Teaching as Highlighted by Mothering: A Narrative Inquiry

There is little research that investigates the relationship between mothering and teaching. Even less has been revealed about teaching and the mothering experience of women who are also teachers. Here we examine how the learning gained from teaching is highlighted and clarified by studying stories of mothering. By examining stories of motherhood, we observe the specific impact of mothering on teaching beliefs and how also being a mother profoundly influences teaching. Our stories reveal at least four recurring themes. Firstly, the stories explored moments of feeling inadequate, giving us the opportunity to question and evaluate our teaching and mothering. Secondly, our stories reveal our care toward students and therefore our vulnerability to students' willingness to learn. Thirdly, our stories show the great value that we place on building relationships with our students, with our children, and with each other. Lastly, the act of writing, reading, and sharing our stories helps us soften our hearts and allows us to see our teaching and mothering roles in new ways.     

Changed Landscape,Unchanged Norms: Work-Family Conflict and the Persistence of the Academic Mother Ideal

Innovative Higher Education - Extensive research suggests that ideal worker and mothering expectations have long constrained academic mothers’ personal and professional choices. This article...     

《诗经》中的女子思乡归宁诗

在周代,女子远嫁异国他乡,且受到当时礼制的约束,但她们的归属感仍很强烈,不想放弃“归宁父母”的仅有机会。因为家是生命的起点和摇篮,对于生她养她的娘家,仍保持着深切的思念和依恋之情。因此,这些诗中弥漫着浓浓的乡愁,在她们的心灵深处,乡情始终不散,反映了人伦的天性。     

Mothering and the work of educational care – an integrative approach

This article, through looking at mothers’ modes of engagement with their children’s education, proposes an integrative analytical approach to the study of the making of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. The article presents and brings into dialogue four different bodies of anthropological and sociological literature: mothering as a form of care work, anthropological work on child-rearing in different cultural settings, sociological studies of the class negotiation of home–school boundaries, and the theoretical and empirical literature on consumption in post-industrial society. Bringing together ideas of care, culture, class, and consumption into one analytical framework is crucial for attending to, in holistic fashion, the complex ways in which mothering, in different social–cultural contexts, is perceived and practiced.     

Women principals in South Africa: gender,mothering and leadership

This paper draws on qualitative data from a mixed‐method study that analysed women's access to the principal role and their leadership experiences. The paper draws on a subset of interviews with 54 female head teachers in the Gauteng and North West provinces of South Africa. Since a mothering style of leadership was self‐reported by over half of the participants in our study, this paper aims to explore the diverse ways in which motherhood was constructed and the outcomes of these constructions on women.     

Mothering young children: Child care, stress and social life

This study focuses on mothers’ and young children’s everyday social experience by analyzing their social relationships, social support in child care, mother-child interaction, and mothers’ evaluations of all these aspects. Three hundred and eighty-four mothers with a child aged between I and 3 years, living in a city in Central Italy, were interviewed. A Principal Components Analysis was performed on items concerning mothers’ and children’s social experience and mothers’ evaluations. Four PCA generated factors were regressed on the mother’s and Four PCA generated factors were regressed on the mother’s and child’s characteristics. Results show that, even in a context characterized by social conditions supportive to mothering, there is a comparatively widespread desire for social interaction with other mothers and children. A stress related to intensive mothering was found in a minority of the mothers and was predicted by the mothers’ continuous commitment in child care during the whole day. Results are discussed in relation to the hypothesis that social contacts with other mothers may have a mitigating effect on mothers’ stress. One implication is that early educational services that provide the opportunity for social intercourse among parents can be an important resource for them.     

Mothers,learners and countermemory

This article explores how issues of learning and mothering emerged in research with women students. First it develops the notion of ‘a motherhood standpoint’. It then considers how Foucault's concept of ‘counter‐memory’, and, in particular, its reworking in feminist cultural theory as ‘countermemory’, can be used to explain why students persistently called up the mother when talking about themselves as learners, revealing this as both a political and psychic process. The mother can be seen as a double figure who represents both knowledge and its limits. The following analysis of student accounts demonstrates the tension between retelling their mother's memories, to bear witness to the educational injustice meted out to women, and their own memories of mothers, whom they are trying to escape to make an independent claim of knowledge.     

Outcomes for Women and Infants Following Assisted Conception: Implications for Perinatal Education,Care, and Support

Assisted conception is becoming an increasingly more common treatment option for women and couples who experience fertility problems. Links have been made in the literature between assisted conception and a greater incidence of pregnancy or birth complications, low birth weight or premature babies, and babies with congenital abnormalities. In addition, evidence suggests that the experience of assisted conception may influence the development of early mothering relationships and impact parenting adjustment. Although this commentary article does not strategically review all available literature, it provides an overview of the health issues that women and families undergoing assisted conception have experienced or may experience. Through raising awareness and promoting discussion of these issues, practitioners will be better equipped to provide informed education and support.     

Negative parental attribution and emotional dysregulation in Chinese early adolescents: Harsh fathering and harsh mothering as potential mediators

The current study examined the potential mediating roles of harsh fathering and harsh mothering in the association between negative parental attribution and emotional dysregulation in Chinese adolescents and explored the moderating role of child gender on this indirect association. 864 students (367 girls, mean age = 13.55 years) with their parents were recruited as participants from two middle schools in Shandong Province, People’s Republic of China. The results demonstrated that both harsh fathering and harsh mothering could partially mediate the association between negative maternal attribution and child emotional dysregulation, whereas only harsh fathering could partially mediate the association between negative paternal attribution and child emotional dysregulation. Moreover, we found the moderating role of child gender only for the association between harsh fathering and child emotional dysregulation, in that harsh fathering could be associated with higher levels of emotional dysregulation in girls. These results shed light on efforts to prevent harsh parenting and child emotional dysregulation.     

Arab Americans: Into the Multicultural Mainstream

As the percentage of youth of color in the nation's public schools continues to increase, so, too, does the urgency of preparing a predominantly white, female, middle class teaching force to work with racially and culturally diverse youth. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of an urban, youth-serving HIV/AIDS prevention and supports center, this article describes how two white women staffers engaged culturally responsive modes of care, support, and advocacy in order to address young people's emotional, developmental, and educational needs. Since both women performed motherly personas as they cared for and supported youth at the center, this article builds upon their experiences to develop “further mothering”—an adaptation of the “other mothering” tradition of black women—as a possible heuristic for analyzing white women educators’ culturally responsive work with black youth.     

The Contribution of Mother-Child and Father-Child Relationships to the Quality of Sibling Interaction: A Longitudinal Study

Although several studies have now examined the relations between mother-child and sibling interaction, the role of fathers in the development of sibling relationships is noticeably absent. The present study included assessments of both mother-child and father-child interaction in order to examine the correlates of sibling conflict and cooperation. Home observations of parent-child and sibling interaction and reports of differential parental treatment were obtained for 30 families with 2 preschool children when the firstborns were approximately 6 years old. Earlier assessments of infant-mother and infant-father attachments when firstborns were 12 and 13 months old, respectively, were also available, as were prior laboratory assessments of mothering and fathering when the oldest child was 3 years of age. Results suggested that sibling conflict and aggression were related to high levels of conflict between the mother and the 2 children at 6 years, intrusive and overcontrolling mothering at 3 years, and an insecure infant-mother attachment. Facilitative and affectionate fathering, on the other hand, was associated with prosocial sibling interaction. Early relationship experiences between parents and their firstborn children had an enduring effect on the quality of sibling relationships and interacted with differential parental treatment in predicting sibling relationship outcomes.     

A Caring Teacher: Explorations into primary school teachers' professional identity and ethic of care

This article explores primary school teachers' conceptions of caring within teaching and discusses the relevance of an ethic of care for teaching. Thirty-two Swiss and English primary school teachers participated in this exploratory study. The methodology included semi-structured interviews as well as image-based approaches employing photographs and drawings. Caring within teaching can be understood in a range of ways: caring as commitment, caring as relatedness, caring as physical care, caring as expressing affection, such as giving a cuddle, caring as parenting and caring as mothering. The author suggests that these definitions of caring within teaching can be placed along a continuum. Caring understood as mothering at one end of this continuum is distinctly associated with traditional Western notions of femininities whereas caring as commitment is non-gender-specific. Caring as relatedness can be linked with the concept of ethic of care, which has been conceptualised as a moral perspective more often held by women. The findings of this study challenge this view, as an ethic of care understood as responsibility for and relatedness to their pupils emerged amongst men as well as women.     

On the outskirts of education: the liminal space of rural teen pregnancy

The historical context of teen pregnancy in the US and its evolution to the present embodiment of the predominantly urban ‘welfare mother’ developed from specific socio-historical contexts that deemed early childbirth, especially illegitimate pregnancies, as morally and socially deviant. Two conceptual elements missing within the literature on teen motherhood are the geographically diverse locations of teen pregnancy and motherhood and the spatial boundaries that arise in the institutional interface of pregnancy and schooling. Since the rural teen mother is rooted within a different social-geographical context than her urban counterpart it becomes essential to examine ways in which rural teen mothers navigate their educational opportunities. Likewise, the literature does not address the spatial boundaries pregnant and mothering teens face as they negotiate their relationship with schools. This study addresses both questions in its attempt to understand how pregnant and mothering teens in rural communities navigate their education and how they perceive themselves within the overall institutional setting of the school.     

The other girls: Culture,psychoanalytic theories and writing

This paper presents a psychoanalytic theory of girlhood linked to a cultural theory of writing. It is a result of an ethnographic study of schooling, where the development of theory links to the immersion of the researcher in the research. There are two expansions of psychoanalytic theory. The first is a feminist poststructural critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis,with the possibility of the existence of a third or tertiary split, as writing eventuates. The second is an extended theory of mothering, through the complex relationships evidenced by girls to women and girls to each other. These theoretical developments are based on a theory of writing that is a poststructural theory of decentred graphics, which accommodates the phonic, the semiotic and the discursive. These theories, with their cultural implications, may be applied beyond the particular ethnography from which they come. In turn they designate knowledge, power, fantasy and desire.     

The Intersectionality of African American Mothers in Counselor Education: A Phenomenological Examination

Using phenomenological inquiry, this study explored the lived experiences and intersecting identities of 8 African American counselor educators who are mothers. Six themes were identified: race, professional strain, work–life balance, support, internalized success, and mothering pedagogy.     

Experiences of Counselor Education Doctoral Student Mothers With Young Children

We explored the mothering experiences of 11 counselor education doctoral student mothers who have at least one young child under the age of 5. Six themes emerged from the study, including ambivalence, increased use of coping mechanisms, striving for balance, “superwoman syndrome,” indistinguishable roles, and leading by example.     

African-American women's decisions to become teachers: Sociocultural perspectives

In this study the authors describe sociocultural and school-related factors that influenced African-American women's perceptions of teaching and decisions to teach. Surveys were conducted of the participants' demographic and background characteristics, and life histories were developed that focused on early experiences with the family, in the community, and at school and how these experiences influenced their perceptions of teaching. These data revealed that the mother, women in the community, and female teachers were significant influences on the participants' decisions to teach. Moreover, their experiences and interpretations of these experiences have shaped their images of good teaching as shared, culturally responsive mothering. The participants' life histories further revealed that as their conceptions of good mothering and good teaching crystallized, their reasons for teaching transcended altruism and a love for children, resulting in perspectives on caring, and a sense of responsibility for the school success of all students. The authors suggest that improved understanding about African-American prospective teachers' lived experiences that give rise to their perceptions of and purposes for teaching hold implications for teacher education and African-American teacher recruitment and retention efforts.     

Coercive Invitations: how young women in school make sense of mothering and waged labour

This paper examines the ways that young women take up powerfully institutionalised invitations about mothering and waged labour and relate them to notions about equal parenting, family structure, masculinity, femininity, the sexual division of labour and non‐parental childcare. It shows how the young women in this study articulate a range of often shifting discourses and strategies which help them to make sense of the options available to them. The findings suggest much movement and interweaving of discourses and contexts and even ‘signs of change’ but all within definite, circumscribed parameters.     

Caring for “others”: Examining the interplay of mothering and deficit discourses in teaching

Data from a year-long narrative inquiry, involving six American women elementary school teachers, suggests that teachers’ conceptions of caring are primarily shaped by their biographies. Despite teachers’ claims that they knew their students well, their conceptions of caring were relatively fixed across contexts rather than malleable to differing students’ realities. Here, I raise questions about the interplay of mothering and deficit discourses as they serve to legitimize and perpetuate single-loop caring. Implications for teaching, teacher education and care theory are discussed.     

Psychologic implications of the maltreated-child syndrome

A retrospective investigation of 97 psychologically maltreated children showed a clear relationship between clinical symptoms and the intensity of the abuse. Parental neglect resulted in impairment of intellectual and locomotor development and emotional and behavioral disorders. Neurotic manifestations of regressive type appeared in nearly half the preadolescents who suffered severe psychological abuse. Children under 6 years of age presented functional symptoms, including regression in toilet training and sleep disorders secondary to inadequate mothering.