The Third Step and Beyond: An Examination of Black Mothers’ Doctoral Students’ Use of Strategic Student Mothering in Graduate School Experiences and Post-Graduation Career Choices

Abstract

Institutions of higher education opine that Black women and mothers are important demographics to retain in doctoral education; however, they fail to recognize that Black doctoral students may also be mothers whose graduate school experiences are informed by the combination of race, gender, and motherhood. This study examined the ways that race is a critical factor that impacts the experiences of Black mothers pursuing doctoral education. Using critical race mixed methods, the study explored how BMDS exercise agency in the form of strategic student mothering, a means by which Black student mother negotiate their relationships with work and education to accommodate family, community, and self during their graduate programs. Secondary research questions explore academic career choice and the ways that plantation politics (Squire et al., 2018) manifest through higher education’s evolutionary use of partus sequitur ventrem, the child follows the mother, a seventeenth century slave code that conflated Black mothers’ work with their reproductive and physical labor to the exclusion of their intellectual labor. I examined the continued functionality of PSV as a system of exploitative practices that BMDS navigate by using SSM. Survey results (N=166) show that disciple, institutional type, and student loan debt were statistically significant variables that inform post-graduation career choices while marital status and number of children were not statistically significant. Qualitative findings show that BMDS embody SSM by using five main strategies, using culturally informed practices, webs of support, seeking synergy, short term sacrifice for long term benefit, boundary setting. Findings inform implications that include the need for more research on the topic and changes to the ways that higher education engages student mothers in doctoral education. HASH(0x40a4c20)