Natality and the Scholarly Life: Motherhood,Mentorship,and Disorientation

Abstract

Context:

The disparate attrition of women, particularly pregnant women and mothers, in graduate study indicates that traditional mentoring approaches are inadequate in supporting the unique challenges of family and graduate life. Although mother-scholars are under-researched subjects in mentorship literature, affective and identity-oriented mentoring has been recommended as a more promising avenue for supporting the retention and development of mother-scholars.

Purpose:

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how theories of natality, care, and disorientation applied to the experience of motherhood can together inform how mentorship could support mother-scholars through identity shifts engendered by graduate studies. The paper draws on maternal experiences to articulate how mentorship can better support the emergence of mother-scholars by cultivating dispositions of care and greater comfort with disorientation among mentees.

Research Design:

The study employs a personal case study and analytical conceptual analysis to identify features of mothering and infancy that can shed light on graduate life and mentorship. It employs auto-ethnography, exegesis, and multimodal methods.

Conclusions:

Mentorship informed by mothering and infancy reconceptualizes graduate study as an academic birth, accompanied by vulnerability, disorientation, and the particular stresses of motherhood for mother-scholars. The author reconceptualizes mentorship as tending to the internal relations a mentee bears to their extant and emerging senses of self. Centering affective mentoring on these relations elucidates how modeling, supporting, and normalizing experiences of difficulty, vulnerability, and disorientation may redirect resources of motherhood toward the natality and continuous creativity involved in a scholarly life. The author provides practical tools and describes pedagogical approaches aimed to elicit metacognitive and affective, identity-based reflection on the transformational growth of graduate study that may enhance doctoral mentorship of mid-career mother-scholars.