Motherscholaring: a collective poetic autoethnographic inquiry

Abstract

Motherscholaring is an essential mode of intellectual and spiritual travel, a type of soulwork, epistemologically rooted in love, occuring at the intersections of personal and professional theories, research, and practices that move toward justice. In this conceptual paper, we creatively and collectively explore meanings of motherscholaring found through poetic inquiry. The aim of this paper is twofold: (a) to add to emergent literature on the concept of motherscholaring and (b) to offer methodological contributions to the developing field of poetic inquiry by demonstrating and discussing the process and forms of poetic inquiry that have been useful in our communal project.

Keywords:

• Motherscholar
• poetic inquiry
• mothering
• postcolonial feminist praxis

Note

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use the term motherfull denoting the encompassing power and life force of mothering in all of its full iterations and contradictions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joy Howard

Joy Howard is a white former teacher and mother of three Black mixed-race boys. She is an assistant professor in a Teacher Education department, and her scholarship focuses on teachers’ racial literacy, Black mixed-race children’s experiences in school, and ways in which activist scholarship can be useful within communities working toward justice.

Kindel Nash

Kindel Nash is a white former teacher and mother of four multiracial (Black/white) children who attend/ed urban public schools. She is an associate professor in an Education department, and her scholarship focuses on ways to critically reframe early literacy teacher preparation through holistic practice-based teacher preparation and critical examination of the practices of highly effective teachers.

Candace Thompson

Candace Thompson is a Black, middle-aged, single mother of a teenage girl. Her Blackness is simultaneously a reminder of the loving community that taught her to thrive and the brand that marks her as less than capable in the wide world. Her aging self is a constant new encounter of wisdom, loss, and unlearning. Being a single parent does not mean that she raises her daughter alone, but it does mean that her child’s father is not a constant helpmate in proximity and daily life. A lover of wild places and things, Thompson finds herself, rather unexpectedly, enclosed within the walls of academe as an associate professor and department chair at a predominantly white, public university.