Pregnancy in the classroom

Margaret E Wu, Purdue University

Abstract

The topic of this thesis came to me early in the first semester of graduate school. It was the beginning of November, less than a week after my thirty-fourth birthday and days after I learned I was pregnant. It was a typical dark Midwestern late afternoon turning to evening, and I was sitting in a cold basement classroom of the building where most of the education classes at my university are taught. Even though the infusion of hormones that accompanies pregnancy was already making me more nauseous and fatigued than I knew was possible, I was not thinking of the sources of my nausea and fatigue. The new life which was, mere days before, nothing more than a long-held and wild hope for a beloved child, was still a bit of an abstract concept for me wrapped within intense love and longing. Instead, I was thinking of the professor who was teaching the class that I was sitting in. What would it be like to be in her place feeling the way I did at that moment? I thought to myself, regardless of gender or profession, everyone has had to power through days at work when they1 were feeling ill, but teaching while pregnant was a bit different from simply going to work while sick. Pregnancy, I was just discovering, can be a time when a woman can just feel “off” for long periods of time. Teaching, especially at the secondary and elementary levels, is a profession where one has to be “on” for hours with few breaks, making “toughing it out” untenable. The professor whose class I was in is a top researcher in her field, and I was in my first semester of graduate school with no aspirations toward academia. Then I realized that if I were not in graduate school, I would be teaching English in a local high school, and suddenly an idea emerged that would become the work you are reading now. I wanted to know how teachers, specifically these women whose place I could possibly be in, resolve the tension of bringing their children into the world while simultaneously preparing other people’s children for the adult world. So, I decided to conduct a small qualitative research study examining the lived experiences of those who teach while pregnant. After interviewing four teachers, I then examined their narratives in the context of feminist psychoanalytic theory, popular culture, and the law. What follows is the result of my modest inquiry. 1Although “they” is grammatically incorrect here, I have used it due to the absence of an accepted gender-neutral third person singular pronoun.

Degree

M.S.Ed.

Advisors

Johnson, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Educational sociology|Womens studies|Occupational psychology

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