Learning to Become Good Mothers: Immigrant Mothers as Adult Learners

Abstract

Immigrant mothers, who are socially constructed as an isolated group of people, are often excluded from the studies of adult learners. In adult education, few studies focus on immigrant mothers’ ways of learning, mothering, and knowing. Based on a critical ethnographical study, this article sheds lights on immigrant mothers’ learning in a foreign land. It unveils how immigrant mothers learn mothering skills and how their lifelong learning practice interacts with the ideology of mothering in contemporary neoliberal contexts. The data come from a 2-year critical ethnographic study that included 30 in-depth interviews with Chinese immigrant mothers in a Vancouver-based immigration settlement organization in Canada. The following five types of immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning practices are examined and analyzed: (a) learning parenting skills, (b) learning to find a job, (c) learning language, (d) learning to drive, and (e) learning to live a healthy lifestyle. This article argues that immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning practice constitutes a mechanism, one in which the ideology of mothering and immigrant mothers’ everyday learning and mothering deeply interact to reproduce race, gender, and class relations. This article concludes that there is a need to study immigrant mothers, as adult learners, and to reexamine knowledge systems, ideologies, and people’s different ways of knowing and learning in adult education.

Keywords

adult learners immigrant mothers Chinese immigrants lifelong learning motherhood learning

Introduction

Studies in adult education have focused on women’s ways of learning for a long time (Hayes & Flannery, 2000; Shan, 2015). Adult education scholars (e.g., Hayes & Flannery, 2000) in the area have discussed the gendered aspects in women’s learning. They find that gendered knowledge systems and gender relations differ by society, culture, and ethnic groups and may produce different knowledge systems between men and women (Hayes & Flannery, 2000, p. 5). Taking into account women’s learning in adult education studies, the researchers argue that women’s learning must be reunderstood, valued, and recognized within a broader social context that should encompass the social determinants of gender roles and norms and overcome the limitations that continue to be (re)produced in women’s learning. However, immigrant mothers’ ways of learning, mothering, and knowing have been overlooked. It is essential to investigate immigrant mothers’ ways of learning, mothering, and knowing because it provides adult educators and scholars a different standpoint for reconstructing adult and lifelong learning theories and practice.

Over the past few decades, an increasing number of mothers have chosen to migrate to North America. For example, in Canada, there were 3,544,400 female immigrants in Canada, representing 21.2% of the country’s total female population (Hudon, 2015, p. 3). Among these female immigrants, 38.1% of those aged 15 years and older were in couples with children (Hudon, 2015, p. 37). These women were admitted mainly through economic, family reunion, and refugee class immigration. Among female immigrants, the most frequently reported birth country was the People’s Republic of China (8.4%; Hudon, 2015, p. 8). Learning becomes key in immigrant mothers’ settlement and mothering experience. In their new country of settlement, not only do they reconstruct their identities and seek social support in the host society, but they also start to learn the language, and acquire employment and mothering skills. After these immigrant mothers first land in Canada, many participate in mothering/parenting educational programs organized by various settlement organizations. This study focuses on Chinese immigrant mothers who immigrated to Canada between 2002 and 2016 and explores how immigrant mothers learn to become good mothers in another land and how their lifelong learning practice interacts with the ideology of mothering in a contemporary neoliberal context.

Previous studies on women as adult learners have focused on women’s identity and self-esteem in learning (Flannery, 2000), the gendered role in women’s learning (Shan, 2015; Stromquist, 2015), women’s workplace learning, skills, and labor power (Sangha et al., 2012; Shan, 2009), feminist influences and pedagogy on women’s learning (Merrill, 2005; Tisdell, 2000), and women’s transformative learning and social justice (Brooks, 2000; English & Peters, 2012). Recently, literature on (im)migrant women in adult education has focused on highly skilled immigrant women and explores their learning and negotiation between work and family (Meares, 2010), learning of language, culture and literacy (Sadeghi, 2008), and the devaluation of their skills and knowledge (Shan, 2009). The construction of immigrant women, which usually focuses on their work, skills, learning, and knowledge, does not differentiate between different kinds of immigrant women. It seems that all immigrant women as a group share similar experiences, skills, and knowledge. However, immigrant mothers may have different experiences from immigrant women with professional skills, who are highly educated or have a job, and have been studied. Immigrant mothers’ experience and knowledge have been devalued, overlooked, and even ignored. Quite often, they are constructed as having “low skills” or “no skills.” There is a paucity of studies in adult education on how immigrant mothers learn, how they integrate into local society, navigate different ways of learning, and participate in a globalized and multicultural society.

This article aims to examine how immigrant mothers from developing countries undertake lifelong learning in order to fit into the construct of good mothers in developed multicultural societies, such as Canada. This article uses Chinese immigrant mothers as an example to investigate how immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning has been socially organized in association with the reproduction of race, gender, and class relations. Although the study sample represents a small privileged subset of the overall Chinese community in Vancouver, this article acknowledges that there is a larger segment of im(migrant) mothers whose experience may be different, but crucial to consider. Two research questions have been explored.

Research Question 1: How do immigrant mothers from developing countries learn in developed countries such as Canada?

Research Question 2: How does immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning interact with the ideology of mothering?

The data originated from a 2-year (2015–2017) critical ethnographic study undertaken in a Vancouver-based immigration settlement organization in Canada, where in-depth ethnographic interviews were conducted with 30 Chinese immigrant mothers. This article argues that immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning practice constitutes a mechanism, one in which the reproduction of race, gender, and class relations associated with the ideology of mothering deeply interact with immigrant mothers ways of knowing, learning, and mothering. This article concludes that there is a need to study immigrant mothers, as adult learners, and to reexamine knowledge systems, ideologies, and people’s different ways of knowing and learning.

Immigrant Mothers Matter

With changing social conditions such as globalization and neoliberalization, there is tremendous growth in the number of immigrant mothers participating in different formal and informal educational programs and lifelong learning activities. In these activities, immigrant mothers need to learn to be self-supported and to become an ideal immigrant mother. Ideal immigrant motherhood, as a type of ideology, requires immigrant mothers to not only be self-sufficient and hardworking but also engaged in “child-centered,” “expert-guided,” and “financially expensive” mothering practices (Vandenbeld Giles, 2014, p. 160).

Neoliberalism refers to a historical period that could be understood as involving a “class-based ideology of markets, privatization, efficiency, and flexibility” (McLaren & Dyck, 2004, p. 46). The neoliberalism involves two layers—the practical layer and the ideological layer. From the practical layer, under neoliberalization, the state has downloaded its responsibility to its local agencies. It requires individuals and agencies to take responsibility for learning and self-support. From the ideological layer, the neoliberalization also impacts on various ideologies, such as mothering, which emphasize individuals to shift their mind and identities to be self-sufficient in local society. Under the context of neoliberalization, it is critical to examine how immigrant mothers, as adult learners, learn to become good mothers, and at the same time, how they are marginalized; thereby reproducing the unequal social and power relations behind their learning activities. Immigrant mothers’ ways of learning, knowing, and mothering provides a different standpoint for us to rethink the knowledge and learning system, ideology, and individuals’ transnational, fluid, and complicated learning practice.

Scholars in adult education (Harding, 1996) have posited the impact that gender as a system of social relations has on knowledge and learning. Since the 1970s, there has been a feminist turn in scholarship that has increased attention to gender issues in adult education, thereby reorienting the development of adult learning theories, such as self-directed learning, workplace learning, and lifelong learning (Shan, 2015). There have also been an increasing number of studies on immigrant women, providing more spaces for discussing women, gender, and immigrants in adult education, for instance, as in exploring migrant women’s work, life, and work-related and life-related learning (Shan, 2015). However, gender alone is not the only critical lens to be adopted in reexamining knowledge and learning. By taking immigrant mothers’ experience, we may see that race, gender, and class relations, as well as the ideology of mothering and the politics of differences are embedded in immigrant mothers’ learning activities.

Although studies on immigrant mothers’ learning, settlement, and other experiences are still lacking, some researchers have started to look at how the social construction of motherhood is perceived by female migrants and how they negotiate the mothering style and make parenting decisions between their home countries and host countries (Holmes & Mangione, 2011; Vesely et al., 2019). Researchers have also examined how immigrant mothers explore multiple meanings of motherhood through migrant women’s transnational experiences and divergent conceptualizations of motherhood (Crawford, 2011; O’Reilly, 2010). However, few studies explore (im)migrant mothers’ lifelong learning and connect the abstraction and conceptualization of motherhood to its material conditions and to the immigrant mothers’ everyday experience.

The “knowledge” of mothering represents multiple meanings. The knowledge for immigrant mothers to learn in their settlement practice is constructed as expert, modern, civilized, scientific, and Westernized knowledge. In contrast, immigrant mothers’ own knowledge of mothering is socially constructed as traditional, indigenous, uncivilized, and unscientific. Immigrant mothers’ knowledge production and mothering practice are constructed as uncivilized, problematic, and different. It is worth noting that the good/bad mother binary also serves as an ideology to control the activities of mothers who are expected to meet the dominant standard of motherhood. The binary is a conceptual tool for dividing relative social phenomena thematically into polarized or oppositional categories (Gustafson, 2005, p. 25). “Good mothers” are constructed as mothers who put their children’s needs before their own, while the “bad mothers” construct is indicative of what Gustafson calls “unbecoming motherhood” for those mothers who decide or are forced to live apart from their children (Gustafson, 2005, p. 12). Crawford (2011) has further criticized this binary by noting that it does not allow mothers to experience mothering in multiple ways. Manohar and Busse-Cardenas (2011) expand the discussion of the good/bad mother binary into different contexts, especially that of international migration. They use the example of the ideology of motherhood in Tamil and Peruvian cultures to understand culturally specific motherhood ideologies, which have been excluded from the standard model of mothering.

The good/bad mothering model, as an ideology of mothering, shapes the experience of mothers in general, and also deeply affects immigrant mothers’ settlement, learning, and everyday practice. The dichotomization of mothering between modern and traditional, civilized and uncivilized, Western and Eastern, and good and bad are all closely related to how mothering as an ideology is practiced throughout immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning activities. Examining immigrant mothers’ ways of learning, knowing, and mothering could contribute to problematizing existing binaries in the knowledge system, which would help people understand knowledge from the other, the oppressed, and the marginalized.

Motherhood learning, as part of a lifelong learning project, has been increasingly promoted in many countries with developed economies, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States. The state plays an important role in organizing immigrant mothers’ learning. The state’s policies and regulations, social services, welfare system, privatization of public-owned resources, and participation in global free trade not only affect immigrant mothers’ learning and practice of mothering but also shape the racialized, gendered, and patriarchal notion of mothering. Recently, the state in many developed countries has shifted its focus from nation-building to helping newcomers quickly integrate into the local market for the purpose of economic development. Settlement services in Canada are seen as part of the nation’s economic development project, helping newcomers acquire a second language, learn mothering and employment skills, and build certain networks in order to integrate into the local society and labor market. The Canadian government, existing at multilevels, combines with various agencies to provide a series of parenting programs for immigrant mothers, such as Toronto’s Parent Support Programme and Vancouver’s Newcomer’s Center for Child and Family (Zhu, 2016). In the process of inculcating immigrant mothers, local government-funded settlement agencies are not just integrating immigrants into a unified national identity, but rather using immigrant mothers to strengthen the nation’s population and economy. The agencies reproduce a national ideology of mothering that excludes immigrant mothers’ knowledge, culture, identities, and practices of mothering from the nation’s beliefs, values, and identities. As a result, the state, settlement organizations, different agencies, and immigrant mothers all participate in organizing motherhood learning.

Methodology and Data Collection

Research was undertaken as a 2-year (2015–2017) critical ethnographic study in an immigration settlement organization in Vancouver. Critical ethnography refers to the use of anthropological, qualitative, participatory, and observational methodology (Masemann, 1982). It differs from traditional ethnography by emphasizing the social conditions of people’s daily life as the foundation for inquiry, enabling the examination of institutions, regimes of knowledge, and social practices that limit choices, constrain meaning, and denigrate identities and communities (Madison, 2005). It provided a critical perspective that looks beyond simple examination of how Chinese immigrant mothers learn, to a deeper problematization of immigrant mothers’ learning, mothering, and identity construction, particularly as they involved power and social relations.

Data Collection

Fieldwork was conducted in a Vancouver-based immigration settlement organization, which provides children and family programs for immigrants and refugees, such as English as a Second Language courses and parenting workshops. Study participants were recruited from the mothering and parenting programs. Thirty semistructured interviews were conducted with Chinese immigrant mothers (Table 1), with one to three children and who had immigrated to Canada from 2002 onward. Participants immigrated under the family reunion, skilled worker, business, and provincial nominee classes. After landing in Canada, many participated in mothering/parenting educational programs organized by Vancouver-based settlement organizations. They all spoke Chinese, specifically Mandarin and Cantonese. In the interviews, participants discussed their settlement, learning, and mothering experience—in particular, how they learned to become what they understood to be as “good mothers” in Canada. Interviews lasted 60 to 90 minutes and were conducted in Mandarin or Cantonese, transcribed in Chinese, then translated into English. There might be minor differences between the original statement in Chinese and the quoted English translation.

Table 1.

Participant Information: 30 Chinese Immigrant Mothers.

No.	Immigration category	Year of landing in Canada	Education	Employment status in Canada	Number of kid(s) and age
1	Family reunion	2014	College	Unemployed	1 (10 Years)
2	Business immigration	2007	Bachelor	Unemployed	2 (20 Years, 5 years)
3	Provincial nominees	2010	College	Part-time work	1 (11 Years)
4	Skilled worker	2015	Bachelor	Unemployed	Pregnant
5	Business immigration	2012	Bachelor	Self-employed	1 (17 Years)
6	Skilled worker	2014	Bachelor	Employed	1(10 Years)
7	Skilled worker	2009	Master	Self-employed	2 (10 Years, 6 years)
8	Skilled worker	2008	Bachelor	Employed	2 (12 years, 4 years)
9	Skilled worker	2007	Bachelor	Employed	2 (8 Years, 4 years)
10	Skilled worker	2011	Master	Self-employed	1 (10 Years)
11	Skilled worker	2010	Bachelor	Unemployed	2 (5 Years, 2 years)
12	Skilled worker	2002	Master	Unemployed	2(4 Years, 1 years)
13	Skilled worker	2011	Bachelor	Self-employed	2 (6 Years, 4 years)
14	Skilled worker	2011	PhD	Student	1 (6 Years)
15	Family reunion	2011	Bachelor	Unemployed	1 (3 Years)
16	Family reunion	2008	Bachelor	Employed	2 (8 Years, 5 years)
17	Business immigration	2009	Bachelor	Unemployed	2 (14 Years, 6 years)
18	Skilled worker	2011	PhD	Student	1 (6 Years) and pregnant
19	Business immigration	2008	Bachelor	Self-employed	2 (19 Years, 16 years)
20	Family reunion	2007	College	Unemployed	1 (7 Years)
21	Business immigration	2011	Bachelor	Unemployed	2 (24 Years, 4 years)
22	Skilled worker	2008	Bachelor	Self-employed	2 (6 Years, 2 months)
23	Visitor visa	2015	Bachelor	Unemployed	1 (16 Years)
24	Family reunion	2009	Bachelor	Unemployed	1 (2 Years)
25	Skilled worker	2006	Bachelor	Unemployed	3 (26 Years, 24 Years, 16 years)
26	Skilled worker	2014	Bachelor	Unemployed	2 (11 Years, 8 years)
27	Family reunion	2006	Bachelor	Self-employed	1 (6 Years)
28	Family reunion	2012	Bachelor	Unemployed	1 (4 Years)
29	Skilled worker	2014	Bachelor	Unemployed	1 (17 Years)
30	Business immigration	2011	Bachelor	Unemployed	2 (17 Years, 5 years)

Positionality: Myself, as an Immigrant Mother in Canada

I am a Chinese immigrant mother and adult education researcher. I participated in an immigration settlement program in 2011 and found my previous ideas of mothering, learned in China, were treated as different, incorrect, and uncivilized. There were unequal social and power relations throughout my learning practice as an immigrant mother. As both an insider (the participant) and outsider (a researcher), I started to think about how mothering as an ideology is socially produced. How is migrant mothers’ learning socially organized by different actors? How can we challenge the dominant ideology, knowledge system, and institutions by taking an immigrant mother’s standpoint? These questions helped me position myself, as both a researcher and as a participant standing in solidarity with immigrant mothers.

Being bilingual and bicultural shapes my perspectives on collecting and analyzing data. I have faced challenges in different cultures and languages; therefore, I dedicated a great deal of time to translating the interview data from Chinese to English. Importantly, although the translations were time consuming and may have some inconsistencies from the original language, using participants’ own language to conduct interviews helps build mutual trust. The participants discussed more and felt very comfortable sharing their experience and personal stories.

Limitations

Immigrant mothers are not a monolithic group of people, but rather individuals with hybrid and diverse identities and experiences; therefore, this study may have limitations in discussing the full range of immigrant mothers’ experiences. One limitation may be inclusiveness. Immigrant mothers come from other countries and regions, such as East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Even Chinese immigrant mothers are from different regions of China. Therefore, this sample does not represent Chinese immigrant mothers overall. Different cultural backgrounds and race, gender, and class identities may interact with immigrant mothers’ settlement and learning in various ways. Moreover, as stated, many immigrant mothers have been treated as having “lower” or “no” skills. However, these participants received higher education or, at a minimum, have a college degree. There are insufficient samples representing immigrant mothers without degrees or with lower levels of education, literacy, and language capability.

Data Analysis and Research Findings

I developed a coding table with categories including the following: settlement, family relations, language learning, household work, employment, volunteering, leisure, housing, parenting, children’s education, race, gender and class issues, environment, and safety. Data were analyzed using Nvivo software. While exploring Chinese immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning, five major aspects emerged and were identified: (a) learning parenting skills, (b) learning to find a job, (c) learning language, (d) learning to drive, and (e) learning to live a healthy lifestyle.

Learning to Parent

Data showed that a variety of immigrant mothers were anxious about their mothering/parenting practice and wanted to learn more strategies. All 30 mothers actively participated in the parenting programs provided by the settlement organizations and attended the parenting program every Friday afternoon. Based on the interview data, most Chinese immigrant mothers did not believe they were good mothers. After taking several workshops provided by social workers, the Chinese immigrant mothers felt that they were too strict with their children and easily got angry at their children’s behavior, and consequently felt they were not good mothers.

Rebecca, a Chinese immigrant mother with a 6-year-old son, found that it was challenging to control her emotions while parenting. She indicated her son always made her angry:

My son was only a 6-year-old. Sometimes he made me very, very angry. For example, in the morning, as he was having breakfast he was thinking of other things and could not focus on his eating. I asked him to finish quickly. He said, “You are not my boss!” I felt so angry. I did not know what to do with him.

She told me that she was eager to learn scientific parenting skills in order to better parent her children. Another immigrant mother, Miranda illustrated her experience of parenting her daughter. She mentioned that she took the settlement programs for learning parenting skills because she wanted to learn how to become a good mother. She said,

In childrearing, I found that there are different ways of treating your children when they make mistakes. . . . For example, in Chinese culture, if our child made a mistake, we would scold our child. When I took the parenting course, I found that in Canadian culture, there is more respect. My teacher told me that “if you felt yourself get really angry, you’d better leave.” As a Chinese parent, I found it was really difficult for me to do. Sometimes, we did not really care about our children’s feelings. But here, they really focus on the feelings of our children, and they usually do not want you to pass your negative emotion to your children.

The Chinese immigrant mothers above found that it was very difficult to keep calm while their children did something wrong. While addressing the construct of mothering, we saw that good mothering practice was imagined as showing respect for one’s children. As a result, the immigrant mothers found emotional control was a major issue for them to learn. In fact, there are unequal power relations behind the construction of mothering. For example, knowledge belonging to China and Canada, respectively, is socially constructed. The Canadian knowledge of parenting/mothering (e.g., controlling emotions and being respectful) that these mothers need to obtain, is constructed as good, scientific, advanced, civilized, and professional, whereas their traditional practice of mothering, such as scolding their children, is constructed as bad, unprofessional, uncivilized knowledge and practice. When immigrant mothers try to acquire Canadian knowledge of motherhood in order to fulfil the requirements of being a good Canadian mother, they learn to use scientific knowledge of mothering/parenting in order to integrate into local society.

Learning to Find a Job

A common goal for immigrant mothers when they seek employment is to survive and integrate into local society. In addition, an alternative goal for immigrant mothers’ employment is to become a role model for their children. Different migrant mothers with different class-based and/or race-based experience might have different reasons in terms of finding jobs. The sample only represents a small number amount of Chinese immigrant mothers’ experiences. For example, Wendy is an immigrant mother who came to Vancouver in 2014. She qualified under the skilled worker class. In the interview, she talked about why she looked for work in Vancouver and about her goal of finding a job:

Here, I had more time to take care of my daughter. If I couldn’t get a job, I thought myself as being isolated from society. That is why we need to work. I thought finding a job was a learning process. As a parent, we need to work and keep learning all the time.

Being employed becomes an ideology that shapes immigrant mothers’ mothering, learning, and relationship with their children. Wendy found that as an immigrant mother, she was constructed as “out of date” or “useless” if she could not get a job. As a mother, Wendy took her daughter’s opinion as a priority, and this awareness guided her to keep learning and looking for jobs. She and her daughter believed that being unemployed meant that such women were “isolated” from local society. The image of an unemployed mother is crucial to understanding why immigrant mothers were eager to find jobs and integrate into the local labor market. Getting a job meant that their skills, knowledge, and experience were recognized and valued. As mothers, being employed could also make them good role models or successful immigrants to influence their children. Therefore, the purpose of finding employment for immigrant mothers was not merely to survive, but also to prove that they were “successful immigrant mothers,” and could fit into the ideology of becoming a self-supporting employed mother.

In addition, work–life balance was a major issue that every immigrant mother faced. Having a good work–life balance shaped the immigrant mothers’ identities; if they could not find a job, they saw themselves as “failed mothers.” There was a separation between how these mothers’ imagined being a work–life balanced mother, and the opposite reality. At the same time, the participants stated that it was impossible for them to find a job until such time as they needed to take care of their children as a full-time job. Gina was a new immigrant under the family reunion class. She lived with her husband’s parents. She mentioned her experience of being unemployed:

At first, my parents-in-law thought I was lazy, since I was not going out to find a job. They always said that I only took the governments’ Child Tax Benefit as my income. But you know . . . as I said, when I first came as a new immigrant, it was really not that easy to find a job here. I did not have any friends here. I did not even know how to get any information [on employment] and get a job. Then I had a young child at home, I had to stay at home and take care of him.

The devaluation and unrecognized value of immigrant mothers also needs to be understood within the patriarchal, capitalist, and neoliberal social system. Immigrant mothers are categorized as women with poor employment skills who cannot find local jobs. Not only have their previous skills and knowledge been devalued but also their labor power at home and the practice of mothering have been ignored. The categorizing process is not one that has simply a one-way impact on immigrant mothers. Instead, it contradicts both the state’s ideological practice and immigrant mothers’ practice. At the ideological level, the state emphasizes the image of an “ideal immigrant woman,” who can take good care of her children as well as find a good job in local society. Government agencies organize immigrants’ learning with the purpose of helping them become ideal immigrant women. At the practical level, unequal gender relations at home may require immigrant mothers to spend more time on child care and household work. The systematic devaluation of their previous skills, knowledge, and experience has denied them the opportunity to become ideal immigrant women, as the state emphasizes. Therefore, the devaluation process could be seen as a practice under patriarchal, capitalist, and neoliberal ideology.

Learning Language

Language is one of the major difficulties for these Chinese immigrant mothers. Over 60% of my interviewees talked about language problems and addressed their language learning experience. Sue talked about the purpose of language learning as a way for her to engage with the local community. She told me:

I really wanted to participate in local community activities. I took part in some of the events held by the community. However, most of the time, the local people were all English-speaking. I could not communicate with them freely in order to build a closer relationship. Maybe my time in Canada was too short, or maybe my English language skills were really poor. I could not become a member of the community.

The immigrant mothers found their lack of language skills prevented their children from learning in school, and as a result, the mothers felt uncomfortable. They believed that they could not become good mothers and support their children in school. Coco talked about the language problem, stating how it made it difficult for her to be involved in her son’s schooling. She said the following:

I lost my confidence to speak English. I was too ashamed to speak English. If I did not speak with them, I could not make any progress in my language skills. For example, in my son’s school, I could not communicate with his teachers and other parents.

Language learning, closely related to learners’ identity construction, plays an important role in immigrants’ integration for settlement (Norton, 2000). Language contains social relations that distinguish newcomers from the local community. Language learning relates to immigrant mothers’ confidence, settlement practice, and employment, and furthermore, it also interacts with their mothering practice. These mothers believe that being a good immigrant mother means having good language skills. The mothers learn language skills through various approaches. Some mothers learned the language through the settlement organization’s English as a Second Language class, while some learned through a self-directed approach. The learning process not only enabled them to become “good mothers” in the host country but also shaped their identity of being a member of the local society. Language learning is closely related to becoming a member of the society (Holland, 1998). It is also a social practice, particularly for immigrant mothers, which connects their identity construction and a sense of belonging to the local community and society. Norton (2000) illustrates that when language learners speak, they not only exchange information with the target language speakers but also constantly organize and reorganize a sense of who they are and how they relate to the social world. Through the practice of learning language, most of these mothers felt that they were hardly accepted by or included in the local community. More specifically, they failed to access social networks, including making friends or communicating with school teachers. As a result, the mothers believed they were isolated from the local society and would not be able to mother their children well.

Learning to Drive

Immigrant mothers were frequently constructed as the person who stayed at home and did not know how to drive. As a consequence of such ideas, almost half of the Chinese newcomer women did not drive and did not even want to learn. There were different reasons for not learning to drive. As stated, different (im)migrant mothers might have different reasons for learning. Learning to drive is another example that related to individuals’ social class status. The sample only represents a small number of Chinese immigrant mothers. A larger number of (im)migrant mothers might have different reasons for (not) learning to drive.

Some mothers thought that their living environment was very convenient, and they could easily travel by bus. For example, Patricia said that she lived close to the places she needed to access, and therefore did not need to learn to drive. Another mother, Karen, was concerned about the expense, saying that she did not learn to drive because driving required a lot of money. Some mothers said that they spent most of the time at home. Coco said the following:

When I first came here, I did not have any friends. My husband went to work every day. I was afraid that I might get lost. So I chose to stay at home.

However, half of them wanted to learn to drive. Sandra, explained her reason for learning to drive:

I learned driving for my son. I didn’t know how to drive when I was in China. Because everything was very close to my home. After I came here, I found that our house was very far away from the shopping malls and my son’s daycare. . . . I really wanted to learn driving, because I thought it was an important skill for taking care of my child. . . . After I got my driver’s license, I always drove my son to the parks, gyms, swimming pool, playgrounds, and science museums. I was so happy that I could take him to so many different places.

Some Chinese immigrants had already driven in China for many years. After they came here, they needed to relearn their driving skills. Fang said the following:

I drove for so many years in China, but I still need to relearn the skills in order to pass the exam. We had a very different culture in terms of driving, and as a result, I was treated as a bad driver here.

While they settled in Canada, most of the mothers were treated as bad drivers or rule-breakers, even though they had driven for many years in China. Driving has been constructed as a way to leave home to go to another place, which means you have the freedom and ability to move. Immigrant mothers are thought of as those who stay at home and are not able to go anywhere. In this sense, driving is not seen to be suitable for immigrant mothers. However, many people, including immigrant mothers, believe that driving could help them better mother their children. They could take them to schools and other places for learning. They could also become independent; for example, they could go shopping, go to work, and meet friends. Driving becomes an experience replete with contradictions for immigrant mothers. On one hand, they really need to learn driving to assist their children, and for their own mobility and independence. On the other hand, they face various types of bias, assumptions of stereotypes, and even violence against their driving practices, thus increasing the difficulties they face learning to drive.

Learning to Live a Healthy Lifestyle

A variety of data showed that immigrant mothers learn to be healthy in their settlement and mothering practice. While enjoying the healthy food and clean air in Canada, most of the mothers started to focus on learning about a healthy lifestyle and trying to be healthy for both themselves and their children. Almost 90% of immigrant mothers agreed that clean air and healthy food were among the major reasons they immigrated to Canada. Among them, 50% of the mothers chose to settle in Vancouver because of the warm weather and good living environment. As a result, they learned the culture of being healthy in Canada. They were eager to learn to be healthy. They changed their lifestyle through (re)learning how to prepare healthy food, how to do more sports, and how to take their children outside and enjoy an outdoor life.

Susan talked about the challenge of preparing food and providing nutrition to her son. She said the following:

My son’s daycare had a lot of rules. There were many types of food that you were not supposed to pack. For example, nuts. Once I prepared a lunch with nuts. I was told that children were not allowed to take nuts to school as these could cause a lot of problems. Sometimes, the daycare had specific requirements for special events. They required us to send a salad. I had to learn to prepare a salad for him. Most of the time, I was concerned about both his nutrition and what kind of food he would eat. Sometimes, I prepared Western food for him because I found it was healthier.

In addition to learning to cook, some mothers mentioned that they liked to do sports in their leisure time. Coco enjoyed swimming and playing tennis during the weekend with her sons. She even hired a tennis coach for herself and her sons. They really enjoyed this sport. She found that through learning tennis, she and her sons had more connections than before.

These mothers believed that after coming to Canada, they started to change their lifestyle and became healthier than before. The learning practice in parenting, driving, and lifestyle became a pathway for these newcomers to become good mothers in Canada. My research indicates that Western-style parenting and a healthy lifestyle involve messages of class and race. While they prepare salad or play tennis, the mothers are considered to be practicing Western-style and higher classed activities. Thus, they are constructed to be good mothers because they are providing healthier and better lives for their children. The myriad healthy daily activities involving race, gender, and class relations greatly shaped immigrant mothers’ identity construction as immigrant mothers. These discursive constructs of the healthy and/or unhealthy lifestyles deeply impact on the learning experience of immigrant mothers that were framed through learning mothering knowledge from White middle-class mothers.

Discussion

Immigrant mothers play significant roles in adult learning. Studying their learning experience enriches the understanding of different types of adult learners and challenges the mothering ideology and our existing knowledge and learning system. Based on the 30 in-depth interviews with Chinese immigrant mothers in a Vancouver-based immigration settlement organization, this article argues that immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning practice constitutes a mechanism, one in which the ideology of mothering and immigrant mothers’ everyday learning and mothering deeply interact to reproduce race, gender, and class relations. Here, three major aspects emerge from this study.

The first aspect must be highlighted. Ideology plays an important role in immigrant mothers’ learning. Taking ideology as a method of inquiry to explore the dialectics of mothering ideology among immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning helps close this separation. Feminist scholars took the concept of ideology and developed it as a method of inquiry to understand people’s everyday world (Bannerji, 2015; Smith, 2005). Ideology as a critical approach particularly helps studies on adult learning. Brookfield (2005) connected the ideology to adult learning. He believes that by adopting an ideological approach, the focus of adult education research is on how people deliberately learn to accept hegemonic ideas, thereby ensuring their servitude. He addressed four major ideological elements that interact with adults’ learning practices, including self-direction, resistance to mental work, a rejection of language, and the acceptance of injustice as part of the natural order of things. Using dialectical thinking is the key to exploring the relationship between ideology and adult learning. Mothering, as knowledge, ideology, and practice, is socially constructed and has been imagined with unequal power relations between authentic and barbarian practices, good and bad practices, and Western and Eastern practices. For example, the social, cultural, and political construction of good mothers in a Canadian context forces immigrant mothers to learn mothering, which was constructed as advanced, Western, and scientific mothering knowledge. This is borne out by the fact that immigrant mothers who learn to parent their children based on Western and scientific approaches are considered to be good mothers. Using ideology as an analytical tool, this study addresses the separations between the abstraction of mothering and immigrant mothers’ actual lifelong learning activities.

In addition, gender, class, and race relations are embedded in immigrant mothers’ settlement, mothering, and learning practice, which enhance our understanding on the politics of differences behind immigrant mothers’ knowledge. Mothering, as a gendered and racialized ideology, is practiced and reproduced by these immigrant mothers throughout their everyday experience. For example, Chinese immigrant mothers must find local jobs in order to become good mothers, but simultaneously, the devaluation of their skills renders them unsuccessful. Additionally, class reproduction excludes immigrant mothers from the social welfare system. Furthermore, immigrant mothers learn to prepare Western-style food or undertake elite sports in order to maintain good mothering practices. Investigating immigrant mothers’ learning and knowledge production through unpacking unequal race, gender, and class relations help reorient our knowledge system, which controls the everyday practice of individuals, particularly women of color and/or immigrants. There are politics of difference underneath immigrant mothers’ knowledge, learning, mothering, and everyday activities. The notion of “difference” has to be understood as processes of social conflict and products of a capitalist society (Bakan, 2008). Within these processes, human actors reproduce social relations within a mode of capitalist totality. Investigating the differentiation of immigrant mothers’ knowledge production, mothering practice, and everyday activities is important because it is vital to view immigrant mothers’ learning process within unequal power relations.

The final aspect is immigrant mothers’ ways of learning. According to the data, Chinese immigrant mothers practice lifelong learning in formal and informal ways. For formal learning, they participated in parenting and/or motherhood learning programs at the government-funded or community-based organizations. In these programs, they not only learn how to become good mothers but also build social networks with other immigrant mothers. For informal learning, immigrant mothers learn parenting skills, culture, and language in their everyday activities. Although most (im)migrants practice learning language and culture, immigrant mothers’ learning practice contains the goal of becoming a “good” mother. For example, Coco talked about learning language by communicating with her child’s schoolteachers. This goal motivates these mothers to learn and quickly integrate into local society. Another informal learning activity includes learning at home. They learn to cook “healthy” food and to play elite sports, such as tennis, which contain a Western-centric construct of “healthy.” In addition, immigrant mothers’ ways of learning in their host countries are different from those in their home country. Their learning activities are socially organized based on different governments’ rules and regulations. For example, in Canada, they not only learn independently but also go to settlement organizations to learn parenting and other skills because they want to quickly integrate into local society; whereas in their home country, they may not have an integration goal and may only practice informal learning to become “good mothers.”

Conclusion

This article provides a comprehensive picture of Chinese immigrant mothers’ experience and lifelong learning. It determines Chinese immigrant mothers experienced cultural barriers, social exclusion, and social discriminations, while also exploring Chinese immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning experience, knowledge production, and ways of knowing. Examining adult learners’ diverse learning experience helps build a bottom-up approach to challenge power and dominant ideology. Understanding Chinese immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning through an exploration of ideology and learning helps us reject the hegemonic mothering ideology and challenge dominant power and knowledge. It provides us with an alternative approach to rethink the meaning of mothering and reconceptualize motherhood learning in global and transnational contexts.

Immigrant mothers still encounter issues with employment, face difficulties in getting access to social welfare, and confront inequality in learning parenting, language, driving, and lifestyle. This article finds that immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning practice contains messages of unequal social and power relations, such as race, gender, and class, as well as unequal relations behind mothering ideology and practice. Its findings contribute to enrich the theoretical development of immigrant mothers as adult learners and further suggests that adult learning should be understood as an ideological practice associated with inequalities in social relations behind the knowledge.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Professors Shahrzad Mojab, Qi Sun, and anonymous reviewers for their valuable insights and suggestions concerning many aspects of this article. She is also grateful to the immigrant mothers and the settlement organization for their participation in the study.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Yidan Zhu

Author Biography

Yidan Zhu is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of British Columbia. She obtained her Ph.D. in the Adult Education and Community Development Program at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. She is interested in studying the discursive and material dimensions of immigrant mothers’ everyday experience and adult education. Her doctoral study focuses on Chinese immigrant mothers’ learning in Canadian immigration settlement organizations. Her current work focuses on migrant mothers’ lifelong learning and health professionals’ education.

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