Thinking Themselves Free

Cynthia Miller Coffel earned her PhD from the University of Iowa. Her research has appeared in Reader, The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and The ALAN Review. Her literary nonfiction won the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize in 2006 and has been shortlisted in The Best American Essays 2008.

«This is a quietly powerful book, one that begins with characters that seem familiar enough – young women, usually poor, academically challenged, estranged from their families, struggling – but then becomes a gracefully rendered journey that these young women must make among the unexamined cultural assumptions that shape their lives. The fact that these girls have often internalized those assumptions, hard-wired them into their own sense of identity, is the problem for which the book seeks answers. Only by ‘thinking themselves free,’ through reading and talk and writing and even more reflection, can the young women find alternative narratives to structure their lives, narratives in which they are not ‘damaged’ or ‘ruined’ or ‘wrong.’ Less a research study than a thoughtful and richly detailed meditation on a complicated social phenomenon, Cynthia Miller Coffel, like Mike Rose in Lives on the Boundary, takes us inside lives that are different from our own while letting us see her own struggles in understanding those lives. It is a new and important story, and one that Miller Coffel has told with heart and grace.» (James Marshall, Professor, Language and Literacy Education, The University of Georgia)«‘Thinking Themselves Free: Research on the Literacy of Teen Mothers ’is a powerful multilay-ered narrative of the stories of teen mothers, teachers of teen mothers, and the life of one researcher as she struggles to understand the lives of the teens and to uncover the intricate web of fictions that surround teen motherhood. Cynthia Miller Coffel not only in-terviews young mothers, she shares her own journey as a teacher and researcher working with teen moms’ programs. As you read Thinking Themselves Free, you may find, as I did, some troubling stereotypes that you carry within because of the available fic-tions of females that remain so pervasive in our culture. In telling the stories of teen mothers, Miller Coffel introduces readers to complex people living complex lives. Throughout this book, Miller Coffel is compassionate, yet never sentimental. This is a beautifully written narrative that complicates what it means to be poor and pregnant, to want to be a ‘helper of the poor,’ and importantly, about literacy teaching and learning and how schools might work.» (Margaret J. Finders, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin La Crosse; Author of ‘Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High’)