The education of a stay-at-home dad and his children: reflections on 20 years of experiences documented in a diary and interpreted for evidence of educational wisdom

In this case study, I use autoethnographic and diary research methods to explore with three of my adult children the diary I wrote during the 20 years (1995-2015) that I was a stay-at-home dad in the United States. Increasing numbers of men choose to be the primary caregiver of their children and this major change in family structures is frequently interpreted from a perspective which emphasises gender roles and redefining masculinity. Some stay-at-home dads reject gender identity as key to understanding our experiences and instead suggest that education matters more. My diary sheds light on this educational priority in a detailed narrative. At the most fundamental level, I offered my children a reliable adult presence to offer the relationship and ‘serve and return’ interactions necessary to developing brain architecture for learning throughout the life course (Center on the Developing Child, 2009, 2011). Although I had no prior training as a teacher, these interactions retrospectively resemble the listening, documentation, and joy found in Reggio Emilia. They also embody education defined as ‘conversation between the generations’ (Oakeshott, 1977), especially in connections between my children and my parents, which contributed to a sense of belonging (Barton & Lee, 2023). Joined to the sense of belonging co-created in a home learning environment networked to the children’s school and other learning environments, these experiences confront a discourse of isolation often present in prior research on stay-at-home dads. At a more theoretical level, Bakhtinian dialogism as synthesised by Holquist (2002), the wayfaring way of being in the world theorised by Ingold (2007), and an understanding of study as love (Wison, 2022) helped to make visible our experiences as an enactment of a ‘pedagogy of the event’ as conceived by Biesta (2013). Accordingly, events of subjectivity emerge as a prioritized domain of education. I offer these experiences and their interpretations as an example of our practical, educational wisdom—our ‘virtuosity’— which is marked out as a purpose for life histories in educational research (Biesta, 2013). Finally, I suggest the possibility of a non-teleological turn which invites further dialogue for the possible use of such language to describe education.