ABSTRACT
Embodied Beginnings The field notes from my qualitative research experiences in teen pregnancy classrooms in the mid-1990s are filled with stories similar to the one above. Looking over the worn and stain-ridden pages of my journal (memories of those veggie burritos I ate while writing my thoughts punctuated by notes made by my children), I reread incidences that describe how pregnant/mothering teens did not “fit” literally and figuratively into educational research, theories, policies, and practices.1 It seemed obvious to me at the time that teen mother’s bodies were key to how they fit and do not fit into schools.2 However, at that point, I was most interested in and attached to telling the educational stories of pregnant/mothering teens from their point of view, through their voices. I offered the girls’ stories to counter the prevalent stories about teen mothers constructed by “official” policy talk and policy discourse. I worked to show that many of the issues facing teen
mothers are the same ones faced by single parenting mothers and by lowincome single mothers, placing teen pregnancy within the larger constructs of motherhood and single parenting, and differentiating social expectations and definitions of such mothers based upon race.
