Lameesa W. Muhammad
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 127
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The education of African Americans within the United States is a contemporary problem with historical roots. The struggle to achieve access, opportunity, and achievement within U.S. public, private, and charter schools remains an issue that leaves some African Americans making the decision to homeschool their children rather than leaving them in an educational system that continues to under-serve them. The purpose of this study is to gain a more in-depth understanding of the African American homeschool experience through the eyes of the parents, guardians, or caretakers who made the decision to opt out of a formal system of schooling. Specifically, this qualitative study explores through informal interviews, the self-narrated formal school and homeschool experiences of six African American women who are currently homeschooling their children after having attended a U.S. public, private, or charter school for a period of at least one academic year. This study also explores how their decision to homeschool their children relates to and reflects back upon the historical and contemporary problematic that underscores the overarching struggle which African Americans have and continue to face in attempting to gain access, opportunity, and achievement within the U.S. formal educational system. This study identified three root narratives as a result of the conversations with the participants. These roots narratives were gathered through a process of restorying their conversations for the five elements of plot: structure, characters, setting, problem, actions, and resolution. This resulted in a reconstruction of each of the study participant's individual lived stories as African American homeschoolers. Findings from this study reveal that the historical and contemporary problematic that African Americans and many other marginalized groups face within the U.S. educational system was not captured in every narrative from the participants of this study. However, this narrative inquiry into the lives of these women who made the decision to homeschool their children did reveal their unique understandings on why, what, and how they were un-doing school.