Call for Submissions from Past and Present Unschoolers!

 

Call for Submissions for Past and Present Unschoolers!

Are you a current or former un-schooling family? Have you used unschooling elements or ideas in your home-based learning? Were you unschooled or homeschooled in a kid-centered way? We want your stories for an anthology!

We’re collecting personal essays from self-identified unschoolers and homeschoolers. This anthology’s purpose is to shine a light on the relatable disasters, the astonishing successes in an unschooling life.

We want to hear about your impressive successes and your weird wins.

We want to hear about the time your kids spent 72 hours in a tent on the kitchen counter, or the time when you developed a crush on a C-drama idol and taught yourself Mandarin. We also want to hear about disasters, disappointments, and the hard-learned heartbreaking lessons that are inevitable when you approach learning with openness, curiosity and creativity. 

We welcome humor and rage and grief. We welcome stories of failure as well as success.

Please don’t moralize or evangelize. This is not a collection to CONVINCE anyone to unschool. It is to illuminate, for past, present and potential future unschoolers, the myriad realities of an unschooling life. The audience is other homeschooling people, but with application to others who want to understand kid-centered learning. Don’t paint a perfect ideal-world view. 

Some questions and themes we’d love to see addressed in this anthology.

If one of these reminds you of a story you have, write it up and send it in!

Kids and total freedom

The adult’s role in kid-centered learning

(Self)-assessment

Impact on non-schooling family members

Satisfaction and “finishing” work 

Community

Wealth and poverty, scarcity and bounty 

Diversity and being multicultural

Deep vs. Broad

Kids and trauma

Family culture and lifestyle

Reflecting back as an adult unschooler

Who are we? 

Rebecca Davis, M.Ed, was unschooled way back in the ancient ‘90s, and has home/un/trad/de-schooled her own and other people’s kids for two decades. She blogs about grief at malihini-view.blogspot.com. Myra Breen, M.Ed, is an unschooling parent and homeschool educator at Teach Northwest, and recently completed her masters thesis on unschooling. The gaps in the available published literature led us to say– Hey! We should make an anthology about this! 

Submission Guidelines:

• Length: 500-1500 word pieces 

• Strong writing: concrete nouns and verbs, sensory details, and specifics that make your experiences come to life. 

• A short (100 words) self-introduction

Send your narrative *In the body of the email* to R.A.Davis.Writing@gmail.com 

We will offer $25 for accepted pieces and you retain the rights to your work. In the unlikely event that this makes money, we’ll pay our authors more.