Entanglements of Teenage Motherhood Identities: A Critical Ethnography Within a Community-Based Organization

• In Event: 16.061 - Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: 16.061-2 - Educational Research Using Critical Methods

Abstract

The purpose of this critical, ethnographic study is to deeply explore the experiences of teenage mothers participating in a community-based organization (CBO) as potential opportunities to take up issues of age, race, gender, motherhood, and social class within their ongoing identity construction and schooling experiences. This study takes a critical perspective on the social construction of adolescence in order to contribute to scholarly work that attends to how teenage mothers are within Western schooling and society. By focusing on hybridity and the entanglement of identities this paper gives attention to the ways in which educational opportunities have both improved and remained static when conceptualizing what it means to educate and involve teenage mothers and their children within existing educational systems.

Author

• Jana LoBello, University of Minnesota