Silenced Motherhoods: Teacher as Not-Mother in the Early Childhood Classroom

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: Feminist Teaching: Interrupting Gendered Binaries in the Early Childhood Workforce

Abstract

What is the role of mothering in the early childhood classroom? Given the focus in the field on “professionalization” and “scientific” practices, how might the role of maternal nurturance be woven into our understandings of pedagogies? Through narrative research as a teacher-scholar, I explore my own experiences around my role as “not-mother” in the classroom, looking critically at the interwovenness of mothering and teaching in classroom relationships and communities. Through this narrative examination, I look to historical debates on the maternal in early childhood, in conversation with the my realities of mothering as the teacher-not-mother. Through narrative inquiry and analysis, I attempt to make visible this forbidden identity of not-mother, and her centrality to meaningful early childhood pedagogy.

Author

• Dana Frantz Bentley, Buckingham Browne and Nichols School