SUNY series, Feminist Theory in Education – Serie

This book is a meditation on the profession of teaching from the perspective of a woman whose intellectual identity as teacher and writer is inseparable from her whole life as a woman. Pagano brings the methods and insights of feminist psychoanalytic literary criticism to bear on a reading of her own educational practice in order to reach a transformed understanding of the educational enterprise. She raises serious questions: How are we implicated in what we know? What actions are required by our knowledge? Responses to these questions are given with probing analyses of practice, ethics, gender, knowledge, and curriculum. In Exiles and Communities: Teaching in the Patriarchal Wilderness Jo Anne Pagano teaches us how to teach as she sustains identity in transformation and relinquishes neither the world nor other people to thought.

Teachers, in general, are hired to conform with set values of the community which hires them. They are expected to reflect conventions which correspond with an ideological model of behavior sanctioned by the state and by the community in which they work. In a publicly funded educational system, not only are teachers expected to transmit dominant ideologies, but, as representatives of the state, they are assumed to embody the dominant values of the society which hires them. The notion of lesbian teachers inevitably contradicts mainstream assumptions about female teachers-women whose image stereotypically corresponds with and implicitly conveys traditional female "virtues" of purity, dedication, and nurturance.Using an analysis that combines feminist concepts of patriarchy with Gramsci's notion of hegemony, this book is an institutional ethnography which begins from the standpoint of lesbian teachers, but, at the same time, locates their experiences in the immediate social organization from which they arise and which gives them meaning.Through intensive interviews with nineteen lesbian teachers, Khayatt explores these womens' lives as they themselves describe them: How do they conceal their sexuality? How do lesbian teachers cope in the classroom? How do they deal with their perceived need to live a double life? To whom do they come out? Why do they feel unsafe to be out despite the potential protection of legal rights? And, finally, what would they stand to lose if found out?

This book examines issues of identity and difference, both theoretically and as represented in curriculum materials. Here debates over the cultural character of the curriculum are characterized as debates over the American national identity. The editors argue that historically, cultural conservatives have failed to appreciate that the United States is, in a fundamental and central way, an African and African-American place. European Americans are, in a cultural sense, also black, and the failure to teach sequestered suburban (usually Caucasian) students about their (cultural) African and African-American heritage perpetuates their delusion regarding their deeper identities. A curriculum which reflects the non-synchronous identity of Americans is sketched in the last section. Such a curriculum involves not only the inclusion of African and African-American content, but interracial intellectual marriage as well.Contributors to this book include Peter Taubman, Susan Edgerton, Beverly Gordon, Alma Young, Wendy Luttrell, Cameron McCarthy, Patricia Collins, Roger Collins, Brenda Hatfield, Marianne H. Whatley, and Joe L. Kincheloe.

This collection of essays on diverse issues in collaborative work illuminates the next direction for the study and practice of collaboration in classrooms and research projects. The essays probe more deeply than any previous work into the political, social, and individual psychologies of students, teachers, and researchers working together. Beginning with a critique of the ideology of individualism, the authors treat classroom issues at all levels from middle school through graduate school. Advocating an affirmative philosophy of collaboration, the authors attempt to understand both its shortcomings and its successes, as illustrated in many examples of essays and comments written by students in collaborative projects.

Ecotone: Wayfaring on the Margins, a personal history of place, is written from the perspective of a teacher, naturalist, and feminist and uses the metaphor of the biological ecotone as the boundary where inner and outer landscapes of the woman/nature continuum meet.In this book, Krall proposes a counter-narrative to the usual reading of marginality. In autobiographical narrative that rings with experience, she describes margins as rich as dynamic abodes, places of crossing over and transition as well as spaces of separation and alienation. In reinterpreting journeys and encounters, she maps the shared terrain of the personal, social, and natural fields of our lives. She draws upon Native American sensibilities about place, relationship, and the sacred, in order to deepen our understanding of human/nature bonds, to more fully develop respect and responsibility to others, and to heal the rifts that sometimes set humans at odds with other humans and non-human creatures and threaten life on earth.

Explores women's exploration of the relations between their private and public selves—it examines the voices with which women speak to their students, their colleagues, and themselves. The major audience is women interested in women's identity and identity construction as well as writing.Plain and Ordinary Things revisions the space of student writing in classrooms from a number of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives: feminist, literary, anthropological, and phenomenological. It actualizes the relationships among reading and writing, the songs of pre-literate people, nineteenth and twentieth century literary history, feminist theories about gender and language, and women's writing and pedagogy. The book explores the relations between private and public selves and women's roles as teachers and writers. Dooley also examines the authenticity of women's voices with which they speak to their students, their colleagues, and themselves.The discussion of reading, writing, and teaching in the book is informed by several premises. The most important of these is that writing and teaching are reproductive acts that gather up past experience, providing a ground for the expression and transformation of identity and that understanding this changes pedagogical theory and practice. The book also focuses on reading the writing of three twentieth century women authors: Virginia Woolf, Joanna Field (nee Marion Milner), and Adrienne Rich.

Points to the many ways in which the study of autobiography can contribute to the theory, practice, and politics of women's studies as curriculum, and to feminist theory more generally.Women's Lives/Women's Times reflects the growing interest in life-writing as a basis for both feminist theorizing and women-centered education. It discusses the many ways in which the study of autobiography can contribute to the theory, practice, and politics of women's studies as curriculum, and to feminist theory more generally.This volume is concerned with the application of theory to text-particularly with the assumptions and discourses of postmodernism-but also in exploring how general theories of the subject do not always fit comfortably with the specifics of autobiographical writing. It also recognizes the challenge women's autobiography offers to theory, taking us, in its complex weave of the personal, the political, and the theoretical, beyond the usual generic and disciplinary boundaries.

Exploring the very human and moving autobiographies of teachers, and the promising insights of feminist and critical reading theory, this book asks how we can oppose the alienation and distancing that so often characterize curriculum in schools.By exploring the very human and moving autobiographies of teachers, and the promising insights of feminist and critical reading theory, Atwell-Vasey asks how we can oppose the alienation and distancing that so often characterize curriculum in schools. She links the hopes and concerns of teachers with curriculum forms that reverberate with the drive, love and conflict, characteristic of the rich experiences of life. These curriculum forms include theater work, intense negotiation and trust among readers, and projects that ask students to use texts to pursue and reconceptualize unresolved issues and social obligations in the real world.

The poet's life as a teacher.Winner of the 2008 Critics' Choice Award presented by the American Educational Studies Association A Pulitzer Prize–winning poet who confessed the unrelenting anguish of addiction and depression, Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was also a dedicated teacher. In this book, Paula M. Salvio opens up Sexton's classroom, uncovering a teacher who willfully demonstrated that the personal could also be plural. Looking at how Sexton framed and used the personal in teaching and learning, Salvio considers the extent to which our histories-both personal and social-exert their influence on teaching. In doing so, she situates the teaching life of Anne Sexton at the center of some of the key problems and questions in feminist teaching: navigating the appropriate distance between teacher and student, the relationship between writer and poetic subject, and the relationship between emotional life and knowledge. Examining Sexton's pedagogy, with its "weird abundance" of tactics and strategies, Salvio argues that Sexton's use of the autobiographical "I" is as much a literary identity as a literal identity, one that can speak with great force to educators who recognize its vital role in the humanities classroom.