Home Education; the Curriculum is Life

This thesis reports real life. I, the researcher taught my children at home for twenty years, intuitively solving educational problems, confronting the curriculum to find a way to enable them to learn at home despite learning difficulties. Having achieved success beyond my expectations, I reflected on that process, seeking out expert opinion and analyzed it. The result is this thesis - "an academic analysis of a lived experience" (Cairns, personal correspondence, 2005), an auto-ethnography.

My children's learning problems focused my effort, thought and teaching practice upon literacy. There was no research question to direct the experience, only naive wonderings, "How can I help this child learn to read?" and later, "How did she learn so well?" These were later refined into more sophisticated research questions. The methodology of this experience was, "ad hoc" and the literature, instead of provoking

research questions, hypothesis and design, was reviewed after the experience to answer and refine questions that had emerged from it. The literature helped interpret the lived experience and the lived experience helped evaluate the literature, pointing to urgently needed theory about home-learning. The research was carried out, "back to front."