Author:

Keywords:

family, education, socio-materiality, upbringing

Abstract:

From an educational point of view, the family seems to be evident. The family, after all, is a place (perhaps the place) where childrearing takes place. The operative word here is seems because, once we go deeper into the issue, we encounter some difficulties. Over the last few decades, the Western world has increasingly questioned the usefulness of the term family. At the same time, there is a growing consensus on what good childrearing entails. The way we understand childrearing is gradually becoming more aligned with the meaning of the word parenting. As a result, it is difficult to bring or to think family and education closer together beyond the conceptualization proposed by the parenting culture: the family as a (child’s first) learning environment. The question, therefore, is how to reunite family and education? Put differently, how to speak and write about the educational relevance of the family instead of focusing on parental behavior in the family? In order to offer some resistance to the impoverished way of understanding the family as where a parent ‘parents’, all the chapters of this dissertation (which are called takes) focus on family education, one way or another. The first take offers a prescriptive account of the conceptual debate on the family. A debate that is generally framed in a negative way, understanding the term family to be vague, ideologically dangerous or simply outdated. The emptiness of the term is understood in a more positive way, namely as an opportunity to try to fill in the word once again. Concretely, a reformulation of the perhaps unanswerable ‘what is the family?’ question to a ‘what gathers the family?’ question is proposed. ‘Gathering’ offers a way to situate family education no longer at the level of the individual parent but at the level of the (family) group or association. The second take examines the implications of the tendency to address the family as an environment where one can (or should) learn. It does so by a critical investigation of the Family Competences Portfolio Project. The FamCompass addresses adults (and asks adults to address themselves) as individuals with specific learning needs and interests while relationships with other family members are understood as providers for relevant learning opportunities. What tends to be obscured, therefore, is the idea of family as a living arrangement that does not necessarily has to serve the labor market but also has a value and receives a meaning in and for itself. To provide an alternative for the family as a learning environment, the third take explores the idea of family education as a socio-material gathering. A comparative literature study of examples of gathering presented by various well-known socio-material theorists results in the following broad insight: the notion of gathering offers a way out of the narrow conceptualization of family education as resolving solely around parent-child interactions by including the material world. Put differently, a socio-material perspective allows us to go from a parent-child dyad to a parent-world-child triad. The fourth take works as a transition between the first more theoretical part and the second more empirical part of the dissertation. Important methodological choices are presented in the form of a Q&A. The empirical part of the research on family education is located at the intersection of ethnographic fieldwork and film studies and is informed by the socio-material or gathering turn in humanities and educational sciences. The fifth take entails a film on everyday upbringing (hopefully) presenting this theme in an engaging and thought-provoking way as well as a film review providing the reader with insights on film content and editing. The sixth take discusses one of the older socio-material approaches, namely scripting. By analysing two scenes (one out of the film, one out of the pilot study), four scripts make it clear(er) that upbringing is not ‘just’ a human affair. Bringing up children is done with and through material ‘engagement’. The risk, however, is that scripting transforms upbringing into a continuous battle of human and material intentions, motivations, functions and goals. The proposal is to supplement scripting with siting, taking into account situational or contextual factors. Ultimately, in the conclusive section, the educational contribution of this dissertation is assessed. A first argument is that family education is where adults and children intergenerationally ‘re-member’ around a (material) thing of care. Adults and children can pick up their generational ‘membership’ through the way they handle and take care of ‘stuff’. A second argument is that besides a sociological-material perspective we can now begin reflecting on an educational-material perspective of upbringing. The idea is that the world, at least for (young) children, is unscripted, thus undetermined. As such, upbringing may not solely be about repetitively instructing children of the scripts of things. Upbringing may also refer to family members experiencing that some-thing can receive a new meaning through a playful re-ordering of the world.