Session Information
Contribution
Description: This paper explores mothers'daily routines of care and how educational support work is nested within this. It argues that the caring work that mothers perform to support their children's education is shaped by their access to emotional capital; a gendered resource, involving emotional knowledge, skills and experiences. Drawing on interdisciplinary, but particularly egalitarian discourse (Lynch 1989, Hochschild 1989, Sevenhuijsen 1998, Kittay, 1999, Nussbaum 1995, 2001), it suggests that mothers experience gender inequalities as a consequence of their allocation to this work and the traditonal gendered acquisition of emotional capital. Furthermore, it suggests that in a knowledge-based society, which increasingly values performativity, mothers experience a moral imperative to do educational care work, regardless of their capacity to access necessary resources/capitals. The paper investigates the nature of emotional capital and describes its creation, activation and depletion relative to mothers' positionings and everyday routines of care. In terms of social justice, it concludes that there is a need to recognise the significance of this gendered knowledge and moreover, it suggests that those working in education must question gendered assumptions underpinning codes of practice and policies around 'parental' involvement. It asserts that schools and educators need to recognise care as work, an effort that is demanding of time and sigificant emotional resources, and that contributes fundamentally to children's well-being so they can fully partcipate in schooling. The paper may contribute to extending conceptualisations around capitals and dis/advantage in education, particularly our understandings of emotional capital, as emotional knowledge, based in gendered experiences.
Methodology: The paper is drawn from a larger qualitative in-depth study (O'Brien 2005) of twenty-five mothers who had a child making the transfer from first to second-level schooling (a time shown to be charged with emotion and challenging to both students and their families David et al. 1993, Reay and Ball 1998). The sampling method was thoretical and mothers were chosen reflecting the problems raised in the care and education literature. Mothers were chosen on the basis of social class, marital status, engagement in paid work/not, sexual orientation, ethnicity and if children had educational disabilities. Mothers were interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. Analysis of interview data was by hand, developing themes and categories from the research and analysing mothers' narratives. Bourdieu's thesis of capital (1986) was extended to include the concept of 'emotional capital' (Allatt 1993). Mothers' capitals were coded using a continuum measure for each capital; economic, social, credentialised cultural and emotional. It was possible then to map mothers' resources relative to their various positionings and habitus and explain how educational care was produced idiosyncratically on a day-to-day basis.
Conclusions: This paper focuses on emotional capital as a key aspect of mothering knowledge and how this shapes or constrains the educational care work that is carried out ostensibly by mothers. It suggests that emotional capital as gendered knowledge enables mothers regardless of positionings to perform daily educational care for their children; to listen, think about, decide, help, organise, intervene and communicate on behalf of their child. However, the doing of care depletes emotional energy which must be replenished via other capitals, and via emotional support, if mothers are to survive the complex labours of every-day care.
The paper finds that a gendered moral imperative binds mothers to care through their emotional capitals and gendered knowledge. Knowledge of moral care from mothers' perspectives means it is difficult, almost impossible, not to care, as not to care would mean not to love their children.
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