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School Smart And Mother-Wise: Working-Class Women's Identity And Schooling By Wendy Luttrell

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School Smart And Mother-Wise: Working-Class Women's Identity And Schooling By Wendy Luttrell
In School-smart and mother-wise: Working-class women’s identity and schooling by Wendy Luttrell, the author discusses how American education disadvantages working-class women as children and adults. The purpose of the study is to discuss the circumstances that led the participated women to drop out from schools and then attend the Adult Basic Education Programs and to examine the identity and schooling of working class women through stories. The central question that the research tends to answer were:
1- In what ways, can schooling hinder a person's sense of social standing and self-worth?
2- How schools change women, both when they are children and when they return to school as adults?
In this book Luttrell portrays two distinct worlds
…show more content…
What I saw in this study is that there are several factors influenced women’s stories, and narrating their past childhood and their failure in school and returning to school shaped their stories and it serve different purposes, and defeated any negative judgment from the author. Luttrell in her study shows how cultural, social and economic status change the women’s life, and how those women now are fighting to be “somebody”. The role of the researcher is very important in this study. She was the teacher of those women. Also, she was build a trust relationship with them to encourage the women to speak. When I read the study, I notes that the author is using the term "storied selves". I really didn’t understand it at the beginning until I read more and more about the women’s stories. I understood that Luttrell in her study used this “storied selves” to talk about the process by which the women arrived at their senses of selfhood and social identities, how a story is told and how people define and defend their selves and identities promote each other. Finally, the study is an ethnography research. The author built her arguments based on her understanding of the women’s sense and tones when they tell their stories. In addition, she built her arguments according to her observation after the participated women in the study told their stories leaving the judgment to the

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