Together, the authors examine and compare the importance of such factors as sense of identity, self-esteem, social world, and power in what and how women learn. Drawing from extensive research and scholarship, as well as from personal stories, they reveal the numerous ways in which women experience the learning process. They explain, for example, how women often become personally connected to the object and process of learning. They also analyze these different experiences to show education and training professionals how to better design and conduct programs for women. Women as Learners offers specific recommendations to improve all types of formal and informal adult educational programs, including literacy education, counseling and support groups, workplace training, and professional development activities.
While powerful gender inequalities remain in American society, women have made substantial gains and now largely surpass men in one crucial arena: education. Women now outperform men academically at all levels of school, and are more likely to obtain college degrees and enroll in graduate school. What accounts for this enormous reversal in the gender education gap? In The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools, Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann provide a detailed and accessible account of women’s educational advantage and suggest new strategies to improve schooling outcomes for both boys and girls. The Rise of Women opens with a masterful overview of the broader societal changes that accompanied the change in gender trends in higher education. The rise of egalitarian gender norms and a growing demand for college-educated workers allowed more women to enroll in colleges and universities nationwide. As this shift occurred, women quickly reversed the historical male advantage in education. By 2010, young women in their mid-twenties surpassed their male counterparts in earning college degrees by more than eight percentage points. The authors, however, reveal an important exception: While women have achieved parity in fields such as medicine and the law, they lag far behind men in engineering and physical science degrees. To explain these trends, The Rise of Women charts the performance of boys and girls over the course of their schooling. At each stage in the education process, they consider the gender-specific impact of factors such as families, schools, peers, race and class. Important differences emerge as early as kindergarten, where girls show higher levels of essential learning skills such as persistence and self-control. Girls also derive more intrinsic gratification from performing well on a day-to-day basis, a crucial advantage in the learning process. By contrast, boys must often navigate a conflict between their emerging masculine identity and a strong attachment to school. Families and peers play a crucial role at this juncture. The authors show the gender gap in educational attainment between children in the same families tends to be lower when the father is present and more highly educated. A strong academic climate, both among friends and at home, also tends to erode stereotypes that disconnect academic prowess and a healthy, masculine identity. Similarly, high schools with strong science curricula reduce the power of gender stereotypes concerning science and technology and encourage girls to major in scientific fields. As the value of a highly skilled workforce continues to grow, The Rise of Women argues that understanding the source and extent of the gender gap in higher education is essential to improving our schools and the economy. With its rigorous data and clear recommendations, this volume illuminates new ground for future education policies and research.
This book explores Japanese women's desire for English as a means of identity transformation and as access to the West and its masculinity. Drawing on ethnographic data and critical discourse analysis, the book illuminates how such desire impacts upon the linguistic, social, and romantic choices made by young women in Japan and overseas.
Too Scared to Learn explores the impact of women's experiences of violence on their learning, and proposes radical changes to educational programs through connecting therapeutic and educational discourses. Little attention has previously been paid to the impact of violence on learning. A large percentage of women who come to adult literacy programs have experienced, or are currently experiencing, violence in their lives. This experience of violence negatively affects their ability to improve their literacy skills. Literacy programs and other educational programs have not integrated this reality into their work. This book builds on extensive research that revealed the wide range of impacts violence has on adult literacy learning. Interviews with counselors and therapists, literacy learners, and educators working in different situations, and a wide range of theoretical and experiential literature, form the basis of the analysis. Educators are offered information to support reconceptualizing programs and practices and making concrete changes that will enable women to learn more effectively. The book makes clear that without an acknowledgment of the impact of violence on learning, women, rather than getting a chance to succeed and improve their literacy skills, get only a chance to fail, confirming to themselves that they really cannot learn. Essential reading for literacy and adult education practitioners, teachers of English as a second language, and education theorists, Too Scared to Learn explores the intersection among trauma, psychological theory, and pedagogy. The book is filled with a wealth of practical ideas, possibilities, and thoughts about what practitioners might do differently in classrooms and educational institutions if we begin to think differently about violence.
The story of the American university in the past half century is about the rise of women in participation as students, faculty members, college athletes, and in subsequently changing the overall university culture for the better. Now almost sixty percent of the overall college student population in America is female, and still growing. By the year 2000, women surpassed men worldwide in attendance at higher education institutions. At the same time, after years of a disproportionate dominant male professoriate, female faculty members are now becoming the majority of university professors. While top university presidents are still largely male, women have achieved real gains in the overall administrative ranks and trustee positions. In all areas of the university disparities still exist in terms of compensation and balance in key areas of the academy, but the overall positive trend is clear. Few to this date have recognized and chronicled this extraordinary change in college education—one of society’s fundamental and influential institutions. For universities the test for the future is to make the changes needed in broad areas within higher education from financial aid to curriculum, student activities, and overall campus culture in order to better foster a newly empowered majority of women students.
Education was decisive in recasting women's subjectivity and the lived reality of their collective experience in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America. Asking how and why women shaped their lives anew through education, Mary Kelley measures the significant transformation in individual and social identities fostered by female academies and seminaries. Constituted in a curriculum that matched the course of study at male colleges, women's liberal learning, Kelley argues, played a key role in one of the most profound changes in gender relations in the nation's history: the movement of women into public life. By the 1850s, the large majority of women deeply engaged in public life as educators, writers, editors, and reformers had been schooled at female academies and seminaries. Although most women did not enter these professions, many participated in networks of readers, literary societies, or voluntary associations that became the basis for benevolent societies, reform movements, and activism in the antebellum period. Kelley's analysis demonstrates that female academies and seminaries taught women crucial writing, oration, and reasoning skills that prepared them to claim the rights and obligations of citizenship.
Female seminaries in nineteenth-century America offered middle-class women the rare privilege of training in music and the liberal arts. A music background in particular provided the foundation for a teaching career, one of the few paths open to women. Jewel A. Smith opens the doors of four female seminaries, revealing a milieu where rigorous training focused on music as an artistic pursuit rather than a social skill. Drawing on previously untapped archives, Smith charts women's musical experiences and training as well as the curricula and instruction available to them, the repertoire they mastered, and the philosophies undergirding their education. She also examines the complex tensions between the ideals of a young democracy and a deeply gendered system of education and professional advancement. An in-depth study of female seminaries as major institutions of learning, Transforming Women's Education illuminates how musical training added to women's lives and how their artistic acumen contributed to American society.
Historically, white women have had a tremendous influence on establishing the ideological, political, and cultural scaffold of American public schools. Pedagogical orientations, school policies, and classroom practices are underwritten by white, cisgender, feminine, and middle to upper class social and cultural norms. Labor trends suggest that students of color are likely to sit in front of many more white women teachers than males or non?white teachers, thus making it imperative to better understand the nature of white women’s work in culturally diverse settings and the factors that most profoundly impact their effectiveness. This book examines how white women teacher dispositions (i.e. knowledge, beliefs, and skills) intersect (and/or interact) with their racial identity development, the concept of whiteness, institutional racism, and cultural perspectives of racial difference. All of which, as the authors in this volume argue, matter for nurturing a teaching practice that leads to more equitable schooling outcomes for youth of color. While it is imperative that the field of education recruits and retains more nonwhite teachers, it is equally important to identify research?supported professional development resources for a white woman?dominated profession. To that end, the book’s contributors present critical insight for creating cultural contexts for learning conducive to effective cross?cultural and cross?racial teaching. Chapters in the first section explore white women’s role in establishing and maintaining school environments that cater to Eurocentric sensibilities and white racial preferences for learning and social interaction. Authors in the second section discern the implications of white images, whiteness, and white racial identity formation for preparing and professionally developing white women teachers to be effective educators. Chapters in the third section of the book emphasize the centrality of race in negotiating academic interactions that demonstrate culturally responsive teaching. Each chapter in this book is written to investigate the intersectionality of race, cultural responsive pedagogies, and teaching identities as it relate to teaching in multiethnic environments. In addition, the book offers solution?oriented practices to equip white women (and any other reader) to respond appropriately and adequately to the needs of racially diverse students in American schools.
Women’s lives are often written on our bodies. Yet very little is made of the impacts of embodiment for women in literacy education, both learners and professionals. This volume presents the writings of 26 contributors—teachers, students, and administrators—who examine the rich terrain of personal and professional experiences related to whole person engagement in learning and teaching. These writings provide a compass to guide readers through the bodily landscapes, mindful flights, willful spirits, and emotional embraces. Written with the same desire to open minds, hearts and practices to new understanding, this book builds on the successful style of Empowering Women through Literacy (2009). This new volume appeals to all readers, as the essays, poems, and investigations woven through its pages challenge us to consider the embodyment of women’s learning. Join us on the journey as we travel across many arenas and discover significant ways to comprehend and support best practices in teaching and learning, especially for women.
WINNER OF THE 2020 CONNECTICUT BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION AND NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS FOR BOOK CLUBS IN 2021 BY BOOKBROWSE "Perkins makes the story of these early and unwitting feminist pioneers come alive against the backdrop of the contemporaneous civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1970s, and offers observations that remain eerily relevant on U.S. campuses today."—Edward B. Fiske, bestselling author of Fiske Guide to Colleges "If Yale was going to keep its standing as one of the top two or three colleges in the nation, the availability of women was an amenity it could no longer do without." In the winter of 1969, from big cities to small towns, young women across the country sent in applications to Yale University for the first time. The Ivy League institution dedicated to graduating "one thousand male leaders" each year had finally decided to open its doors to the nation's top female students. The landmark decision was a huge step forward for women's equality in education. Or was it? The experience the first undergraduate women found when they stepped onto Yale's imposing campus was not the same one their male peers enjoyed. Isolated from one another, singled out as oddities and sexual objects, and barred from many of the privileges an elite education was supposed to offer, many of the first girls found themselves immersed in an overwhelmingly male culture they were unprepared to face. Yale Needs Women is the story of how these young women fought against the backward-leaning traditions of a centuries-old institution and created the opportunities that would carry them into the future. Anne Gardiner Perkins's unflinching account of a group of young women striving for change is an inspiring story of strength, resilience, and courage that continues to resonate today.
