A Netnographic Study of Homeschooling in Italy

My study aimed to develop a context-specific understanding of home education (or homeschooling) in Italy, by considering the micro, meso and macro levels of this under-researched phenomenon (see Figure. 1). At the interdisciplinary crossroads of Education and Cultural Anthropology, the study was framed within an interpretive and culturally-oriented paradigm. Using a qualitatively-driven mixed methods approach (Mason, 2006), I drew on field notes from online and offline participant observations, interviews, and survey data to make sense of the ‘emic’ conceptualisations of this form of alternative provision. Netnographic methods (Kozinets, 2015) were especially useful to explore the phenomenon at its meso level, i.e., the relational network of multiple belongings to communities, associations, formal and informal groups that every home educator relates to. During the pandemic, many families decided to home educate not because of actual pedagogical conviction (‘proactive’ motivations), but as a pragmatic way to escape the unprecedented school situation (‘reactive’ motivations). New families and communities have emerged, increasing the complexity of the Italian homeschooling landscape. As previous research has highlighted (Fensham-Smith, 2017), online communities are empowering contexts in which parents embody other rationales to their narratives to legitimate their choice, develop a sense of belonging and identity as home educators, and progressively move from ‘reactive’ to ‘proactive’ motivations. These communities serve as social agents with potential transformative effects on their members and their educational practices. In these social spaces, knowledge and meanings are co-produced by their members through dialogue and knowledge exchange, generating shared narratives but also conflicting conceptualisations of the home education practice. Schismogenetic dynamics (Bateson, 1979) have fostered the insider narrative around the supposedly ‘pure’ home educator, whereas actual experiences are marked by nuances and flexible transitions between different approaches and arrangements. Netnographic methods proved to be useful to engage with this hard-to-reach and geographically dispersed population, who are often very active on the Internet. Moreover, it was chosen for its affordances in addressing a scarcely investigated research topic by becoming familiar – from the within – with the cultural codes and vocabulary of its social actors in a less obtrusive manner compared to traditional ethnography. Deemed to be well suited to deal with politically and socially controversial topics, netnography is appropriate to study homeschooling in a social context where it is, albeit legal, but poorly understood and potentially stigmatised. The netnographic and ethnographic insights generated through hermeneutic analysis were used for both methodological and data triangulation, i.e., they contributed to the development of questionnaire items and the semi-structured interview guide (research design and tool development) and to the interpretive endeavour (meta-inferences).