Non-SNAF Families, Mothering Work and Schooling in Ontario: Two Decades of Keeping the Institution in View


Rashmee Karnad-Jani, Public Scholar

Although parental engagement is largely held up as a gender neutral one, scholars in the field argue that the relationship between schools and families is actually one between schools and women. This paper explicates how gendered labour done in families is the invisibilized work of women that Griffith and Smith (2005) called Mothering Work. This paper also examines the experiences of mothers whose embodied labour lies outside the Standard North American Family (SNAF) explicated by Smith (1987, 1993) and the ways in which educational experiences are different from those promised in institutional texts for some families. The paper takes up Smith’s framework of The Small Hero into whose life the ruling relations of Ontario’s K-8 educational system enter and invites active participation from researchers and K-8 educators to engage with the Blended Standpoint by examining how non-SNAF families experience schooling alongside their children.

This paper will be presented at the following session: