The Skits, Sketches, and Stories of MotherScholars

Abstract

“MotherScholars” are those who creatively weave their maternal identities into their scholarly spaces. With this article we invite readers along a collaborative friendship study of our own participatory arts-based journey to understand, reclaim, and identify personal and professional benefits only realized once we acknowledged and embraced the blended reality of Mother Scholarhood. Our work is presented as a curation of individual skits, sketches, and short stories that were created during a collective 8-week time span in a shared virtual space. We open our story to interpretation and interaction through the lenses of our readers.

Being Dr. Mom and/or Mom, Ph.D.: Autoethnographies of MotherScholaring during COVID‐19

“…Following suit from Burrow et al. (2020) and Spradley et al. (2020/2021), we reject symbols implying balance, and as such, we present ourselves as unhyphenated MotherScholars with integrated identities.…”

“…Working from home leads us to find creative ways to manage being mother and scholar; hence, we use the term MotherScholar to embody the identity management and blurring of the mother and scholar identities. The term MotherScholar derives from research that describes “female academicians who are also mothers [who] seek creative ways” of interjecting mothering identities into their academics and scholarship (Burrow et al., 2020, p. 4246; Lapayee, 2012; Matias, 2011) and vice versa. The pandemic increases the time demanded for mothering, negatively impacting our sense of self (Calacro et al., 2020).…”

“…The term MotherScholar derives from research that describes “female academicians who are also mothers [who] seek creative ways” of interjecting mothering identities into their academics and scholarship (Burrow et al, 2020, p. 4246; Lapayee, 2012; Matias, 2011) and vice versa. The pandemic increases the time demanded for mothering, negatively impacting our sense of self (Calacro et al, 2020). As the pandemic wears on, the pressures and stresses of being a MotherScholar become more pronounced (Calacro et al, under review).…”

“…The pandemic increases the time demanded for mothering, negatively impacting our sense of self (Calacro et al, 2020). As the pandemic wears on, the pressures and stresses of being a MotherScholar become more pronounced (Calacro et al, under review).…”

Giving a lot of ourselves: How mother leaders in higher education experienced parenting and leading during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…It provided important validation of existing literature around work-family conflict, blending, or integration but specifically within the context of COVID-19. Specifically in higher education, existing literature covers faculty as mothers (Wolf-Wendel and Ward, 2014;Sallee et al, 2016;Burrow et al, 2020), faculty as mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic (Beech et al, 2021;Fulweiler et al, 2021;Minello et al, 2021), and women in higher education leadership (Cook, 2014;Gallant, 2014;Hironimus-Wendt and Dedjoe, 2015;Burkinshaw and White, 2017), but very little literature presents the voices of mother leaders in academia to understand their lived experience with their dual roles and virtually no research has been conducted on the intersection of a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, motherhood, and higher education leadership. As such, this study was critical to understanding specifically the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mother leaders in higher education when there are so few women in top leadership positions in academia (American Council of Education, 2017).…”