The Roller Coaster Ride: Lived Experiences of Teacher-Mothers In The Department of Education

Abstract

This qualitative study has deeply looked into the situations of five teacher-mothers from Candoni, Negros Occidental, who are public secondary school teachers, and raising multiple children. These women are teachers in the public secondary school, and at the same time they are mothers of many children. On the basis of the Theory of Role Balance by Macdermid (1996) and Role Theory by Michaelian (2005), the paper queries the ways in which the evoked competition among demands has affected these women's power to hold at bay over both family and work lives. The study used a qualitative-phenomenological design and the purposive participants were selected, located, and elicited for their experiences through semi-structured interviews, and then they were conscientiously interpreted by Creswell’s method. The results of the study show that the women’s went through the events not as separate problems but as interconnected occurrences of the same thing—structural and personal challenges—time management problems, overlapping role expectations, dislocation, and resource limitations, which deepen role strain. Still, these limitations simultaneously opened up the adaptive nature of the practice, as teacher-mothers creatively utilized the available coping mechanisms such as purposeful role negotiation, prioritization, and a more pronounced sense of both professional and familial commitment. This paper sheds light on the way systemic and individual forces influence the performances of multiple roles, thus, presenting worker-families’ interaction with the topic of work-familiy balance in rural educational contexts of the Philippines.