Education Commons^™

Mothering And Literacies, Amanda Richey, Linda Evans

Linda S. Evans

This collection explores the connections between mothering/motherhood and literacy as it is broadly defined. Literacy, in this case, encompasses reading/writing literacy as well as multimodal, new or digital, and contested multiliteracies that are socioculturally situated and contextually defined. Mothers are often the object of cultural and popular discourses on family literacy, as well as targets in international campaigns to increase literacy learning. There has been little scholarly attention paid to how mothers in diverse sociocultural contexts do literacy, or how literacies have been mediated or challenged by mothers and motherhood. By critically examining the connections between mothers and literacies, this …

Alienated Motherhood And The Quest For Certainty, Sue Ellen Henry

Sue Ellen Henry

“Man (sic) who lives in a world of hazards is compelled to seek for security.”

-John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty

The age of “scientific motherhood” has dawned. Inundated and overwhelmed with the enormous stakes of new motherhood, contemporary mothers are likely to seek what little “certainty” there is in caring for newborns by relying heavily on “expert” texts and parenting advice books. This paper examines my first experience in new mothering and the false sense of security that emerged from my own “quest for certainty.” Following Dewey’s critique of a bifurcated view of knowledge and belief, this argument exposes …