Full Description
This book offers a comparative analysis of alternative education in the UK, focusing on learning spaces that cater for children and young people. It constitutes one of the first book-length explorations of alternative learning spaces outside mainstream education - including Steiner, human scale and forest schools, care farms and homeschooling.Based on original research with teachers, parents and young people at over 50 learning spaces, Geographies of alternative education demonstrates the importance of a geographical lens for understanding alternative education. In so doing, it develops contemporary theories of autonomy, emotion/affect, habit, intergenerational relations and life-itself. The book will appeal to academics and postgraduates in the fields of geography, sociology, education and youth studies. Given ongoing concerns about the state's role in providing children's education, and an increase in the number of alternative education providers in the UK and elsewhere, the book also highlights several critical questions for policy makers and practitioners.
Contents
Introduction;
Conceptual frameworks: towards geographies of alternative education;
Alternative learning spaces in the UK: background to the case studies used in this book;
Connection/disconnection: positioning alternative learning spaces;
Mess/order: materials, timings, feelings;
Movement/embodiment: learning habits (I);
Inter/personal relations: scale, love and learning habits (II);
Towards the 'good life': alternative visions of learning, love and life-itelf;
Conclusion: Geographies of alternative education and the value of autonomous learning.
