Social Sciences
Feminist Theory of Education
The feminist theory of education examines how gender inequalities are perpetuated and challenged within educational systems. It critiques traditional educational practices that reinforce gender stereotypes and advocates for inclusive, equitable, and empowering learning environments. This theory seeks to address issues such as gender bias in curriculum, unequal opportunities for girls and women, and the need for feminist pedagogy.
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11 Key excerpts on "Feminist Theory of Education"
eBook - PDF- J. Demaine(Author)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Today, there are numerous `feminism(s) in education' (Weiner, 1994) and theories of gender politics. Many of these `new' positions derive from the expression of political, cultural and sexual identities in both society and the academy, and interdisciplinary and post-structural theoretical work in the social sciences. In contrast to second wave theorizing, these `new' forms, which are often associated with late modernity, tend to emphasize change and fluidity (for example, shifting and performative notions of gender) over that of gender continuities and the stability of the gender order. The current research traditions within `feminist' sociology of education thus are even harder to `capture', drawing as they do upon divergent, yet sometimes overlapping, theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of gender and feminism in education. Despite such difficulties, we believe that in order to understand the nature of current feminist sociological analyses of education, it is necessary to engage with the field as a whole rather than with particular examples of research. It is, therefore, still worth attempting to chart a rather informal (albeit retrospective) history of diverse feminist theoretical perspectives. We shall show that many of the key questions raised by early feminist studies, rather than being rejected, are still being addressed by feminist sociologists of education today. 32 Sociology of Education Today A conceptual framework Connell (l987), in Gender and Power , argues that positions on gender are more easily understood when examined in relation to broad epistemo- logical, political and social questions. We have found Connell's distinc- tion between intrinsic and extrinsic theories particularly useful in charting the trajectory of feminist sociology in education. Intrinsic theories are those which attempt to explain how strong conceptual and stable notions of gender (rather than shifting notions of gender) in society come into being.
eBook - PDF- Christine Skelton, Becky Francis, Lisa Smulyan, Christine Skelton, Becky Francis, Lisa Smulyan(Authors)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
In recent decades, feminism and gender theory have made major contributions both to the development of educational theory and to broader social theory. The focus of this chapter is to celebrate as well as to assess the achievements of what has been, and remains, an extraordinarily powerful and influential cumulative body of work. In recognition of this fact, the account sets the scope of ‘educa-tion feminism(s)’ upon a broad canvas, by offering a critical consideration of some key moments, across time, in its complex and creative engagement with important cognate strands of modern social theory. This rich and mutually pro-ductive interface offers an important perspective both for understanding and for judging the wide-reaching impact of feminist research from the mid-twentieth century onward. Such work has been continuously important in establishing pro-ductive and challenging links between gender theory, education feminism(s) 1 and social theory as it has developed within other traditions. Concentrating upon recent theoretical work in the ‘West’, principally within British and North American settings, the chapter particularly considers the significance of 4 ‘Education Feminism(s)’, Gender Theory and Social Thought: Illuminating Moments and Critical Impasses J o -A n n e D i l l a b o u g h the ubiquitous ‘cultural turn’ for recent theoretical debates about gender. The value of such a strategy is that it conveniently highlights the relation between emergent stances in critical educational theories and post-structural accounts, and those endur-ingly important materialist positions developed by feminist accounts of cultural reproduction in earlier years. In this way, the strength of feminist research is revealed in its simultaneous capacity both for intellectual flexibility and for deep theoretical coherence. We should therefore begin with a brief historical account of the achievements of feminist research in the field of education.
eBook - PDFGender and Education
An Encyclopedia [2 volumes]
- Barbara J. Bank(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
Broad in scope and diverse in expression, feminist research draws from an array of methods, philosophies, models, and disciplines to pursue questions about educational knowledge and schooling processes. Central to such pursuits is the conception of educa- tion as a social system with profound power and possibility to shape human lives. As such, it is a crucial arena for feminist work. Researchers with varied goals have worked within and against conventional approaches to analyze male power and demonstrate the central- ity of gender to education, social life, and the creation of knowledge. Early feminist cri- tiques focused on the varied effects of historically male-dominated social and educational systems on women’s opportunities. More recent critiques encompass a wider array of topics ranging from policy inequities, to the underrepresentation of women in administration, to the subtle ways gender and race infuse educational theory. Despite the growth and diversity of feminist inquiry since the American civil rights and women’s movements, the visibility of feminist methodologies in some educational fields and their near invisibility in others speak to still untapped potential in researchers’ use of this resource. This disparate use also reflects a certain degree of unfamiliarity with, con- fusion about, or reluctance to engage with feminist methodologies that merits redress. Indeed, the complexity of contemporary educational concerns necessitates that research- ers utilize an array of tools and techniques to approach their work effectively. Although feminist priorities are revised as educational issues emerge and recede, scholars with diverse goals and orientations nevertheless share a number of characteristics in their work: a spirit of critique, recognition of the centrality of gender to social life, the promotion of equal educational opportunity and practice, and principles of feminist methodology that
- Samuel Totten, Jon Pedersen(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Information Age Publishing(Publisher)
Focus on the transformational nature of both critical theory and feminist theory is key to understanding what critical feminism in education entails. We must, consequently, look at what critical feminism seeks to do rather than limiting it to a definition that claims to explain what it is. CRITICAL FEMINISM IN EDUCATION Critical feminism in education manifests in a variety of ways that range from abstractions of educational philosophies (Hill-Collins, 1990/1991; Ladson- Billings & Tate, 1995; Marshall, 1997) to classroom pedagogy and practice (hooks, 1989; Lott & Bullock, 2010). Critical feminism in education is not simply a concern for those in higher education. Critical feminism is, in fact Critical Feminism in Education 41 significant to educators from preprimary through postsecondary settings, both at the level of discussions and activism traced back to critical femi- nist lenses (Davis, 1994; Guy-Sheftall, 1992; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Lather, 1991; Yelland, 1998). We wish to be clear, however, that the term critical feminism is not actu- ally used by many scholars to describe their own work. Scholars, such as hooks (1991, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2000d, 2001a, 2001b), have cautioned that language is an important consideration in how one constructs his/her identity; given this caution, there appears to be some resistance to nam- ing one’s work “critical feminism,” even when the work engages the ideas, tenets, and philosophies of critical feminism. We are cognizant of the fact that our overview of critical feminism in education, both within the main body of the chapter and in the annotated bibliography, is not comprehen- sive vis-à-vis all of the discussions of critical feminism in education. By its very nature, such a chapter would be nearly impossible to write, and critical feminism will continue to transform the ways in which educators consider the importance of emancipatory as well as liberation ideologies.
eBook - PDF- Beverly Irby, Genevieve H. Brown, Rafael Lara-Aiecio(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Information Age Publishing(Publisher)
975 The Handbook of Educational Theories , pp. 975–984 Copyright © 2013 Information Age Publishing, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. CHAPTER 87 Critical Feminist Theory M. D. YOUNG and C. MARSHALL Michelle D. Young University of Texas at Austin Catherine Marshall University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Over the last few decades, feminists have challenged fundamental understandings of the way we think about and research, women, men and social-political contexts. They have offered a perspective and research strategies that consider women from the perspective of their own experiences, that emphasize identification, trust, empathy, and relationships, and that has as one of its primary goals providing “women explanations of social phenomena that they want and need” (Harding, 1987, p. 8). In doing so, it has produced radical reexam-inations of assumptions and reconstructions of previ-ously accepted interpretations across a broad range of disciplines. Within this chapter we discuss the develop-ment of feminist theories, and attempt to disentangle some of the issues concerning generalizability, validity and method regarding feminist critical theory. Subse-quently, we turn our attention to how the theory has been used within educational research and then address some of the most common and robust critiques of this perspective. D EFINITIONS AND O RIGINS OF F EMINIST AND C RITICAL F EMINIST T HEORIES Derrida (1974) asserted the impossibility of identifying a definitive origin for any theory. Reinharz (1992) affirms this adding that we should talk about the plu-ral—“feminisms.” Viewing feminist research in this manner emphasizes that “rather than there being a ‘woman’s way of knowing’ or a ‘feminist way of doing research,’ there are women’s ways of knowing” (Rein-harz, 1992, p. 4) and multiple ways of studying and car-rying out research on the conditions of women's lives.
- Anna Pagès(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
In this sense, adopting feminist perspectives as a way of doing philosophy of education can be seen as a joint effort to redefine the center by looking at the contemporary educational landscape from the margins (Thayer-Bacon and Turner 2007). In addition, feminist engagements with both the style and content of an otherwise male-dominated philosophical discourse have generated new ways of defining which issues and questions count and have significance within the field itself (see, e.g., Stone 1995; Thayer-Bacon, Stone, and Sprecher 2013). Against this background, we suggest, feminist theory and feminist philosophy ought to be of interest to any scholar who is committed to the idea that public education is an education for all and who wants the field of philosophy of education to continue to develop and live on as a scholarly mixed-gender community. Or, in the famous words of bell hooks (2000), “Feminism is for everybody.” The focus of the chapter: The “woman” and the “feminine” In contemporary feminist debate, and as a response to the emerging postmaterialist and postfeminist movements in gender theory, one of the most crucial questions for education is whether feminism itself and its historical focus on the injustices faced by women as women have any relevance today or if it only lends itself to identity politics (Mikkola 2017). Given that much contemporary gender and queer theory problematizes “her” and “she” as central pronouns for feminism and criticizes feminist philosophy for introducing irrelevant, essentialist, or even harmful separations between women and men into theoretical inquiry, a crucial question to ask is what relevance, role, and meaning categories such as “woman/girl” and “feminine/femininity” will have in educational research in the future
eBook - PDFGender Bias in Scholarship
The Pervasive Prejudice
- Winnie Tomm, Gordon Hamilton, Winnie Tomm, Gordon Hamilton(Authors)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press(Publisher)
In educational psychology, feminists have largely abandoned the use of empiricist models. Rather, they have begun to examine women's experience in its social context and to listen to women's experiences as women experience them (Gilligan 1982). Most feminists argue that new, alternative methods are necessary in all fields of education. In Malmo's work (1983), it means going beyond the other; in Smith's formulation (1979), it is doing a Sociology for women; in Robert's anthology (1982), it is doing feminist research; in Wine's opinion (1982), it is moving toward a gynocentric psychology. Like the critique of theory which accompanies it, feminists' call for new methods currently stands at the very front of the feminist agenda in academe. New Visions It is no longer a sight merely a photograph, or fresco scrawled upon the walls of time, at which we can look with merely an esthetic appreciation. For there we go ourselves and that makes a difference The questions we have to ask and answer.. .during this moment of transition may well change the lives of all men and women for ever... (Woolf 1938: 28). Virginia Woolf's words are as true today as they were in 1938. Without taking the uniqueness away from Woolf's experience of transition, it is clear that feminist scholarship has reached a critical juncture in its evolution. The moment of transition, to which Woolf refers, is evidenced presently in the mammoth feminist literature. Generally speaking, this literature argues that education and the other disciplines, like society at large, is patriarchal. Feminists' voices repeat over and over that all of the disciplines reverberate a desire to explain, justify, and maintain the sexual status quo of human and institutional relationships. Because such a desire is Gisele Thibault / Women and Education 87 violating to women, the epistemological and experimental distortions which result are unacceptable for feminist scholarship.
eBook - PDF- Josh Diem, Robert J. Helfenbein(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Information Age Publishing(Publisher)
After establishing our framework for teaching gen-der in education, we will discuss our experience with student resistance and some possibilities for productive engagement. CONTEXT Although gender is one third of the social theory trinity of race, class, and gender, feminist theory has remained marginalized in the popular dis-course of gender and education. Marcus Weaver-Hightower (2003) has pointed out that while a number of popular feminist texts on education proliferated in the mid-1990s (Orenstein, 1994; Pipher, 1994; Sadker & Sad-ker, 1994), an equal number of “backlash blockbusters” (Mills, 2003, cited in Weaver-Hightower, 2003) were popular by the end of the same decade (Gurian, 2001; Sommers, 2000; Pollack; 1998). In the allegedly “post-femi-nist” present era, 1 many studies of gender in education have shifted from girls to focus on the relative underachievement of boys in schools. Weaver-Hightower calls this shift the “boy turn,” playing on the double meaning of “turn” to highlight both the shift to boys and the assumption by some schol-ars that boys have been historically neglected in the discourse of gender and education and are now due for attention. This focus on boys is partially the result of the fact that much feminist research on gender and education has historically worked within a liberal framework, 2 focusing on ways to win rights and raise the academic achievement of girls. Within liberal feminism, the goal has been to make girls equal to boys within the current system of education. Because girls’ achievement has surpassed boys in many academic fields within education, many recent studies have begun from the assump-tion that the feminist movement was a success and that now boys are oppressed in a system that favors girls (see Lingard & Douglas, 1999 and Weaver-Hightower, 2003 for a more in-depth analysis). Despite the increased academic achievement of girls, however, we have seen little structural change in gender relations in the United States.
eBook - PDFTwenty-First-Century Feminist Classrooms
Pedagogies of Identity and Difference
- S. Sánchez-Casal, A. MacDonald, S. Sánchez-Casal, A. MacDonald(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
theoretical means for teachers and students to both assert and contest ex- planatory claims about social groups and the world, the feminist classroom can construct and deconstruct epistemic authority according to shifting cur- ricular and political contexts. Difference as the Theoretical Subject of the Feminist Classroom In 1981 This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Moraga and Anzaldúa) cast a critical eye on the white solipsism, homo- phobia, classism and cultural imperialism of the feminist movement by crit- icizing and negating prevailing feminist understandings of difference. 6 By retheorizing the relationships among experience, identity and epistemic au- thority, these critical perspectives in turn generated groundbreaking social theories focused on interaction among women of color and between op- pressed women and society. Subsequently Third Wave feminists re-engaged the brilliant analyses formulated in This Bridge and sustained this revolu- tionary theoretical movement by producing comprehensive criticisms of identity politics. From a visionary and self-critical standpoint, many Third Wave feminists have argued that personal identity is complex and heteroge- neous, and thus that dominance and subjugation can exist simultaneously in individuals and social groups (Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, Cherríe Moraga, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Paula Moya, and others). These theories of identity open an expansive new paradigm for feminist pedagogy, one that simultaneously reaffirms the epistemic status of cultural identity while it challenges the wholesale validity of experience— including the experience of oppression—in the production of knowledge.
eBook - PDF- A. Green, G. Rikowski, H. Raduntz, A. Green, G. Rikowski, H. Raduntz(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Further, the individualized concept of learning removes the learner from her social context, and her day-to-day life situation. Wilma Fraser points out that “[f]or those at the margins of political, economic and social power, the notion that they ‘are what they have done’ sounds more like a slap in the face than a term of encourage- ment . . .” (1995: 141). The literature on learning depoliticizes learners and ignores learning that is based in the social relations and collective agency of learners. I believe that it is necessary for feminist and social justice oriented educational researchers to find our way back to feminist and revolutionary theories of consciousness in order to raise a counterhegemony to the “knowl- edge economy” ideology that masks this particularly dangerous phase of capitalist conquest, militarization, and destruction. Through the above example of a feminist research method for researching Kurdish women’s learning, it is clear that working with interview transcripts is only part of the task at hand. In many ways the women’s testimony presented above is both universal and particular. Some of the stories about family vio- lence and community relations seem as though they could be located in a thousand different places and times over the past hundred years. Even the references to wars and repressive regimes sound similar to other wars and regimes in the past several decades. Yet the Kurdish women and the disability rights activists discussed above live, work, learn, and struggle in particular and specific contexts. As complicated as the context may be, I believe the social relations can be revealed, grasped, and acted on. If, as feminist and social jus- tice oriented researchers, we can ground our analysis in the understanding that power relations unfold over time, and in relation to the global political econ- omy, we can avoid the danger of dissolving into a sea of particularity and social relativity.
eBook - PDFAt the center
Feminism, social science and knowledge
- Vasilikie (Vicky) Demos, Marcia Texler Segal, Vasilikie (Vicky) Demos, Marcia Texler Segal, Vasilikie Demos, Marcia Texler Segal(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Emerald Group Publishing Limited(Publisher)
Subjectivity refers to the processes by which we become a subject or person À our sense of ourselves and our relationships with the world ( Barker, 2003 ; Thompson, 1992 ; Weedon, 1987 ). Subjectivities are multi-ple, fluid, fragmented, precarious, often contradictory, always in process, and never complete ( Hall, 1996 ; Weedon, 1987 ). Informed by feminist theory, feminist pedagogy is a diverse set of philosophies and practices for teaching that advocate challenging unjust gender politics and other oppressive power relations in classrooms and beyond, and valuing per-sonal experience as strategies to bring about social transformations ( Crabtree, Sapp, & Licona, 2009 ). Together with CR, the notion “the personal is political” is the cornerstone of feminist pedagogy ( Crabtree et al., 2009 ; Freedman, 2009 ; Sowards & Renegar, 2004 ). Feminist CR is a space where participants share their personal stories of gender and other inequalities to help each other become politically conscious of the social contexts of their experiences in systematic forms of oppressions ( Freedman, 2009 ; Sowards & Renegar, 2004 ). However, practicing femin-ist pedagogy is often challenging; there is frequently a gap between how feminist teachers envisage their classrooms and conceptualize power and empowerment, and what they are actually able to do in the institutional contexts in which they teach ( Crabtree et al., 2009 ; Gore, 1990 ; Ropers-Huilman, 2009 ). As Gore (1990) contends, many feminist pedagogy dis-courses are abstract, decontextualized, and unreflexive and, thus, neglect people’s actual actions in the context of their lives. Following Gore (1990, p. 10) and her focus on contexts and practices, we define empowerment as an “ … exercise of power in an attempt (that might not be successful) to help others exercise power.” We understand empowerment as an issue of “multiplicity, contradiction … partial-ness … ” 225 Feminist Pedagogy and Research in a Women’s University
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