Being Good Mothers And Good Teachers: A Case Study Of Motherhood Practice Of Female Teachers In Senior High School

Being a female teacher means playing the roles of a good mother and a good teacher both in school and at home for the expectations of society and schools is that female teachers can take care of students as mothers,and the hope of family members is that female teachers can teach their children professionally and easily.Therefore,female teachers have special motherhood practice experience in the fields of school and home.By revealing the ideas and strategies how female teachers playing the roles of good mothers and good teachers in school and at home,we will find the ways that they used to keep the balance between their two different social identities.This research was conducted in School D,a public senior high school in City Z of Henan Province.And I conducted semi-structured interviews and observations with eighteen female teachers of various ages to examine the ideas,strategies and effects of their motherhood practice.High school female teachers finish the process of shaping the images of mothers and teachers by actively blurring the boundaries between home and school.When working in the school,they will make full use of their gender advantages to complete the task of emotional labor,and they try to reduce the difficulty of emotional labor with the help of their private experience of being mothers.While at home,these high school female teachers will strengthen their authority as mothers by emphasizing their authority in education and will skillfully use the consistency between their professional habits and school culture to strive for more right in their motherhood practice.However,when implementing the working strategy of "I am a good mother,and therefore I am a good teacher" and the motherhood practice strategy of "I am a good mother,and therefore I am a good teacher",female teachers also have to deal with the pressure of "I have to be both a good mother and a good teacher".In the process of parent-child interaction,these female teachers' motherhood practice is deeply influenced by teachers' group culture and their professional habits.For example,they hope their children can make no mistakes,get good grades and can be obedient and sensible.These motherhood practice goals are highly coincident with teachers' judgment standards for good students.In addition,female teachers always consciously transform their gender identity,social capital,economic capital and cultural capital into great advantages in the process of motherhood practice,and in this way,they try to make control of their working and family life in school and at home.What's more,driven by a strong sense of morality,high standards and strict requirements for themselves and their children also become one of the important characteristics of female teachers' motherhood practice.In this study,I chose some typical work and life situations in high school female teachers' life to examine the direct and indirect effects of female teachers' motherhood practice.By investigating the lifestyles and working states of these high school female teachers and the way they tried to meet the social expectation of being good mothers and good teachers both in school and at home,this research enriched the meaning of motherhood and concretely showed the ideas,strategies and actual effects of high school female teachers' motherhood practice.