Mothers and Schooling

Fibian Lukalo is Director for Research at the National Land Commission, Kenya. She taught at Moi University, and has held a number of fellowships including the Vera Campbell Scholars Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Sante-Fe, New Mexico; The African Guest Researchers Fellowship at the Nordic African Institute in Uppsala, Sweden; and the Gender Institute programme at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Senegal. She received her PhD in sociology of education and international development from the University of Cambridge, UK.

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

1 Mothers and school decision-making: An introduction

An introduction

Situating the study

The structure of the book

PART I

Uncovering spaces for mothers’ voices

2 Gendered households and mothering

Contextualising schooling

African feminist perspectives

Reflections

3 Researching mothers’ lives in situ

Living in Wela

The ethics of naming, hearing and valuing

Research dynamics and validations

Concluding comments

PART II

Mothers’ school choices: educational histories, aspirations and constraints

4 Education in Wela - ‘the hunched-back village’

Children: education, domestic life and resources

Family patterns of schooling

Conclusion

5 Schooling in mothers’ lives: childhood memories of support, silence and denial

Gendered memories: the marginalising of girls’ education

Personal resilience: the pursuit of ‘becoming educated’

Self-blame: the guilt associated with insufficient schooling

Reflections

6 Mothers at the heart of decision-making

‘Possessing certificates': mothers as teachers

‘We reached’: choice dilemmas of mothers with some schooling

Arduous school encounters: disability and infirmity

Mothers’ approaches to schooling

7 Schooling ‘all’ children? The challenges of social mothering

Grandmothers in charge of schooling

Social mothering: contingency schooling plans

Paternity: mothers keeping their own children close

Fostering children: paternities and reciprocal arrangements

Thoughts on social mothering

PART III

Mothers’ agency: Decisions, discourses and school engagement strategies

8 A typology of mothers’ educational decision-making: from aspirations to school engagements

Schooling, poverty and social advancement: fractured possibilities

Mothers’ aspirations and school engagements

Facilitating environments and mother - school strategies

Schooling gains in mothers’ worlds

9 Epilogue: mothers’ educational agency

Who are you?

Schooling for all?

Looking to the future

Glossary

Index