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The research of Associate Professor Wendy Luttrell focuses on how gender, race, class, and sexual identities are formed and transformed as part of the schooling process. In her forthcoming book, Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Race, Gender, and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens, Luttrell teases apart the self-perceptions of pregnant teenagers and the misperceptions others hold about them, especially in relation to schooling. Luttrell is the 2002 winner of the Morningstar Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Q: How do race and class determine outsiders' attitudes about teen pregnancy? A: There is a long and changing history of public responses to female adolescent sexuality. The tenacious hold of racial stereotypes and the scapegoating of pregnant teenagers for social ills have characterized public response since the American colonial times, according to sociologist Kristin Luker. The education of pregnant teenagers has a complicated history as well, a history that too has been shaped by race and by socioeconomic class. Before Title IX (legislation which was designed to ensure gender equity in education), the majority of outsiders' attitudes toward pregnant teenagers did not allow them a place in regular school settings.
Since this legislation, data has revealed that girls use teen pregnancy programs differentially, with African-American and Latina girls having the highest rate of returning to school after becoming pregnant. Here, it becomes important to note that middle- and upper-class girls who get pregnant while in school and decide to have abortions are invisible in the dialogue about the "problem" of teenage pregnancy and schooling, as are the boys who become fathers while in school. The issue of teen pregnancy is framed in a way that places a disproportionate focus on poor girls and girls of color. Q: When comparing how pregnant teenagers see themselves with how teachers and other students see them, what differences have you seen? A: The pregnant girls with whom I worked were keenly aware of the stereotypes about them. They expressed feeling they needed to defend their sexual reputations, as well as feeling they were being judged in advance about being inadequate mothers. I asked them to fill in the following blank: "What others think they know about me is ______. What I know about myself is ______." I found that most girls believed they were viewed to be "irresponsible" and "unprepared" for motherhood. Yet, they claimed to take responsibility for their actions. Because so many of the girls had shouldered family responsibilities, they also felt they knew as much about how to care for their babies as many other women. One of the most frequent frustrations expressed by the girls in my study is that once it was known that they had become pregnant, their teachers and peers seemed to forget that they had any interests or concerns beyond their pregnancies and soon-to-be-born babies. They wanted to be treated in more balanced ways, for who they had been, for who they are now, and for who they are becoming. Q: What are some of the possible results of society's apparent incapacity to see pregnant teens as they see themselves?
A: Society is missing out on the passions, hopes, and creativity of many young women who get labeled and stigmatized. By not realizing that young women have much to learn about themselves and their social worlds, in part due to the experience of pregnancy, schools are not taking advantage of an opportune and generative moment. There is so much more to say about the larger, societal consequences of punishing girls for becoming young mothers. But this is part of a larger, social phenomenon with which we hand full responsibility for raising the next generation to individual—often single and working—women, and then blame them for not being able to accomplish this nearly impossible task on their own. Q: How might society begin to offer young people more opportunities to recreate themselves in their own image instead of relinquishing their self-definitions to others? A: First, young people need opportunities to not only critique media images about who they are (especially poor, urban, minority youth), but also to produce images which they believe are more representative of them. In my research, I designed "self representation" activities—activities in which the girls depicted themselves and their lives, and then were asked a series of questions about what they meant to convey with each representation. These activities, following my initial interviews and fill-in-the-blank questions, extracted many new insights about how the girls thought they were being seen. I think we need to be doing more of this kind of creative, imaginative, and playful work with youth, both in and out of school settings. Q: You recently received HGSE's Morningstar Award for Excellence in Teaching. Could you offer some guiding principles that you use in the classroom? A: Winning the Morningstar Award is an incredible individual honor, but I feel that teaching and advising is not something that anyone can do alone. Good teaching and advising has to be supported by the educational context within which one works, and by one's colleagues, which I am fortunate to have at HGSE. Good teaching is about relationship- and community-building, which relies heavily on student willingness to act as eager partners. I thank my students for their energy and participation. If I had to single out a guiding principle, it would be that learning, teaching, and research are all based on nurturing relationships that require mutual respect and interest—interest that is guided by curiosity, and not by judgment, on both the teachers' and the students' part. Schools do not always give priority to curiosity, but I believe it is the foundation of learning. For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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