Learning from home learning: Crossing boundaries of place and identity

Abstract

During the COVID-19 lockdown, parents and caregivers were asked to take greater responsibility for their children's education while they were unable to attend school. In this commentary, we report on data sourced from 243 participants in the Tasmania Project in Australia about their experiences of learning from home during COVID-19 lockdown. We engage with ideas about boundaries and bounding processes to understand how participants perceived challenges to their children's learning from home. They identified a lack of physical space for children's work to be performed and a lack of time, skill, and confidence to support them. We explore the bounding processes inherent to understanding and constituting education through identity, space, and place making and consider the ways in which these processes were revealed in the challenges identified by respondents. We argue that home learning disrupted known practices associated with education and schooling and challenged accepted categories and socio-spatial divisions created by institutionalisation. We anticipate that exploring the challenges of home learning during COVID-19 from the perspectives of parents and caregivers will inform future homeschool partnerships.

“Make sure I hear snoring”: Adolescent girls, trans, and non-binary youth using sound for sexual wellbeing boundary-making at home during COVID-19

“…Similarly, geographers have come to see boundary work as always in movement. Take Beasy et al’s, (2021) study on the boundaries of place and identity during schooling at home during COVID-19 which reveals how boundary making is “continuous” (p. 343). This fluidity represented at home is critical in understanding how lockdown orders were not simply stagnant or unchanging, but in constant flow and negotiation.…”

Coping with the COVID-19 lockdown: The role of household and family responsibilities in Beijing

“…While I'm not certain that this is correct, I must be cautious. (Interview in July 2020) Second, parents viewed themselves as performing an additional role as teachers and as having more education-related responsibilities with their children's transition to home-based learning (Beasy et al, 2021). Before the pandemic, the majority of participants were mainly responsible for accompanying their children to school.…”

“…There have been many studies examining how parents adjusted their daily routines to adopt the children’ transition to home-based learning (Lee et al, 2021). Parents perceived their role as “teaching” and “educating” their children, implying more household burdens (Beasy et al, 2021; Holt and Murray, 2022). Some parents reported that balancing work from home with childcare was difficult (Freeman et al, 2022; Manzo and Minello, 2020).…”

“…This change shifted parents’ lives from being work centered before the pandemic to being child-centered during the pandemic. Some children lack self-discipline, especially when there is no parental or teacher supervision, which annoys their parents (Beasy et al, 2021). Meimei (female, 45, nuclear family) told us about her dilemma as follows:My son was asked to watch instructional videos, which were recorded in advance by his teachers.…”

“…For different household types, there are differences in household responsibilities and demands, mediating the influence of COVID-19 on the individual and family life. Existing research, however, has primarily focused on childcare obligations (Beasy et al, 2021; Holt and Murray, 2022; Manzo and Minello, 2020), mostly in nuclear families, while household responsibilities in other household contexts have received little attention. In this article, we suggest that studying the influences of the COVID-19 lockdown across household types could not only enrich our understanding of household diversity of a pandemic’s effects, but also inspire neighborhood planning and management responding to a pandemic to take the neighborhood’s constitution of household types and the differentiated demands of households into consideration.…”