1st Edition
Mothers and Schooling Poverty, Gender and Educational Decision-Making in Rural Kenya
This ground-breaking book opens new horizons in understanding educational decision-making and how schooling patterns are shaped by, and reshape, rural communities. It provides a humane portrait of the struggles faced by mothers in rural Kenya to educate their children, despite the ‘free education policy’.
Based on a prize-winning study examining mothers’ attitudes to education in a rural Kenyan community, this vividly nuanced ethnographic work draws upon African feminist perspectives to describe the livelihoods and aspirations of 32 mothers responsible for over 180 children. It explores the effects of mothers’ school histories and the constraining effects of land practices and patriarchal culture on their actions. Their school choice and engagement strategies reflect different facilitating environments, their educational values, the use of social mothering practices and reliance on kinship reciprocity. The findings illustrate the importance of recognising the diversity of mothers’ situations within this small community and the pressures they face to be ‘good mothers’ who school their children.
Mothers and Schooling highlights the importance of mothers’ educational agency and is essential reading for anthropologists of education, those working in gender studies, poverty alleviation strategists, educational researchers, teachers and policy-makers who wish to improve the success of Education for All for the children of women living in Southern rural poverty.
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
1 Mothers and school decision-making: 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
Research dynamics and validations
The ethics of naming, hearing and valuing
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’: 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 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 relations
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
Biography
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.
"Mothers matter. Here is the close-focus story of how women make ends meet, and shape children's schooling, in a world of poverty and gender inequality. This is more than a fine ethnography of village life. It breaks new ground, especially in showing how 'social-mothering' extends beyond immediate kinship to include other children; and in showing the daily struggles that affect engagement with school. Tracing the varied, often tense relationships between women and men, adults and children, families and schools, Fibian Lukalo's approach to the dilemmas of education, development and social justice is relevant far beyond East Africa."
Raewyn Connell, Professor Emerita, University of Sydney, Australia.
"This book offers an extraordinary account of children’s access to schooling in the context of rural life in Kenya. Focusing on women as mothers, the narrative reveals how multiple dynamics unfold to make mother’s agency regarding their children’s education, particularly that of daughters, a residual rather than an explicit decision. A must read for those seeking to understand the complex and tortuous connections among gender, poverty, culture, and educational attainment—connections that defy easy synthesis."
Nelly P. Stromquist, Emerita Professor, University of Maryland, USA.
"Mothers and Schooling provides a deep, nuanced reflection on the interplay between poverty, patriarchy and policy when it comes to educational decision-making on the African continent. Fibian Lukalo offers a thoroughly researched exposition on how mothers and motherhood chart educational directions for their children amidst socio-economic, cultural and gender dynamics that have all too frequently been considered alone. She offers a welcome contribution to the debate on individual versus collective agency, and the multiple roles women play in the lives of children, not only their own. Most importantly the book shows how educational policy, developed by global agencies in New York or Geneva, land in small rural villages– in this case in Kenya. It asks pertinent questions regarding the limits and possibilities of social reform through education, and how women contest power in the context of Education for All."
Sharlene Swartz, Executive Director of Inclusive Economic Development, Human Sciences Research Council and Professor of Philosophy, University of Fort Hare, South Africa.
"Lukalo’s detailed account of educational decision making by mothers in rural Kenya introduces us to "maternal pedagogies" and how they shape the schooling trajectories of their children. Through ethnographically-rich longitudinal research, Lukalo brings mothers’ voices to the fore as they reflect on their own educational experiences and the effects of gender, poverty, and policy on the decisions they make for their offspring. Their life histories complicate assumptions about Education for All and illustrate the importance of mothers’ agency in policy implementation."
Frances Vavrus, Professor of Comparative and International Development Education, University of Minnesota, USA.
