Les groupes de soutien d’apprentissage en famille (« école à la maison ») : production de normes sociales dans une perspective de gouvernance réflexive de l’éducation

In Quebec, each school board makes its own homeschooling evaluation policy. Those various terms and conditions lead up to a lot of different relationships between homeschooling parents and school agents, leaving some of them unsatisfied, and sometimes, compromising the children’s right to education. Our analysis of homeschooling evaluation policies all around the world shows that parents’ autority, school board’s autority and the autority of a third party could be combined in various ways.   Among those third parties, homeschooling support groups, thanks to their collective and intermediary position, could play a complementary role in the homeschooling regulation, with a better acceptance from parents and school agents. Homeschooling support groups are local self-organized groups which gather families for social activities and mutual aid. According to the reflexive governance theory, support groups could be seen as a collective learning place allowing social norms to emerge and regulate parental practices. This study aims to describe social norms currently established in Quebec-based homeschooling support groups and the associated production processes.  Explicit and implicit collective social norms of two Quebec-based homeschooling support groups, registered as non-profit organizations, were described using focus groups and offical groups’ documents. Content analysis has showed that collective social explicit norms formalize the democratic mechanism of each group (term and condition of members’ participation), claimed values (respect to and openness toward others) and social goals (mutual support and ressource sharing). Collective social implicit norms were: 1. Children and parents must socialize, 2. Parents must be commited in the child’s education and 3. Teaching and learning must be of quality and meaningfull.   Collective social norms seem to be close to institutional norms from Quebec educational school policy, “to provide instruction, to socialize and to provide qualifications”, but they exceed them especialy in matters of parental commitment, which is important, various type of socialization possibilities and individualized instruction. Thus, those norms are closer to the legal framework for homeschooling, in the Public Instruction Act, requiring that a child should 1. receive schooling and 2. benefit from an educational experience which are equivalent to what is provided at school, without necessarily replicating the school form at home.  Several norm production processes have been described : co-construction, statement and adherence, shared quest and contact with non-homeschooling persons. It suggests that, through those groups, social learning and citizen commitment of parents are possible.  Collective social norms and associated production processes described in this study suggest that homeschooling governance could benefit from using homeschooling support groups as third party in the regulation.

Keyphrases: homeschooling, home education, reflexive governance, support group, focus group, social norm