Firsthand Accounts of U.S. Teachers Pumping Milk at Work: A Poetic Inquiry
International Review of Qualitative Research
This article uses poetic inquiry (Faulkner, 2016; Leavy, 2015; Prendergast, 2009) to foreground t... more This article uses poetic inquiry (Faulkner, 2016; Leavy, 2015; Prendergast, 2009) to foreground the firsthand experiences of K-12 teachers expressing milk at work in the United States. The poems illustrate a fundamental irony for the predominantly female-identified teaching force: Teachers are expected to nurture other people’s children without proper time, space, and resources to nurture their infants via pumping milk while at work. The poems demonstrate a need for additional time and space to express milk and a need for clear policies and practices to support pregnancy, birth, and bodyfeeding for teachers. More universally, the poems speak to the regimented nature of schools and the impact on teacher’s bodies. The first four poems were each written from four individual participant interviews, and member-checked with each participant. The last three poems are a compilation of direct responses from 20 participants describing the feelings, sensations, and emotions related to pumping ...
The purpose of this paper is to consider how white identity is maintained, in part, by the way it... more The purpose of this paper is to consider how white identity is maintained, in part, by the way itsm eaning is interpreted, and to explore how different frameworks for discussing the influence of whiteness affect the ways white teachers might take up their white identities. I argue that using a feminist poststructural approach (Butler, 1993; Davies, 2003; Kumashiro, 2002; St. Pierre, 2000), by re-reading one's stories of racial identity, can mobilize white teachers for anti-racist action in a contextualized manner, situating identity as both made by and making larger social discourses about whiteness. I share the poem "Bule", published in Infinite Rust, where I write about my white identity in the context of living outside of Jakarta, Indonesia for two years. I model the re-reading process by critically interpreting "Bule" using two frameworks for understanding whiteness: the white privilege framework, popularized by Peggy McIntosh (1988),and the white racial ...
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