What (and Where) is the ‘Learning’ When We Talk about Learning in the Home?

In this paper, I will build on the proposal that we need to pay attention to both of these frames through characterizing the metadiscourse surrounding learning in the home. I suggest that this metadiscourse is made up of several elements. I will show how a number of families — the subjects of a larger research project that investigates learning across time and contexts — adopt and use folk “ theories of learning,” and I will consider, in particular, how such theories relate to dominant discourses around learning in school. Second, I will explore how media technologies — and in particular, how the ways that they are purchased and how they are located in the home— also contribute to dominant conceptualizations of learning and at times almost seem to stand for a proxy measure of it. Third, I will draw on observations and accounts of how learning is enacted as a discipline and as a habit within the ebb and flow of family life.