Abstract
What is the role of mothering in the early childhood classroom? Given the focus of the field of “professionalization” and “scientific” practices, how might the role of maternal nurturance be woven into our understandings of pedagogies? This paper addresses the disempowerment experienced by an early childhood practitioner when maternal subjectivities and practices are framed as oppositional to the “professionalization” of the field. 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 explore the role of maternal relationships in early childhood, in conversation with my practices of mothering as the teacher-not-mother. Through narrative inquiry and analysis, I attempt to make visible the forbidden subjectivities of the not-mother, and her centrality to meaningful early childhood pedagogy.
Highlights
Spring- Goodbye SeasonIt is spring in PreK, and goodbyes are imminent
This paper examines the maternal role of teacher as “not-mother” in the early childhood classroom
I conceptualize the above terms, as the particular ways in which nurturance, care, and love are intrinsic to foundational relationships in early childhood spaces (Recchia et al 2018)
Summary
It is spring in PreK, and goodbyes are imminent. I avoid the calendar, our end drawing nearer each moment. I conceptualize the above terms (mother, motherhood, mothering, and maternal), as the particular ways in which nurturance, care, and love are intrinsic to foundational relationships in early childhood spaces (Recchia et al 2018). Identifies mothering as, “the main vehicle through which people first form their identities and learn their place in society” (357) This framing of mothering is central to the work represented in this paper, as it positions early childhood educators as empowered in this process of subjectivity-forming with young children, acting within one construct of mothering. In silencing the maternal, I quiet my subjectivities and the root of my power as an educator These intersecting dissonances of subjectivity and expectation render me silent and bewildered, in an eternal dance of appeasing the regulatory eye and hushing the feminine selves not approved under the dominant regulatory gaze of the moment (Butler 2006, 1993).
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