This study aims to investigate the way mothering extends to get the social meaning when parents experience volunteering and to find how mothers understand and reconstruct mothering through their volunteering. It also has the purpose to show what the m...
This study aims to investigate the way mothering extends to get the social meaning when parents experience volunteering and to find how mothers understand and reconstruct mothering through their volunteering. It also has the purpose to show what the meaning of mother-centered volunteering is on motherhood or mothering and how our society makes married women positioned who are in different conditions. With focusing on parents' experiences, it is possible to answer and analyze the inquiries of mothering in detail because mothering is constructed by individuals and social conditions reciprocally and has a variety of meanings in result. This study has the purpose to penetrate the systemic contradiction and to destruct the norm of mothering that is mainly constituted by housewives in the middle class through revealing excluded mother's voice in the discourse of the parents participation. The main methodology of this study is the depth-interview of mothers who are the main target of parents' volunteering in the elementary school. To make the result abundant, it is supplemented that examining the references and analyzing the discourses, too. The results are as follows.
Nowadays parents' volunteering is made up in the situation where competitions and individual responsibilities become more extended in neo-liberal education system and where mothering is anticipated to be revealed more intensively. Parents' volunteering has the meaning of the extension of mothering that is accomplished in their family because it is related to their children. Especially mothering comes to be intensified in the school as a social sphere through competition and conflict. Furthermore parents' volunteering has the limitation that it is unconcerned about the differences of class and gender because the norm of mothering is made up on the basis of housewives in the middle class. Due to these aspects of parents' volunteering, women reconstruct the meaning of mothering according to their conditions and behaviors and make the results and the possibilities which are hard to designate accommodation or resistance.
Women's experience and recognition on parents' volunteering shows that they are not left as a victim of education system but they decide their position and role and practice as a positive actor through social relationship. It is important to know that women are not influenced by motherhood ideology unilaterally and to find new meanings of women's position and role in the process that women reconstruct the norm of mothering under the tension and contradiction between discourse and real experience. This study, however, has the limitation that it doesn't trace the ground to expand the possibilities and deepen new potentials, and that it doesn't analyze the differences of parents' volunteering requiring material resources among each class in detail.