Fostering Relationships with and Ethical Representations of Pregnant and

Parenting Teens

Heidi L. HallmanDepartment of Curriculum and Teaching

University of Kansas

Jessi’s Poem

“Just Because

Just because I had a baby

Don’t laugh and talk behind my back.

Don’t think I can’t achieve.

Don’t try to please me with your make believe.

Just because I had a baby

Don’t mean I have to give up my dreams.

Doesn’t mean for you to stop being a friend.

  

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Jessi’s poem (cont.)

Just because I had a baby

Doesn’t give you a right to throw me on with the statistics.

Just because I had a baby

Doesn’t mean I’m a ho’

Don’t act like I don’t know.

Just because I had a baby

Means I need you more than ever.

By Jessi Martin

 

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The teen mother as “at-risk”

• The “at-risk” student is positioned against the “normal” adolescent (Lesko, 2001).

• The pregnant teen has not always been a defining category for adolescents. Before the 1970’s attention was focused on unwed mothers of all ages.

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Who is the pregnant and parenting teen?

• Studies (Luttrell, 2003; Pillow, 2004; Zachry, 2005) challenge the depiction of the pregnant teen as “deviant” or “abnormal”

• Several researchers (e.g., Brindis, 1993; Luker, 1996) have documented results that appear contradictory to the early pregnancy/ lack of success model so frequently assumed by the American public.

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Questions to consider

• Does representing the pregnant/ parenting teen as a unit of analysis undermine researchers’ efforts to ethically highlight the stories of these teens?

• In representing the stories of pregnant and parenting teens, are researchers aiding in the construction of some stories as “fit” and others as “unfit”?

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Ethnographic Methods in a Postmodern Landscape

• The state of ethnography questions both the researcher and the researched

• Ethnographers build a representation of their site, in part, through depicting the stories of their participants

• Pillow’s (2004) research depicting teen mothers eventually rejected a use of participants’ stories, claiming that these stories might contribute to pregnant and parenting teens being “overrepresented and hypervisible” (p. 8).

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The work of critical ethnographers in depicting pregnant and parenting teens

• Kelly (2000), Luttrell (2003), Hallman (2009) focus on narratives of participants as a way to highlight participants’ agency

• Focus on participants’ self-representation

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Agency and Identity through participants’ narratives

• Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain (1998) state that “identities, the imaginings of self in worlds of action, [are]…lived in and through activity and so must be conceptualized as they develop in social practice” (p. 5).

• Though societal discourses about teen mothers certainly have influence on others’ perceptions of the teen mother, it is important to recognize the agency that teen mothers possess.

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Agency and Identity through participants’ narratives

• Kelly (2000) highlights the relationship that participants have with the discourses in which they operate. Kelly describes this relationship through the dichotomous construct of teen mothers as victims/ teen mothers as free agents.

• Emphasis on a critical stance.

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The relationship between participants’ agency and the discourses in which they operate

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Teen mothers as “free agents”

Teen mothers as “victims”

The extra-local context of the research site

Our own “collusion” in ethnographic representation

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We are tied into the relationship between “researcher” and “researched”

As Watson (2006) notes, participants’ stories often reject “discourse determinism,” and instead seek to draw on the resources available to construct an identity.

Postmodern Ethnography

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A deep understanding of the lives of one’s participants and a contextualized reproduction of the stories told by the participants

--Norman Denzin

Jessi’s poem

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Jessi’s poem references several discourses of teen motherhood, and one could view these discourses as confining Jessi’s agency

Jessi’s understanding of herself as a teen mom involves “talking back” to these discourses as well as synthesizing them.

Jessi’s poem

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Jessi’s poem, “Just Because,” becomes a metaphor for teen mothers’ work within the dialectic of “free agent”/ “victim”

The divide between the extremes of “free agent” and “victim” articulates the prevalence of “discourse determinism” in the way that teen mothers are frequently characterized

LaShaundra’s letters to her daughterLetter 1

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Dear Kamille,

It’s your mom, LaShaundra. Right now I am finishing high school at Eastview and I’m 18 years old. I’ll be graduating soon and am glad I made it this far. I did this mostly for you so you would have a mom who made something of her life.

Love, Mom

Letter 2

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Dear Kamille,

Man, do I hate to read! But I like to write so I will write to you. I’ve been thinking about how big you have gotten already and keep wondering what you’ll be when you grow up. Don’t be a teen mom like me because it is hard. People always think that you’re not going to make it. But we’ll make it. Maybe when you grow up you’ll be a teacher like Bob.

Love, Mom

Letter 3

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Dear Kamille,

I’m going to write to you today about my situation with your daddy. This is hard for me but he has been calling me lately. I am wondering if we are going to get back together. Maybe he is willing to change and take responsibility. I always tell people that being a teen mom makes you take responsibility.

Love, Mom 

Letter 4

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Dear Kamille,

I read a good book called The First Part Last. It is about a teen dad. I have never seen a book about a teen dad before. I thought that was pretty cool. Your dad is still calling me but we’re not together. I thought that since I’m finishing high school, I should make a plan for my future. So here it is:

get good gradesgraduate from high schoolgo to college and get good gradesapply for a job as a physician assistant

Letter 4 (cont.)

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Bob asked me to think about what obstacles I might encounter. I told him that I have you, so I’ll have to take care of you or have someone watch you while I’m in school.

But if things don’t work out I know for sure that I’m going to graduate from high school.

Love, Mom 

Working within the dialectic

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Dierdre Kelly’s (2000) articulation of the “dominant discourses” of teen motherhood:

“wrong-girl” frame/ “wrong family” frame

“wrong-society” frame/ “stigma-is-wrong” frame

Working within the dialectic

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Through awareness of a dialectical relationship between participants’ agentive selves and the discourses in which they operate, education researchers can account for the back-and-forth between ‘self’ and discourse.

Working within the dialectic

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It is easy to misconstrue the discourse as having an overriding power to determine the values and interpretations of women’s appearances in local settings…but women are active, skilled, make choices, consider, are not fooled or foolish. Within discourse there is play and interplay.

Dorothy Smith, 1990, p. 202