Educational and Mothering Discourses and Learner Goals: Mexican Immigrant Women Enacting Agency in a Family Literacy Program

This study examined how Mexican immigrant women enrolled in a family literacy program used mainstream ideas of mothering and parent involvement in education to pursue their own personal and academic goals. Like other adult learners (Perry & Purcell-Gates, 2005), these mothers appropriated dominant parenting and educational discourses in the U.S. to justify furthering their education, to support their future goals, to create new identities, and to demonstrate their mothering abilities. Participants negotiated multiple identities such as mother, wife, and woman by combining discourses of raising a literate child and being a good mother. At other times these identities conflicted with achieving some of their goals. The study offers adult education scholars and practitioners alternative ways of understanding learners, their goals, and pathways to achieving these goals.