Mothering doctoral students with young children are frequently positioned in higher education discourse through deficit-oriented narratives that frame motherhood as incompatible with scholarly rigor, persistence, and success. This study challenged those assumptions by examining the lived experiences of mothering doctoral students enrolled in Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) programs at R1 institutions. Adopting an asset-based perspective, the study explored how these women navigated, integrated, and made meaning of overlapping identities as mothers, scholars, and professionals, with particular attention to how their doctoral journeys shaped who they were becoming across these roles. Three research questions guided the inquiry, addressing how identity multiplicity shaped doctoral experiences, how personal and structural strengths were leveraged within academic and caregiving borderlands, and how visual storytelling through photo-elicitation supported meaning-making.Using a qualitative, hermeneutic phenomenological methodology, data were collected from eleven mothering Ed.D. students parenting at least one child from birth through age eight. Participants completed pre-interview questionnaires and engaged in two semi-structured interviews, with the second incorporating photo-elicitation. Data were analyzed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), informed by Harper’s Anti-Deficit Achievement Framework and Ortega’s Mestiza Theory of multiplicitous selfhood. Reflexive journaling, member checking, and triangulation supported analytic rigor and trustworthiness. Four interconnected findings emerged. First, participants enacted intentional integration, weaving motherhood, scholarship, and professional life into a purpose-led, fluid identity rather than striving for balance through separation. Second, strength-in-action was revealed as an embodied, daily practice, one that was expressed through structure, momentum, adaptive self-belief, and reimagined care rather than a fixed trait. Third, persistence was sustained through collective infrastructures of support, including relational networks and responsive institutional practices, demonstrating that strength is co-constructed rather than individual. Fourth, photo-elicitation functioned as a meaning-making practice, enabling participants to render visible their identities, strengths, and persistence through visual reflection and dialogue. These findings are synthesized in the Productive Paradox Model, which conceptualizes thriving as emerging through—rather than in spite of—tension, contradiction, and multiplicity. The model reframes doctoral persistence as a relational, interpretive, and care-informed process of becoming. Implications extend to doctoral program design, faculty practice, and institutional policy. Findings call for reframing the Ed.D. around purpose rather than pipeline, embedding flexibility as an equity-based form of rigor, cultivating cohorts and communities of care, institutionalizing family-responsive supports, and recognizing reflection as legitimate scholarship. By centering mothering doctoral students’ strengths and meaning-making practices, this study offers an asset-based counter-narrative and invites a reimagining of doctoral education as rigorous, humane, and relationally attuned.

Author

• Burmicky, Monica

Language

• en

Keyword

• Mothers
• Doctoral Education
• Hermeneutic Phenomenology
• Photo Elicitation
• Student Parents
• Academic Motherhood

Date created

• 2026

Type of Work

• Dissertation

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• Higher Education Administration

Degree

• Ed.D.

Advisor

• Dortch, Deniece

Committee Member(s)

• Black, Victoria
• Latz, Amanda
• Wolf-Wendel, Lisa
• McKinnon-Crowley, Saralyn

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/6t053g96s