| In this poststructural, narrative analysis, life history interviewing was used to investigate the subjectivities and literacy practices of six mothers from the same, small southern community. The purpose of this study was to understand how these women navigated the terrain of their own identity as mothers, how they used narrative knowing to construct these worlds, and what literacy practices they engaged in as women, mothers, and students. Using a feminist, poststructural theoretical framework, along with the socially-embedded, contextual New Literacy Studies' definition of literacy, allowed for a deeper look into how these women narrated their literate lives and remembered their educational pasts. Because women who are mothers are often the object of popular discourses about literacy (and national campaigns for family literacy), it was important to probe further into how women actually do literacy---in their homes, their workplaces, and their schools. These six women---Beth, Carla, Ellena, Estelle, Nina, and Martha---were all engaged in school study, ranging from adult education classes to graduate school coursework. Participants were recruited using purposeful sampling from two educational contexts---the adult education center and a local daycare.;A triangulated procedure involving both an inductive analysis and a narrative analysis, allowed for a dual approach to both data representation and findings. Using the metaphor of the quilt, I represented each woman's story as a textured account, emphasizing her literacy practices and her narrative voice. In this phase of the study, seven general narrative themes were identified: mothering stories, counter-narratives, pedagogical stories, epistemological stories, home-school stories, literacy stories, and self stories. The overlapping, interconnectedness of these narrative themes was stressed. In the inductive analysis, the general research questions were addressed. The findings included: the multiplicity of multi-modal literacy practices; the importance of gender in identity and literacy; the connection between agency and metacognition (in the form of metastatements); the presence of multiple subjectivities; and the awareness and transgression of popular discourses about motherhood. General recommendations included the importance of listening to mothers in adult education settings, rethinking the voice metaphor in feminist research, and making space for multiliteracies in adult and family literacy. |
