Article Abstracts:
-- by Kathleen Weiler
In this article, Kathleen Weiler reflects on the historiography of Country Schoolwomen, her recent study of women teachers in rural California. Using a broad definition of feminist research, Weiler summarizes some of the most salient issues currently under debate among feminist scholars. She raises questions about the nature of knowledge, the influence of language in the social construction of gender, and the importance of an awareness of subjectivity in the production of historical evidence. Using several cases from Country Schoolwomen, Weiler discusses the importance of considering the conditions under which testimony is given, both in terms of the dominant issues of the day --f or example, the way womanliness or teaching is presented in the authoritative discourse--and the relationship between speaker and audience. She concludes that a feminist history that begins with a concern with the constructed quality of evidence moves uneasily between historical narrative and a self-conscious analysis of texts.
-- by Asgedet Stefanos
In this article, Asgedet Stefanos examines women and education in the east African nation of Eritrea. She tackles as her central questions whether, and to what extent, Eritrean women have been achieving emancipation, and, if so, what role education has played in that process. Stefanos begins by providing a historical overview that delineates Eritrean women's general social condition and access to education in pre-colonial traditional society and during the eras of Italian and British colonialism. She then evaluates developments during Eritrea's protracted national liberation struggle against Ethiopia and the four years since independence. Stefanos documents significant advances in the emancipation of women and highlights education as a vital arena for change. She observes shortcomings in the Eritrean political leadership's strategy to establish effective educational equity for women, as well as disparities between the goals and assessments of policymakers and the aspirations and experiences of women. Her discussion of contemporary Eritrea is informed by policies and commentary of political leaders and interviews with a diverse sample of Eritrean women. Stefanos concludes by asserting that the current situation confronting an independent Eritrea promotes new obstacles and challenges to a vigorous pursuit of female rights and gender equality, and that the prospects for expanding women's gains in education are very much in the balance.
-- by Linda Eisenmann
In this article, Linda Eisenmann examines the role and impact of Barbara Solomon's now classic text in women's educational history, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. Eisenmann analyzes how Solomon's book influence, defined, and in some ways limited the field of women's educational history. She show how current historical research--such as the study of normal schools and academies--grew out of Solomon's work. She points out where the book is innovative and indispensable and where it disappoints us as teachers and scholars in the 1990s. Eisenmann criticizes Solomon for placing too much emphasis on women's access to higher education, thereby ignoring the importance of wider historical and educational influences such as economics, women's occupational choices, and the treatment of women in society at large. Finally, Eisenmann examines the state of subsequent research in women's higher educational history. She urges researchers to investigate beyond the areas defined by Solomon's work and to assess the impact of these neglected subjects on women's experiences in education.
-- by Linda M. Perkins
The Seven Sister colleges are well known for producing some of the nation's most successful women. At the turn of the century, they were recognized as the leading institutions for elite White women. In this article, Linda Perkins outlines the historical experiences of African American women attending the Seven Sister colleges from the institutions' founding to the civil rights era of the 1960s, a period during which approximately five hundred Black women graduated from these institutions. Through an exploration of university archives, alumni bulletins, and oral interviews with alumnae, Perkins shows that the Seven Sister colleges were not a monolithic entity: some admitted African American women as far back as the turn of the century, while others grudgingly, and only under great pressure, admitted them decades later. Perkins illustrates how the Seven Sister colleges mirrored the views of the larger society concerning race, and how issues of discrimination in admissions, housing, and financial aid in these institutions were influenced by, and had an influence on, the overall African American struggle for full participatory citizenship.
- by Deirdre A. Almeida
In this article, Deirdre Almeida presents an overview of Native American education since the European's arrival in the Americas, with a focus on its effect on Native American women in the United States from 1878 to the present. Until recently the history of Native American women has only been touched upon, but over the past decade, Native American women scholars have emerged to present their perspectives on the influence of both traditional learning and formal Western-based educational programs on Native women. Almeida examines the educational experiences of Native American women resulting from U.S. government policies, focusing in particular on the off-reservation boarding school program of 1878-1928. Throughout her study, Almeida demonstrates how education was, and still is, connected to the political power of Native American women. Traditional learning has been the means by which Native American women have established and maintained their voices and empowered themselves through gender roles. However, Western-based education, under government control, has been used as an instrument to destroy the traditional power of Native American women, through the shifting of these roles. The voices of the Native American women presented in this his study illustrate their resistance to the breakdown of traditional political standing and the use of education to reclaim and protect it.
- by Marilyn Mavrinac
Since the Third French Republic was established in 1875, French education has operated under a mandate to provide compulsory citizenship training to all children and to select an elite group of talented students who will receive a more rigorous form of schooling. In the twentieth century, France has experienced two major education reform movements aimed at democratizing this mandate --one between 1920 and 1930, and the other between 1960 and 1980. Both reform waves concentrated on changing the selection process for this elite group, which had almost exclusively included middle- and upper-class males. In these waves of change, which resulted in the standardization and centralization of Frances' schools, much attention was paid to issues of class, but little was paid to issues of gender equity. Mavrinac examines the effects of these reforms on gender equity and the effects of increased school centralization on girls' access to equitable education. She concludes by highlighting the lack of connection between movements for school reform and gender equity proposals and suggests that, despite its modification in recent years, the patriarchal structure of the educational bureaucracy remains powerfully in place.
- by Stacey J. Lee
In this article, Stacey Lee examines the phenomenon of low educational participation and achievement among Hmong American women. She argues that the focus on cultural differences as the sole explanation for this fact ignores the existence of economic, social, and other structural barriers to Hmong American women's educational persistence and success. Lee shares the stories of several Hmong American women who are pursuing or have completed higher education in the United States, investigating the factors--economic, racial, and cultural--that helped or hindered their decisions to continue their education. These women are part of a movement within the Hmong community that questions traditional expectations for women and girls, in particularly marriage and motherhood. Lee illustrates how these women's experiences are also shaped by social factors such as welfare policies and racism. Their stories demonstrate that cultural transformation is neither a smooth nor unambiguous process.
We Can't Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard
by John Hoerr.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. 292 pp. $29.95.
In We Can't Eat Prestige, freelance writer John Hoerr offers a passionate view of the unionism practiced by the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW). This union, organized by women workers and a few men, represents Harvard's support staff - that group of workers most often invisible in the literature on higher education. They are the secretaries, library and laboratory assistants, dental hygienists, accounting clerks, and other office workers who "perform vital services yet [have] no voice, or standing, or recognition of any sort" (p. 3). Hoerr writes that these workers had to put up with exploitative management policies that denied them respect and decent wages.
Kris Rondeau, a former laboratory research assistant at the Harvard Medical School, led a fifteen-year struggle to establish the union in the face of fierce opposition from then-President Derek Bok, deans of schools, and staff lawyers who worked to defeat the union. Some workers (including Rondeau initially) also opposed the union, viewing unions as incompatible with the prestige and status that working at Harvard conferred. Other workers resented the "patronizing and condescending way that the men - faculty members, administrators, and postdoctoral assistants - treated female research assistants" (p. 27). For example, Leslie Sullivan, a research assistant in the School of Public Health, thought about leaving her dead-end job, "but where would she go? If she couldn't get fair and equal treatment at Harvard University, the institutional paragon of liberal enlightenment, then where?" (p. 28).
The push for a union grew out of the women's movement of the early 1970s and efforts of women in the Harvard Medical area to achieve equality and end discriminatory treatment. In the initial request to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the organizers included only the medical area. Harvard's lawyers appealed, saying that the union vote should include all support staff. The NLRB denied that appeal, but the union nevertheless lost the 1977 elections. The union organizers also lost in 1981. However, in an appeal to the NLRB that took two years to be decided, Harvard lawyers required that all support staff participate in the vote to unionize or not.
Union organizers were successful in 1988, winning the election with 50.7 percent of the vote. Hoerr argues that this narrow win was a result of Harvard's aggressive anti-union campaign that included "captive audience" meetings of support staff who were lectured by personnel who "used the old debating trick of citing facts and making generalizations that no one in the audience would have enough knowledge to contradict" (p. 196). Additionally, there were attempts to create racial division among support staff. However, union organizers emphasized its guiding principles: "collective voice, pay equity for women, child care and parental leave programs, job flexibility, and a career program" (p. 197). The two most important principles they put forth were self-representation and participation. The union slogan, "It's not anti-Harvard to be pro-union," appealed to support staff who wanted to "make the institution even better than it was" (p. 199).
Hoerr points out the irony that Harvard's President Derek Bok and faculty members asserted "the right of workers to form a union yet fought unionization efforts of workers on campus." In a letter to all employees, Bok wrote, "I am not at all persuaded in this case that union representation and collective bargaining will improve the working environment or help us to sustain the highest quality of education and research" (p. 204).
Immediately after the 1988 vote, Harvard's administration asked the NLRB to overturn the election, claiming that the union had created an "intimidating atmosphere" on election day (p. 212). What was the intimidating atmosphere? Union organizers had decorated Harvard Yard with balloons. The NLRB hearing judge dismissed Harvard's objections to the election. Further, he "chastised the Harvard lawyers for distorting testimony" and wrote, "a pattern emerges that transcends what might lightly be dismissed as an aggressive adversarial approach" (p. 221).
Hoerr details the difficult decision Bok made to stop fighting the union and asserts that he was serious about developing a "relationship that would be valuable, interesting, and even new" (p. 225). Under Bok's leadership, management and the union agreed on a contract that acknowledged that support staff should have a role in governance. Unlike other union contracts, HUCTW's contract did not include detailed rules and rights, but offered general guidelines, a problem-solving process that encouraged workers to represent themselves, and joint councils (including union and management representatives) to give workers a voice in decisionmaking.
The author notes that the union has produced economic benefits for workers and that many workers have benefited from active participation in union and joint activities. He concludes that, after three years, HUCTW has not created a revolution. It has created "a community of workers" involved "in redesigning their workplace and work life" (p. 244). As Hoerr points out, however, the partnership that Bok initiated did not continue under the leadership of now-President Neil Rudenstine. Under Rudenstine's leadership, "much of the creativity had been throttled and the new relationship that Bok envisioned existed in outline only" (p. 260).
Hoerr is a specialist in labor reporting and the author of And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry. This background may help us understand his fascination with HUCTW and his emphasis on how it differs from traditional, male-dominated unions characterized by contentious strikes and rule-bound contracts. It may also explain why he glosses over the increase in rules in the HUCTW contract since 1995. Hoerr also relies too much on HUCTW success stories - those workers who have been able to actively participate in decisionmaking through joint councils - neglecting those workers in departments that do not allow joint councils. He apparently failed to talk to any rank-and-file workers who have been discouraged from pursuing complaints or whose supervisors remain convinced that clerical workers have little to contribute and let them know that they "were not and never will be an integral part of the teaching and research function" (p. 254).
m.k.
The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894-1985
by Charles van Onselen.
New York: Hill & Wang, 1996. 649 pp. $16.00 (paper).
The seed is mine. The ploughshares are mine.
The span of oxen is mine. Everything is mine.
Only the land is theirs.
- Kas Maine
This quote opens a remarkable and beautifully written oral history. It is the biography of Ramabonela Maine, also known as Kas Maine, who was born in 1894 to a BaSotho family in the Transvaal, in South Africa. Charles van Onselen of the University of Witwaterstand in Johannesburg spent fifteen years working on this book: his first interview with Kas Maine was in 1979, while Maine was in one of South Africa's resettlement camps. Maine's life, his prodigious memory, and the "five hundred or more scraps of paper which Maine himself had been careful to preserve" (p. 10) served as the core of van Onselen's program of structured interviewing of Maine's wives, children, and grandchildren over a period of ten years. The result is an extremely accessible history of South Africa's rural and agricultural origins. Most outsiders do not recall that twenty-five years ago, most South Africans lived and worked in the countryside. Kas Maine was a prosperous sharecropper who was able to maintain his economic independence; he never worked for anyone. While in earlier years Maine enjoyed good relations with landlords that he could trust, "the economic distance between landlord and tenant was widened by the racial and political inequities that came first with conquest, then with segregation, later still with the policy of apartheid" (p. 7).
For example, Black tenants were denied equal access to state resources, such as credit from the Land Bank. This "hastened the decline of sharecropping" and drove those sharecroppers who refused to accept wage labor west and north into "drier areas where grain farming was less dependable." By 1913, South Africa's Native Land Act prevented Black South Africans not only from buying property outside of designated areas, but also forbade sharecropping in the "agricultural heartland of the highveld" (p. 7). Van Onselen writes that verbal sharecropping contracts between relatively affluent Black tenants, like Maine, and poor White landowners continued for nearly a half century after they were outlawed. These arrangements continued because many of the White landowners were poor, and they needed the oxen and mules owned by the Black sharecroppers to produce the tobacco, maize, and vegetables.
However, mechanization and the Marketing Act of 1937, which guaranteed White farmers a minimum price for their grain, made landlords less dependent on the sharecroppers' production techniques. Those Black sharecroppers who did not want to be wage laborers were forced to move into the newly established Black homelands, and their children were forced to work in the mines, as wage laborers on White-owned farms, or to live in the cities. Maine's family serves as a symbol of wealthy Black sharecroppers who were destroyed as they were forced onto poor, dry land and beaten down by the consolidation of apartheid.
This book will be prized by historians and educators interested in learning more about South Africa and the effects of apartheid on the economy, traditions, and customs of Black sharecroppers who comprised the backbone of the country. Anyone interested in historical methodology, biography, or qualitative research should read this book; it is a fine example of the melding of interviews and historical documents to tell Maine's story, which is really the story of all South Africans. Finally, this text will help students gain a better understanding of present-day South Africa as it moves toward democracy and modern capitalism for all.
m.k.
The Essential Piaget: An Interpretive Reference and Guide
edited by Howard E. Gruber and J. Jacques Vonėche.
Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995, 2nd ed. 912 pp. $50.00 (paper).
This second edition of "the best and most complete of all the anthologies" of Jean Piaget's work, published in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth, will be valued by all scholars interested in his work, and in cognitive psychology in general. The first hardcover and paperback editions, published in 1977 and 1982, respectively, have been out of print for several years. Thus, this new paperback edition should be welcomed by many. The editors, professors Howard E. Gruber and J. Jacques Vonėche, provide an illuminating introduction to the book as a whole, along with topical introductions to the different sections and explanatory notes. They also include a chronology of Piaget's life, a bibliography, and name and subject indexes.
The Essential Piaget spans some seventy years of Piaget's writings, thematically organized by the editors in sections: Biology; Philosophy; Education; Egocentric Thought in the Child; The Mind of the Baby; Logico-Mathematical Operations; The Representation of Reality; Figurative Aspects of Thought; and Factors of Development. In each section, the editors include extensive selections from Piaget's writings, ranging from excerpts from his most influential books to some of his most important articles, along with several texts published in English for the first time in translations by the editors. These include his first paper, An Albino Sparrow (1907), his prose poem The Mission of the Idea (1915), and a summary of his novel Recherche (1918).
Gruber and Vonėche argue that Piaget began his career as a biologist, and that he only turned to psychology in order to address certain problems in philosophy and biology. The editors highlight this idea by providing the reader with psychological, philosophical, and biological texts, as well as selections in which Piaget established different connections and relationships between these fields.
In this second edition, the editors add a brief preface, as well as a last section, Retrospection, in which they "look back at the essential" in an attempt to "show the continuities and discontinuities in Piaget's oeuvre from his early writings to the last ones" (p. 863). They highlight the commonalities, as well as the sense of repetitiveness that is reached when analyzing his diverse writings. As Gruber and Vonėche point out, "when old themes recur, there is always some way in which the new developments reincorporate the past" (p. xiii). One such recurrent theme that "pervades the entire oeuvre" (p. 865) is that of equilibrium, which the editors argue took both personal and abstract theoretical forms for Piaget. Gruber and Vonėche point out that the discontinuities in Piaget's work highlight his shift from a focus on tracking and describing developmental change through stage-theoretical terms, to a focus on explaining change through specific principles and mechanisms. Other discontinuities in his work are described in the areas of reflective abstraction and generalization, causality, and contradiction, and in Piaget's shift from possibilities to necessities and from formal, content-free logic to a logic of meaning.
This new edition of The Essential Piaget is a "must," an essential read for students and experts of psychology in general, and of Piaget's theory in particular. It also brings up questions regarding the place that Piaget's work and theory have within the scope of psychology at a time when much attention has been paid to it at the many conferences, seminars, and colloquia organized around the world in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. Gruber and Vonėche help to highlight the fact that there is still amazing wealth to be explored in Piaget's work.
b.m.b.
Journey with Children: The Autobiography of a Teacher
by Frances P. Lothrop Hawkins.
Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997. 432 pp. $22.50 (paper).
The autobiography of Frances Lothrop Hawkins, Journey with Children, is the story of a teacher who believes in children. It artfully illustrates how teaching demands listening, watching closely, and following children where their natural curiosities lead them. And it is about respect.
Hawkins tells us, "To have respect for children is more than recognizing their potentialities in the abstract, it is also to seek out and value their accomplishments - however small they may appear by the normal standards of adults" (p. 350). Examples of Hawkins's keen ability to recognize children's accomplishments and genuinely give them value are found throughout this book. Her respect for children is illustrated not only through her direct encounters with them, but also through the settings that she carefully designs for her students. Whether in the field school, on the Indian reservation, at a co-op school for four-year-olds, or in classrooms in inner-city Boston, Hawkins provides children with environments that elicit their own interests and thereby "deepen their engagement in practice and thought" (p. 350).
Journey with Children is organized chronologically, beginning with Hawkins's first teaching experience, as a substitute in mid-Depression San Francisco, and recounts her varied experiences in rural, urban, and home-grown "gypsy" classrooms. Woven into the many stories of her students is her theory, which holds the book together.
As I read this enlightening account, I found myself wishing to know more about Frances Hawkins's life outside of teaching. Although in the Introduction she touches on the relationship between her childhood history and her teaching, I still found myself asking who Frances Lothrop Hawkins was before she walked into that first classroom as a teacher and what influences from her life account for the teacher she has become. I would have loved to hear stories that would shed some light on how she has come to watch so closely, listen so intently, and deeply understand children the way she does.
m.h.
Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children
by Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996. 406 pp. $32.50 (paper).
Literacy instruction has undergone dramatic changes over the past fifteen years. Spurred by current research in the teaching of writing, holistic learning, and reading recovery, elementary school educators are reexamining and revising long-held teaching practices. With the movement from basal readers to real literature, teachers have been redefining their role in reading instruction.
Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children is a key book for teachers who have been trying to make sense of how, when, and where instruction happens in reading, and why it is essential. An often-quoted misconception regarding literature-based reading instruction is that if children are surrounded with good books, they will learn to read. Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell explain that surrounding children with the right materials is not enough, that we must also provide "good first teaching" in order to help children develop strategies necessary to become independent readers. In this book they illustrate how guided reading - "showing children how to read and supporting them as they read - is the heart of a balanced literacy program" (p. 1).
The first half of the book focuses on what guided reading is, how it fits within the context of a balanced literacy program, and what the organization and management of such teaching and learning might look like. Based on their own years of research in early literacy, Fountas and Pinnell help teachers think about what they need to do to create a classroom environment that supports beginning readers. In addition to being rich in practical application, each of these chapters is also firmly grounded in theory.
The second half of the book is a compilation of reproducible appendices to help teachers with the nitty-gritty of implementing guided reading in the context of a larger literacy program.
This is an important book for teachers, administrators, prospective teachers, college professors, or anyone seeking to provide quality teaching to children in their first years of schooling.
m.h.
One Child, Two Languages: A Guide for Preschool Educators of Children Learning English as a Second Language
by Patton O. Tabors.
Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brooks, 1997. 195 pp. $24.95.
In One Child, Two Languages: A Guide for Preschool Educators of Children Learning English as a Second Language, Patton O. Tabors, a research associate for the Projects in Language Development at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, provides a comprehensive and readable resource that early childhood teachers, administrators, and parents will find insightful and invaluable.
One Child, Two Languages is divided into two parts: the first part discusses children as language learners, while the second illustrates how teachers can support children's second-language acquisition. As a participant observer, the author studied culturally and linguistically diverse young learners and teachers in one English-language classroom over two years. The first part offers in-depth portraits of two children - Juliana, a native English speaker, and Byong-sun, a second-language learner - to demonstrate the complex process of acquiring language within a learning environment. There are multiple examples that illustrate Juliana's and Byong-sun's challenges in acquiring English.
The second part is a step-by-step guide that preschool teachers will find useful in supporting children's second-language acquisition and social learning in different classroom settings. There are strategies on how to use the curriculum to promote language development, the teacher's role in assessing the development of second-language learners, and working with parents. One Child, Two Languages is a resource that can help preschool educators begin to understand the complex challenges that second-language learners face in acquiring English in the preschool classroom.
c.a.
Taking Note: Improving Your Observational Notetaking Power
by Brenda Miller Power.
York, ME: Stenhouse, 1996. 96 pp. $12.50 (paper).
Taking Note: Improving Your Observational Notetaking is a "little handbook" filled with strategies to help teachers become more skillful observers of their students. Through specific techniques and practical information, Miller suggests ways for teachers to learn more carefully about their classrooms. Although the book is set in literacy classrooms, it offers techniques and information to all teachers who want to learn in depth about their students.
Taking Note is a practical book, offering many samples of teacher records, suggestions for how to begin to take notes, and what to do with the information collected. Although the wealth of notetaking techniques may seem overwhelming at first, Miller's goal is not to suggest more work for teachers. Instead, she presents ways for teachers to record observations in systematic ways that simplify rather than complicate their lives. She says:
I want this handbook to help you find more time for the things you care about (in and out of the classroom) and still find time to write more cogent and thoughtful notes and narratives about your students. I hope it helps you shift the ways you use the time you have. (p. 4)
Power's clear, lucid voice and sharp sense of humor make it an enjoyable book to read, as well as an informative resource for both seasoned and beginning teachers.
m.h.