Education in everyday family life : language, culture, and morality in homework interactions

How do we become who we are? What experiences contribute to forging our ways of thinking and behaving, our understanding of the world and ways of acting in it? It is the words we are told as children by our parents and caregivers, those ordinary dialogues fading in our memories that constitute the bedrock of our social identities and draw the thickest lines of our future development. The present book focuses precisely on such mundane family conversations. In particular, it deals with an activity that characterizes the routine of most families, one that has been attracting increasing attention and critiques: homework. Zooming in on parent-child conversations, this volume shows that homework is far more than a subject-related, learning-oriented activity characterized by intentional practices of instruction. In subtle yet pervasive ways, it affords moral talk promoting children’s socialization into culture-specific ethical worldviews. Lingering on the ‘small talk’ that constitutes the fabric of parent-assisted homework, this volume shows how moral horizons and cultural ideologies are pervasively assumed, put into words, and transmitted to children in the unfolding of such a mundane activity, thus providing evidence for the educational richness of ordinary family life.