ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on research addressing publicly available blogs published by mothers who home educate their children using the ‘unschooling’ approach. It considers the ways in which ‘otherness’ is recognised in unschooling families, and the techniques that are employed by these families to ensure that this arguably self-imposed ‘otherness’ is a positive experience for their unschooled children. The chapter explores a particularly ‘other’ form of alternative education – offers insight into the experience of families choosing to live and learn in a way that sets them apart from mainstream society in the UK, and in the minority world more broadly. The chapter demonstrates that alterity can be a choice, that doing things differently may lead to isolation that is either chosen or at least accepted as necessary collateral damage within a broader and more important goal of educating differently. The blogs demonstrate a variety of techniques, such as the development of online and real-life communities, used by home-schooling mothers.
