Writing Home-Schooled Students into the Academy

In this interview-based project, the author examines the post-secondary transition of six predominantly home-schooled students who profess the importance of their Christian faith. The author analyzes their writing for hints about how they negotiate the ideologies of post-secondary education. He shows how home schooling has been characterized, discusses how composition scholars construct the conflict between fundamentalist students and secular instructors, and outlines the methodology of this study. The author then describes the rhetorical strategies used by the home-schooled students in order to negotiate their transition from the private to the public and confront new, possibly uncomfortable ideologies. Finally, the author discusses several implications from the interview data, arguing that, though the home-schooled study participants demonstrated they could adjust smoothly to the literacy expectations of the university, faculty need to temper their enthusiasm for transforming these students' social values as well as their commitment to the college community. Moreover, public writing instructors need to reflect upon moments when their own pedagogical obligations to home-schooled and fundamentalist students may begin to surpass their secular commitments. (Contains 5 notes.)