So join me on World Read Aloud Day, March 3rd, at Books, Inc. in San Francisco’s Laurel Village, from 6 – 7 PM for a bedtime story reading. I’ll be joined by my friends and fellow writer-mamas Lisa Harper and Nicki Richesin. Bring the kids in their pj’s for a fun evening outing!

“I read New York Times book reporter Motoko Rich’s recent Week in Review article, “The Book Club With Just One Member,” with mixed feelings. I’ve never joined a book club; as a graduate student in English, then an English professor, now a reviewer, they always seemed a little too coals-to-Newcastleish for me. Nevertheless, Rich’s apparent disdain for the current status of reading as “a relentlessly social pursuit” rubbed me the wrong way.”

Please click on over to Literary Mama to read the rest!

When I found myself pregnant a second time I promised myself it would be different. I was so ready to be laid back and flexible. To let her cry for more than five seconds before leaping up to tend her needs. To avoid curtailing our social life because of her schedule. She can nap in the car on the way to my friend’s house, I told myself. I was going to roll with it this time around. I had had a hard pregnancy — much harder than my first–with so much pain, nausea and discomfort on every possible bodily level. I fooled myself into believing my delivery and early days would be easier, should be easier. I had earned it, hadn’t I? And everyone but everyone had told me: second kids are easier.

Click on over to Literary Mama to read the rest.

“We are seeking proposals for chapters in follow-up to Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind (Stylus, 2009), under contract with Stylus Publishing. Each chapter should briefly introduce a discipline, provide a brief literature review of the scholarship of teaching and learning (or the lack thereof) in the discipline, describe and evaluate the discipline’s traditional pedagogies and practices, and articulate elements of existing or potential signature pedagogies. Each chapter will also be grounded in strong literature reviews and written in a lucid, engaging style.

Exploring Signature Pedagogies included chapters on history, literary studies, creative writing, music, visual and performing arts, geography, human development, psychology, sociology, agriculture, biology, computer science, mathematics, and physics. For this “sequel,” we are looking for considerations of other disciplines, inter-disciplines, and professions, such as the following:

o foreign language

o philosophy

o political science

o communication

o chemistry

o business/economics

o economics

o engineering

o anthropology

o social work

o interdisciplinary studies

o women’s studies

o new media studies

o education

o medicine

o nursing

o others?

Some of these fields have an existing literature on their signature pedagogy, so proposals should reflect a familiarity with these publications, as well as plans to summarize and extend this work. Completed chapters should be approximately 4,100 words, including works cited. Co-authored chapters are welcome.

Proposals are due on March 15 and should include a two-page (double-spaced) description of the chapter and a CV reflecting each author’s qualifications and experience with SoTL.

Proposals should be sent to nancy.chick AT uwc DOT edu. Questions and queries can be addressed to the editors Nancy Chick (nancy.chick AT uwc DOT edu), Aeron Haynie (haynieaATuwgbDOTedu), and Regan Gurung (gurungrATuwgbDOTedu).

So there we were, my husband David and I, on a road trip with our thirteen-year-old late last July, and I hadn’t a thing to wear. And when I say road trip, you have to understand that I’m being somewhat disingenuous here — kind of like Ishmael saying he had signed up to go on a little fishing trip with a slightly wild-eyed one-legged captain named Ahab. If you think it’s easy to pick the right outfit to see an experiential program in the Northern California wilderness, one you hope will take your high-functioning autistic thirteen year-old with a temper like an IED, trust me, it’s not. I didn’t want to look like a dolled-up tart, someone who would ditch their child in the wilderness and bolt for the nearest mall, but I didn’t want to look serious and severe, like a buttoned-up stiff and tweedy schoolmarm incapable of raising a child with special needs, either.

Click on over to Literary Mama to read the rest!

“At its worst, the professoriate is a callow institution, shortsighted and heartless. At its best, though, it has a venerable history as the gateway to the production of vibrant new ideas, of empathic and rigorous education that indirectly and at times very directly shapes our nation’s cultural and intellectual life. It is also an institution that comes with an incredible commitment to each professor’s lifelong contributions, which makes it all the more puzzling that efforts to suggest that universities take special care of their faculty during the years of a child’s new life have so slowly gained traction.

“For my part, I ended up leaving my academic job. After my first child was born, I took a year or two of unpaid leave. I agreed to some adjunct work at local universities, then, a few years in, I resigned my tenure. I continued to each, but in those years I began to find my path to a new career as an author. ”

Today, Miriam is a bestselling author, with Andrea Buchanan, of the terrific Daring Girls series of books; she writes: “Here’s what I’m up to in the land of Daring. Big news is that this summer, I experienced my own kind of daring when I boarded a plane headed to Detroit for a week of taping a special show with PBS, called Daring Kids, with Miriam Peskowitz. We taped nonstop, and it was the hardest work I’ve ever done, and the most exhilarating. That show is being used by PBS during their membership drives, and it’s premiering in December 2009 (anyone who wants to watch needs to check their local PBS station, or call in and ask for it!). The show is 14-odd activities, from kayaking to fishing to making a lava lamp, a volcano, a snowglobe or a pinata. We taped 12 extra segments for the DVD, which will be available in February 2010. For more info, just look at the website.

“I continue to imagine more Daring books, but no news to report.

“One highlight this Fall was visiting Duke University, and speaking at the What Does it Mean To Be an Educated Woman panel, honoring my mentor and friend, Jean O’Barr, on the occasion of her retirement. Very inspiring.”

Miriam’s own career is an inspiring model for us all, and we’ll continue to follow it closely!

The Association for Research on Mothering (ARM) and the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University will co-host a one-day symposium at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute on Thursday, April 08, 2010 on “Being and Thinking as an Academic Mother: Theory and Practice.”

ARM and the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University are now seeking submissions for the symposium. The symposium will explore academic mothers’ experiences from both narrative and theory. While previous panel discussions and collections such as PhD Momma and Parenting and Professing examined being a mother academic from narrative or “lived experience” and others, Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering issue on Mothers in the Academe, explored mother academics’ experiences from a theoretical perspective, this is the first symposium to do so incorporating both narrative and theory. The symposium will explore how both research and narrative can inform contemporary understandings of academic motherhood, particularly in regard to strategies of resistance and empowerment.

Paper proposals should strengthen the dialogue among academic motherhood, intellectual ideas, and personal narrative. The symposium will explore the topic of Being and Thinking as an Academic Mother from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. We welcome submissions from scholars across disciplines.

The symposium will run from 9-5 and will include approximately 25 papers, with each panelist having 20 minutes to present their paper. To present at this symposium, you must be a member of ARM. The symposium will coincide with the NeMLA conference (April 07-11, 2010) at McGill University. The Institute is located at 2170 Bishop Street, Montreal, Quebec.

Topics can include (but are not limited to):
the maternal wall, “opting out”, mentoring and modeling, being a professor mother, work-life balance, negotiating or resisting the maternal wall, single mothers and academic work, graduate student mothering, being a mother on the tenure track, being a pregnant professor, maternity leave and academic mothering, poverty and academic mothering, juggling mothering and academic expectations, intersections between feminism and academic mothering, being an academic artist and mothering, race and academic mothering, academic job searches and mothering, teaching and mothering, sexuality and academic mothering, male organizing principles and academic mothering, the academic schedule and mothering, fertility and academic mothering, challenging assumptions about academic mothers, ethics and academic mothering, “having it all” as academic mothers, adoption and academic mothering, networking, strategies for surviving academic mothering, class and academic mothering, race and academic mother mentors, social reproduction and academic mothering, motherhood closet, being out as a mother, second/third shift in the home, academic culture and mothering, maternal pedagogy, myth of ideal worker/ideal mother, intensive mothering and academe, unboundedness of mother work and academic work, childcare, fathering, trailing spouses, academic couples, biological clock, university policies and mothering, timing and spacing of children, perceptions of mothers in academe, discrimination avoidance, discrimination against mothers in academe, motherhood penalty, “price of motherhood”, adjunct work, teaching and motherhood, benefits of motherhood on teaching and research.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Abstracts due by December 01, 2010.

Scholars interested in submitting proposals to this symposium are invited to submit proposals to D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein at lhallst@bu.edu
or Andrea O’Reily aoreilly@yorku.ca

The 2009 Stanton/Anthony Conversations: Mothers as Leaders: Contradictions & Challenges

Time: 1:15 PM – 2:30 PM
Location: Interfaith Chapel
Room: Sanctuary
Cost: FREE

But after a couple years of fairly mindless dead-end work, she decided she needed a change:

“It was then that I decided to become an electrical engineer, convinced it would be my ticket out of intellectual petrifaction. Choosing electrical engineering wasn’t a well-informed decision; in spite of having an engineer dad, I’d never actually figured out what engineers did. My dad didn’t talk about his job, and my own observation was that mostly what he did was tinker on his Corvettes. … I assumed that if I got an engineering degree, I too would learn the secrets of working on cars. I now know that this particular goal would have been better served by an auto-shop class.”

The goal might not have been expertly considered, but the journey certainly was, and Jennifer’s essay describes her careful route, via community college (where she met her husband), then a junior transfer to UCLA for her degree in electrical engineering, then a spreadsheet-organized plan to be a grad student mom:

“As I’d hoped, being a mother and a graduate student turned out to be a great combination. I had plenty of time with Riley, and enough time away. I did brain things, and I did mom things. If she was sick and I needed to be home with her, no one cared that I didn’t show up for class; I never had to call in sick or apologize for missing a big meeting. I didn’t have to hoard my vacation and sick days like a candy bar on a desert island. I didn’t have to worry whether my co-workers (or my boss) thought I was a flake. Later on, when I tried juggling an engineering career with one, then two, then three kids, I realized just how much harder it was to be a working mom than to be a student mom.”

Today, Jennifer writes, “Your email. . . made me want to tell you how writing my Mama PhD essay has affected me.  As you know I was a fighter plane and sports car groupie long before I became an engineer, and if I’d had a clue what I was doing I should have chosen to become a mechanical engineer rather than an electrical engineer (EE’s don’t take classes in stuff like aerodynamics since we’re too busy studying circuits and semiconductor physics and that sort of thing).

“Writing my essay for Mama PhD reminded me of my original love of overpowered machinery and it made me sad that I never learned about the stuff that interested me — so I recently registered for an online class in airfoil design. I’m happy to report that, unlike when I was in grad school in the mid 90’s, lots of excellent engineering schools have online grad-level courses now. This is great for people who work and also, of course, for moms!

“The only question is whether I can remember the prerequisite material fast enough to keep up. It’s slightly terrifying. Oh, and writing the essay also made me really want to go back to driving a ferocious sports car rather than a minivan.  Still working on that one.

Some time later, Jennifer sent me another update, demonstrating how flexible working student moms need to be: “I switched classes from Airfoil Theory to Dynamics because of a work conflict (well, not only did I switch classes, I switched colleges, since I needed a later start date).  I’m really excited. But I know I will be severely overwhelmed.”

Jennifer is one of several contributors to the book who do not hold PhDs — some of them are still working on the degree; some are deciding whether to finish it; some, like Jennifer, never wanted that particular degree, or needed it to pursue a career in their chosen field. But all their stories shed light on the challenges of combining motherhood and academic work, and we’re happy Jennifer’s story is in the book. And now we’ll look forward to seeing her airplane designs.

I hadn’t really thought about the constraints of space and materials that visual artists work with until I watched Pamela Tanner Boll’s moving new documentary, Who Does She Think She Is? (2008), which introduces us to several mother-artists and asks why, when making art and raising children are both crucial for our culture, it is so hard to do both. The film wants us to know about these mothers making art, and it puts their stories in the larger context of all women artists. Like all women, women artists find their work less well-known and less well-compensated than the work of their male contemporaries. Like all mothers, mother artists endure isolation from their peers, sleep deprivation, and myriad claims on their time which make it difficult to continue their careers. But they do.

<p>
The filmmakers are celebrating the DVD release by organizing house parties around the country on November 8th. Want to join them? You can buy the DVD at a 10% discount with a special promotional code for Literary Mama and Mama, PhD readers; just go the DVD online store and enter the promo code LitMama.

There’s more information about the house party idea here and here. Check it out, and then gather  your friends for a screening!