Working-Poor Mothers and Middle-Class Others: Psychosocial Considerations in Home-School Relations and Research

This article draws from a three-year ethnographic study of girls and their mothers in a high-poverty, predominantly white community. Informed by critical and feminist theories of social class, I present four cases that highlight psychosocial tensions within the mother-daughterteacher-researcher triangle and argue that white, middle-class female teachers and ethnographers need to be particularly reflexive when working with children across the social class divide.