The Lived Experiences of Three MotherScholars Imagining Possibilities in the Time of COVID-19

• In Event: The Lived Experiences of Motherscholars as Teacher Educators in the Time of COVID-19

Abstract

Purpose
We use the historical context of COVID-19, where our intersectional identities and social positions are colliding, to explore our experiences as MotherScholars. We examined our own unique standpoint as three women with similar cultural lenses yet different stories of motherhood and professional development. We imagine creating harmony across these historically segregated spaces and roles.
Theoretical framework
Using standpoint theory (Harding, 2004), Lapayese (2012c) asserts that intellectual and maternal ways of being can be combined into a unique positionality. In this time of COVID-19, our public and private spaces have come together giving rise to challenges and opportunities to synergize maternal and academic spaces.
Methods
We use narrative inquiry to explore our lived experiences as MotherScholars during the COVID-19 pandemic (Clandinin & Caine, 2013). We conducted three story cycles (Bunting, 2014), using prompts about past, present, and imagined possibilities for the future. Interim texts were created to facilitate moving personal storytelling to a larger narrative about the complexities of harmonizing mothering and scholarship during the COVID-19 pandemic (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000).
Data sources
Data created for each story cycle included three initial stories, six level 1 interim reflection texts, one level 2 interim research text, as well as one transcription of our virtual meetings. Analyses were inductive-deductive and iterative, wherein each participant independently identified themes in each set of reflections and interim texts, and then compared findings with others. We explored our reactions to the story cycle data for disconfirming and confirming evidence to identify emerging themes (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
Conclusions
Stories revealed the logistical and emotional tensions inherent in MotherScholarship, pointing to an urgent high-stakes sense of potential failure in both arenas. Each described strategies for negotiating the two spheres including hiding and compartmentalizing part of selves. Stories challenged this forced dichotomy, identifying similarities between the work of motherhood and scholarship, including the never-ending and emotional nature of work in both spheres, as well as the element of ‘peer review’ that legitimizes work in both spaces. We identified ways in which we had conformed to the androcentric systems in which we work. Rejecting the notion of ‘balance’ as not useful (or real), we re-envisioned our future lives as MotherScholars being ‘braided’ across the spaces of motherhood and scholarship, recognizing a natural flow and inherent strength in harmonizing our lives as MotherScholars. In this difficult time of COVID we saw moments of grace that illuminated new possibilities for harmony and ways to explicitly confront the oppressive androcentric assumptions and policies that delegitimate our work as MotherScholars in the academy.
Significance
Our work illuminates the ‘outsider-within’ (Lapayese, 2012) perspective of MotherScholars in the academy as a space of transformation for women who are also mothers. As Lapeyese notes, ‘Mother-Scholars in the discipline of education... embody not only the maternal subject in the private sphere, but also the intellectual subject in a discipline that focuses primarily on children’ (pg. 7). Our stories highlight lived experiences of three MotherScholars as we seek harmony (rather than balance) in our lives and across our multiple, intersecting identities.

Authors

• Erika Feinauer, Brigham Young University

• Erin Feinauer Whiting, Brigham Young University

• Sarah K. Clark, Brigham Young University