Resisting Neoliberal, Adultist and Ableist Education: An Autoethnography of a Deschooling Parent

Abstract

Deploying a Foucauldian reading of autoethnography, this dissertation examines how deschooling can be used to resist discourses of neoliberalism, adult supremacy and ableism in education. Using a series of descriptive vignettes written to my family, I present my story as a deschooling parent that begins with my children’s exit from school during the Covid-19 pandemic and spans through their return three years later. The memories I describe in these vignettes were selected from family interviews and are framed as reflexive responses to our discussions. I analyse the narratives presented in these vignettes in terms of my research questions: 1) How does my parenting constitute a form of deschooling from below that resists neoliberalism and neoliberal privilege? and 2) How does my parenting approach differ from the adultist and ableist forms of education I critique in this dissertation? I discuss how my experiences helped me challenge the binary between deschooling and schooling and thus concentrate on how to use my subjectivity as a parent to resist neoliberal, adultist and ableist education in all the contexts in which my children find themselves including their home lives. My discursive intervention as a parent has primarily been in the lives of my children, myself and my family, but I also have the hope that it will shift power, discourse and subjectivity in ways that have wider reaching deschooling effects.