I began my research study, Eastview School for Pregnant and Parenting Teens, today and the first question I was asked by LaTasha (a senior at Eastview) was, “Who are you?” And I answered in a clumsy way, saying that I was here because I was studying the school—a school for pregnant and parenting students. I told LaTasha that I wanted to learn about Eastview and its students. But, after I said that, I realized I hadn’t really answered her question. Fieldnotes, January 2005 The first page of my field notebook begins with the above statement. Looking back on this entry now, more than three years later, I am reminded of my ongoing quest to ethically represent the participants involved in my study at Eastview School for Pregnant and Parenting Teens (all names of people and places are pseudonyms). Throughout my study, students such as LaTasha asked me the question, “Who are you?” and over time I became more comfortable in asserting things about myself. Although my research at Eastview focused primarily on teaching and learning, a critical part of the study aimed to represent students at Eastview and how they perceived themselves as mothers, students, and adolescents. I, too, was interested in asking the question of “Who are you?” As I became more deeply involved in the study, questions of how to “best” represent students’ answers to this question became a dilemma I grappled with throughout the process of writing and representing Eastview and its students. The context of my inquiry During the academic years of 2004-2005 and 2005-2006, I studied the teaching and learning at Eastview School for Pregnant and Parenting Teens, a public school alternative program for teen mothers in the Midwest United States. Throughout my research, I worked to represent Eastview’s ability to provide a positive learning space for its students. Because scholars Dierdre Kelly (2000), Wendy Luttrell (2003), and Wanda Pillow (2004) have documented the ways in which the schooling for this population of students has been generally founded upon a “remedial” model of instruction, I aimed to illustrate how schools like Eastview assist students in presenting counter-narratives to the typical, dominant images U.S. society holds about the pregnant and parenting student. At the time of my study, Eastview, as a school, had been in existence in the Lakeville Public School Distirct for over twenty years, and had evolved over this period of time into a full-day middle/ high school academic program. When Eastview was founded in the mid-1970’s, it was considered a “supplementary” program for teen mothers and schooled just a handful of students. During the 2004-2006 years, Eastview enrolled up to fifty teen mothers, aged 12-19. during each quarter of the academic year. Throughout this essay, I aim to explore the ethical dimensions of representing pregnant and parenting students (and the students at Eastview, in particular) in educational research. Part of this inquiry calls for a dialogue with scholars who have recently written about pregnant and parenting teens (e.g., Luttrell, 2003; Pillow, 2004). By fostering such a dialogue, I hope to explore how these researchers have framed the methodological and ethical dilemmas of representing this group of students, thereby moving toward an ethical consideration of how “best” to represent this demographic of students in my own
Hallman
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research. Throughout this essay, I pose the following questions: • Does representing the pregnant/ parenting teen as a unit of analysis undermine researchers’ efforts to ethically highlight the stories of these teens? • In representing the stories of pregnant and parenting teens, are researchers aiding in the construction of some stories as “fit” and others as “unfit”? • In educational research, how are pregnant and parenting teens positioned both as “victims” and “free agents”?