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Abstract
Poet, Toi Derricotte (1997) wrote, eventually every identity breaks down tosome self that has to learn to live between loneliness and connection (p. 78). Public school teachers, who are also mothers to school aged children, negotiate this relationship dynamic on a daily basis, often in the isolation of their own classrooms. How teacher mothers transact with and create the potential for agency within the figured world of education is the focus of this qualitative study. Combining Michel Foucaults theories of discipline and punishment with Louise Rosenblatts transactional theory and Dorothy Hollands writing on improvisation within figured worlds, this study describes what happens when teacher mothers write about their lives and share stories with other teacher mothers within communities of care. Poetic inquiry and representation provide further description of the lived experience of the teacher mother within her figured world, utilizing both persona poems and free verse forms as a means to represent data collected in this narrative writing and interview study. Through a process of first writing and then sharing stories about instances of teaching and mothering within a small group setting, four participants, forming a community of teacher mothers, met three times to discuss their narratives. Written words and recorded dialogue from these sessions then served as data from which the researcher composed persona poems about each participant and her lived experience. Narrative analysis was then followed by interviews with each participant along with member checks through sharing of the poems. Teacher mother responses indicate that participation in small, writing and sharing communities serve to provide often-isolated professionals with confidence and courage to enact agency within the figured worlds, providing working teacher mothers with a greater sense of efficacy in balancing societalexpectations and responsibilities of work and home.