| In this research I conducted qualitative case studies of the distance education experience of three families enrolled in a school of distance education in Queensland, Australia. My intent was to learn how the mothers as home tutors and their children experience distance education and how it is that they come to experience it in that way.; Using place as a central idea, I asked how place was at work in the participants' experience of the distance education program. I understood place as both the everyday life that evolves because of the way people inhabit a space and as the source of structural formations---resources, rules, available relationships---that constrain the everyday lives people can shape for themselves. I also understood that people construct their identities---values, motivations, roles, definitions---through their actions in everyday life, and these influence their subsequent actions or the ways in which they inhabit places. In the inquiry I also drew from cultural geographers' understandings about the significance of place, sense of place, and children's place attachment.; Recognizing that the families' schoolrooms as places were part of the larger places of their sheep or cattle properties, I studied participants' everyday lives in both their schoolrooms and on their properties. Over a period of five months, I made three-day monthly visits to each family. The home tutors also wrote in dialogue journals during that time. My data collection activities included observations, formal interviews and informal conversations, field notes, and having participants take photographs of their everyday lives. The photographs were used to support discussion in interviews.; To offer analyses and interpretations I wrote narrative portraits for each family, identified key dimensions of the home tutors' experience, contrasted the children's everyday lives inside of and outside of their schoolrooms, and crafted an interpretive account of how everyday life in the schoolrooms evolved as it did. The distance education program activities and everyday life in the schoolrooms became an unpleasant chore for both home tutors and their children. My culminating reflections offered a number of possible focuses for conversations about improvements to distance education. |
