Mother is Liberation: Giving Birth to Alagaan Pedagogy (Pedagogy of Care)
pedagogy: [noun] the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept.
motherscholar: [noun] those trying to balance motherhood while pursuing professional lives as educational scholars (2008, Matias).
alagaan: [noun, Tagalog] to take care of, to raise, to bring up.
Dr. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, PhD
In this auto-ethnographic reflection, Dr. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, PhD, a tenured professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, shares a "story of survival as a community-engaged motherscholar of color." She illustrates challenges and discriminations faced by women in academia who are starting or raising a family and how mothering. She explains through her own experience that, while typically viewed as a hindrance to career success, mothering can actually shape a framework of growth that intertwines and nourishes academic work and community engagement.
Dr. Tintiangco-Cubales resists common guilts and doubts that act as microaggressions, reframes the 3 work shifts that women (especially mothers are expected to contribute to, and challenges the dominant image of "good" motherhood. Because a good scholar is supposed to be analytical and detached, a good mother or teacher is supposed to be engaged, caring, and self sacrifice, and a good public servant usually must take on self aggrandizing leadership roles, success in each of these realms seem mutually exclusive. However, Dr. Tintiangco-Cubales applies three principles of Alagaan, or Care, Pedagogy:
In the home home, mothering is liberation. Because her and her partner were always seeking to train their daughter to think critically in a world full of possibly detrimental and oppressive messages, it incited them to constantly liberate themselves from oppressive views and frameworks of parenting.
In Academia, mothering is education. Since "the role of mother and teacher both have the possibilities of either maintaining the status quo or disrupting it; both ca either be oppressive or liberatory." Thus, Dr. Tingtiangco-Cubales sees a responsibility as a teacher to teach her students how to learn and think critically beyond the classroom walls. She cares about them deeply as a form of education that is not typically encouraged.
Lastly, in the community, mothering is a collective. Based on what she would have wanted when she was a student, Dr. Tintiangco-Cubales created a support community called Pin@ay Education Partnerships (PEP), an organization for service-learning and mentorship for underserved youths. This developed into a strong pipeline for ethnic studies spanning multiple high school regions. Dr. Tintiangco-Cubales built this community like a mother, and the community mothered her and her family right back.
Pin@y Educational Partnerships Promotional Video (2011)
One of my questions reflecting on this reading, my own experiences, and the testimonies given by others, is whether this sort of intertwining of career, activism, passion projects, and family is possible in other industries. Dr. Tintiangco-Cubales states that, in raising her family, students, and community, "each one taken separately might have overwhelmed me; however, by finding a way to connect them, I have not only survived but have thrived." Her educational background and critical analysis of gender roles and detrimental stereotypes informed her mothering. She brought her child to her office, to conferences, and to her non-profit as pragmatic means of spending time with her child, but also to expose her child to the academic world and critical thinking. Her community work in creating an ethnic studies pipeline for high school students also provided an opportunity for involvement for her university students, served as a subject for her research, and served as community that supported her childcare, mental health, and physical needs. Is this level of cohesion possible for a mother working in computer science? investment banking? fisheries and wildlife maintenance?
In a Medium article published in June 2018 with over 4k "claps" (the Medium platform's equivalent of "Likes," a lawyer, Chris Morgan, shares her story of hiring a nanny, Luisa, and the drastic change in career productivity. Morgan was a mother of young kids, and while she wanted to be around, , found "being a great lawyer and a great mom at the same time virtually unattainable." But upon hiring Luisa, Morgan found a renewed sense of time and ability to focus. Based on her experience, Morgan concludes that "What Luisa allowed me to achieve in just a few short months got me thinking about whether certain male lawyers had the edge over someone like me simply because they had wives holding down the domestic front. Perhaps the extra time and brain space that I just discovered was something they had all along."
I hope that the type of alignment and wholeness across family, work, and service that Dr. Tintiangco-Cubales is possible in other industries. It will take time, but I think an essential part of that change is more people sharing their stories.
References
Morgan, Chris. "I hired a wife. And my career took off." 2018, Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@chrismorgan_1657/i-hired-a-wife-and-my-career-took-off-16dc8ae481fe
Tintiango-Cubales, Allyson. "Mother is Liberation; Giving Birth to Alagaan Pedagogy (Pedagogy of Care."
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