ATLANTA —The National Communication Association held its 109th Annual Convention in National Harbor, Maryland, November 16-19. Among the 18 participants from Georgia State University was, Katherine Kountz, Georgia State University student and TCV Fellow. Kountz was awarded the 2023 Robert Gunderson Top Paper Award from the Public Address Division at NCA for her paper titled “Democratic Education and the Cultural Politics of the Unschooling Movement”
The Public Address Division is one of NCA’S oldest and largest divisions. Its members employ various analytical methods, including historical, descriptive, rhetorical, textual, and institutional critiques, as they examine the symbols that serve both to express and to shape public cultures.
Description
While the homeschooling movement has increasingly gained legitimacy over the last thirty years as an acceptable mainstream alternative to public schooling, the unschooling movement, a subset of homeschooling that proposes unstructured child-directed learning, has not benefitted from similar legitimacy gains until the Covid-19 pandemic and enforced remote schooling prompted renewed interest in this once-fringe educational philosophy across a variety of media. This essay concerns unschooling’s increased legitimacy because it suggests resistance to a proposed civic identity and political subjectivity expressed in the form of political exit: the dissociation from either a political activity or a public good. Although political exit is typically associated with preserving individual sovereignty, unschoolers’ exit from the public education system and connection in a networked public sphere suggests a more ameliorative and collective orientation. The question of unschoolers’ individual or collective orientation suggests a means to understand their exit as a communicative act better. In many ways, parents choosing to unschool their children enact a mode of resistance against the current neoliberal education model; however, their alternative practice arises from within neoliberal publicity. As these parents exercise their freedom and negotiate the field of school choice within a neoliberal framework, how are unschoolers resisting or reaffirming neoliberal subjectivity? To address this question, this essay analyzes the discourse of unschoolers on the r/unschool subreddit. Homeschooling and unschooling, in particular, contribute to the further fragmentation of society. Although unschooling aims to produce caring community members, what constitutes community is unclear. And if learners share no common field of knowledge and experience, if they do not participate in a quotidian mutually shared public activity like attending school, how will they come to understand their place in relation to others? A child disinterested in learning history may not be taught about the Holocaust, leaving them more vulnerable to disinformation, conspiracy theories, or a shared commitment to preventing the recurrence of such events in the future. The analysis suggests that the increased legitimacy of unschooling evidences a deepening commitment to neoliberal publicity, which entails a sense of hyper-individuality and personalization, which dilutes the social glue that binds our sense of public responsibility and shared life.
Dr. Carol Winkler, Georgia State University Professor of Communication and Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative Lead Faculty, presented the paper in Kountz absence on Friday, Nov. 16 at the 109th NCA Annual Convention as part of the public address division’s top student paper panel.
For Transcultural Conflict and Violence at GSU
Press Inquiries Contact
J. Dante McBride,
Public Relations
404-413-5676
[email protected]