Luttrell also identified in her interviews intense emotion, including ambivalence and anger, as “the women’s experiences in school were subjectively tied to their mothers’ feelings and actions toward teachers” (Luttrell, 1997, 97). This maternal involvement took on three forms: the uninvolved, the school “back-ups,” and the antagonists, and each had its consequences for how women felt they were treated by teachers, and their overall academic success. Luttrell noted that even while narrating unique events and circumstances, the interviews were remarkably similar in that none of the women mentioned their fathers’ role as significant in their schooling experiences, and “in their descriptions of marginality, exclusion, or resistance at school, the women looked to their mothers for protection and comfort; and it was their mothers whom they tried not to blame for the schooling disappointments” (1997, p. 97). So connected to schooling is mothering work, that it is often difficult to tease them apart. Yet the research reviewed above suggests that teasing apart the mothering-schooling relationship is central to understanding strands of academic achievement and inequality, and this requires a feminist perspective that places gender at the centre of an analysis of school parental involvement policies.

While these studies illuminate the intersection between mothering and schooling as a dominant theme contextualizing the present research, it is also important to consider the ways in which institutional discourses of mothering and pedagogy may play out in the domestic sphere. Indeed, the divide between “public” and “private” is more ideal than reality, and the domestic sphere is an important, if poorly theorized, site, where the social relations that govern mothering discourses are played out. Walkerdine and Lucey’s (1989) Democracy in the Kitchen is a classic study that illustrates this point. Their deconstruction of a literacy study that normalizes middle-class mothers’ pedagogic strategies touched on themes close to the present research, and merits a detailed analysis.

Walkerdine is a critical psychologist and linguist based in the United Kingdom. Her research focuses on the construction of gender identities and the regulation of girls and women through scientific discourse, and in particular, pedagogical and psychological discourses. In Mastery of Reason (1988), she analyzed educational and psychological research that reproduced the construct of the “sensitive” mother and the “the nature of the child.” She argued that these contributed to the pathology attributed to working-class families, and the regulation of women and girls in schools and other social institutions. In Democracy in the Kitchen (1989), Walkerdine and Lucey drew on the concepts of “sensitive mothers” and regulation to conduct a feminist analysis of transcripts of a home-school language study carried out by Tizard and Hughes in 1984. They identified a number of dividing strategies that Tizard and Hughes used to normalize the ideal of middle-class domestic pedagogy, and distinguish it from the pedagogic practices of “working-class” mothers and daughters.