| Mothers who enter an elementary teacher certification program have extensive experience supporting the emotional, physical, and intellectual needs of their own children. As they work toward their goal of becoming elementary schoolteachers, the institution of teacher education neither acknowledges nor attempts to incorporate their experience into structured activities at the university or in public elementary schools. What does this mean for women who are entering the world of public education believing their lives as mothers and public school teachers will complement and inform one another? Why are the culturally pervasive notions of the conflation of the dynamics of mothering and teaching noticeably absent within the world of teacher education? How does this absence influence the experiences of mother-students as they carry out their responsibilities in the supposedly separate spheres of the public and private worlds?;This research attempts to discover from within the expanded social relations that sculpt in subtle and limiting ways the contours of women's lives. Accumulating data from 36 interview-conversations, 30 observations in elementary school classrooms and five observations in university classrooms, an in-depth account of the experiences of six elementary teacher certification students who were also mothers was developed. Moving beyond a simple documentation of the experiences of these six women and the implications inherent in that documentation for teacher educators, this work is a social analysis as well. Implementing strategies from the developing research traditions of standpoint theory, the study begins with the lives of women and connects their perspectives with historical and cultural themes. The analysis and its potential for transformation occurred at three levels: the everyday lives of mother-students, the institutional practices of teacher education, and the gendered division of labor that emerges, shifts and changes with the growth of capitalism.;The work presented here uncovers unspoken connections between the daily lives of all participants in the enterprise of teacher education and the extended, subtextual relations which reinforce and in turn depend on an assumed sexual division of labor and a supposedly clear public/private divide. These connections were woven through the contrasting perspectives of mother-students and teacher educators. Their contrasting views were supported by manipulative conceptualizations of caring and professionalism. Connecting mother-students' stories with historical and cultural themes created a beginning place for political understanding. It also led to the identification of transformative possibilities for mother-students, teacher-educators, and those who are troubled by the oppressive nature of the worldwide sexual division of labor. |
