Education: Discipline Analysis. Women in the Curriculum Series.

Overview & Synopsis

This essay examines the ways in which education, as a discipline, has been influenced by feminist scholarship in the field. It explains that foundational studies by feminist scholars have examined sexual differences in identity and ways of knowing, and have challenged the arrogation of feminine experience and viewpoints to generalizations of male experience. The essay goes on to look at the education curriculum, focusing on access and equity, pedagogy, and narrative and identity, noting that autobiographical writing has become an important process in teacher education. It notes that feminist scholars have challenged traditional research paradigms of researcher/researched, knower/known, and subject/object, and have questioned the boundaries that separate public from private by insisting on the political nature of all inquiry. Many of the issues embroiling public education reading instruction in the early grades, the role of parents in determining curriculum, single-sex schools, and the power of teachers in relation to administrators, legislators, and parents are addressed in the thought, research, and teaching of feminist scholars. (Contains 70 references.) (MDM)