“I was enrolled here because I kept arguing with my mom about the homework”. Ethnographic encounters with children in a homework club

Abstract

Educational spaces have become diversified. School is no longer the only place where teaching-learning processes take place. New and very different spaces are now the stage where different agents build systems of meaning and action around educational processes. This article deals with an emerging educational space in Mexico: the homework clubs. It offers an ethnographic perspective and important data about the children who spend several hours each day there doing activities that used to be done at home with other members of the family (eating meals, doing homework, playing, spending time with others). The results show that these children, as social agents, make the homework club a place where they do tasks “from school” without the coercion of the grades, where they perform tasks “of the house” without the authoritarian presence of the parents, and where they even play with a broader community than that of their siblings. The homework club generates a special kind of childhood agency which is not exempt from the power relationships of an adult-centered society but negotiates in very particular ways what the child can do in that specific environment.