Kathleen Weiler

After more than twenty years of feminist education research, policy development and innovative school practice, it seems appropriate to evaluate the impact and significance of this world wide struggle for social justice in education. At the same time, the recent restructuring of educational provision whether in the name of sexual equality or the ideologies of the New Right also requires a considered response from Those Committed To Promoting Greater Social Equality.; This Collection offers a unique opportunity to host an international forum on contemporary thinking and practice, not just within different national contexts, but for feminism more generally. ln adopting a critical feminist approach, the chapters re-establish such egalitarian traditions as radical feminism, black feminism and socialist feminism and address such themes as the interrelation between social class, race and gender and the ways these articulate with feminist educational practice.; In gathering together leading educators from five different countries all committed to the project of social transformation, this book represents the shifting concerns of the feminist theoretical debate and helps formulate feminist educational agendas more suited to the political and economic conditions which orevail in the 19905.

International Perspectives

Feminism And Social Justice In Education

Applying theory to practice, Women Teaching for Change reveals the complexity of being a feminist teacher in a public school setting, in which the forces of sexism, racism, and classism, which so characterize society as a whole, are played out in multiracial, multicultural classrooms. A fine book, a rich melding of critical theory in education, feminist literature, and pedagogical experience and expertise. Maxine Green, Columbia University Applying theory to practice, Women Teaching for Change reveals the complexity of being a feminist teacher in a public school setting, in which the forces of sexism, racism, and classism, which so characterize society as a whole, are played out in multiracial, multicultural classrooms.

Gender, Class and Power

Women Teaching for Change

Maria Baldwin (1856--1922) held a special place in the racially divided society of her time, as a highly respected educator at a largely white New England school and an activist who carried on the radical spirit of the Boston area's internationally renowned abolitionists from a generation earlier. African American sociologist Adelaide Cromwell called Baldwin "the lone symbol of Negro progress in education in the greater Boston area" during her lifetime. Baldwin used her respectable position to fight alongside more radical activists like William Monroe Trotter for full citizenship for fellow members of the black community. And, in her professional and personal life, she negotiated and challenged dominant white ideas about black womanhood. In Maria Baldwin's Worlds, Kathleen Weiler reveals both Baldwin's victories and what fellow activist W. E. B. Du Bois called her "quiet courage" in everyday life, in the context of the wider black freedom struggle in New England.

A Story of Black New England and the Fight for Racial Justice

Maria Baldwin's Worlds

Candace Mitchell

This book is organized around three themes: mechanisms of domination and control; pedagogies of possibility; and theory as critique. It links education with an analysis of politics and economics, and takes as central the possibilities of schools as places where social critique and the empowerment of students can take place. The authors have considered the possibilities of student resistance and curriculum transformation, and have deepened their critiques to incorporate recent theoretical analyses influenced by feminist critiques, anti-racist approaches, and postmodernist thought. In moving from theoretical analysis to practical examples of curriculum transformation and classroom practice, What Schools Can Do provides both a foundation for the analysis of schooling and alternatives for teaching practice.

Critical Pedagogy and Practice

What Schools Can Do

Feminist Engagements is a collection of essays by some of the top names in feminist education, in which they read and revision the works of the major twentieth-century theorists in education and cultural studies.

Reading, Resisting, and Revisioning Male Theorists in Education and Cultural Studies

Feminist Engagements

Madeleine Arnot

Gathers together notable educators from five different countries to examine contemporary feminist politics and practice in education. It presents a response to recent developments in education and feminist theorising and the restructuring of educational provision.

Feminism and Social Justice in Education

Focusing on the lives and work of women teachers in two rural California counties from 1850 to 1950, Country Schoolwomen explores the social context of teaching, seeking to understand what teaching meant to women teachers, what it provided them, and how it shaped their categories of experience. The women we meet in this study taught in isolated one- and two-room schoolhouses and in the migrant schools of the Depression years; many of them witnessed the profound upheavals brought about by the two world wars. Through the lens of their lives, the author examines the growth of state control over schools, the irrevocable impact of powerful economic and political changes on small-town life, and the patterns of racism that have divided California from the time of the earliest European settlement. This study challenges a number of assumptions about the lives and work of women teachers. It is often assumed, for example, that the work of women in schools has always been controlled by men--that education has, with rare exceptions, remained a patriarchal space in which women care for children in classrooms while men hold positions of authority, define issues, and set policy. Country Schoolwomen introduces us to a network of women educators who occupied positions of power at the state level, who supported one another, and who defined an alternative, far more positive image of the woman teacher. The work of these women put forth a vision of classroom teaching as a serious and stimulating profession. And for many of the women in this study, teaching clearly did provide material resources and intellectual satisfaction. The historical record thus suggests that rather than signaling their subjugation, teaching has afforded women a potential source of power; it has offered them respect, autonomy, and financial independence. But women have had to struggle--not always successfully--to claim this potential, which male educators have often sought to deny or disregard. In addition, both university experts and local communities have persisted in viewing classroom teaching as "women's work" and have consequently been slow to acknowledge competing perspectives on the profession. This study ultimately reveals, then, not a homogeneous tradition but a dense ideological landscape, one in which representations of "the woman teacher" were often caught among contradictory and contested visions.

Kathleen Weiler

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