"Education, Faculty of"@en . "Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCV"@en . "Ekdahl, Moira C."@en . "2008-09-17T22:48:30Z"@en . "1993"@en . "Master of Arts - MA"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "Personal observation, supported by Ministry of Education statistics, indicates that women are under represented in social studies teaching in BC. Social studies is about how humans interact and have interacted in the social world. Yet, these interactions are defined largely by men and are about men. The experience of women as teachers of social studies is both little studied and extremely important for understanding the subject and improving its teaching. This thesis looks at their experiences, as constructed in the stories of six women who have been leaders in the teaching of social studies and geography. It draws from their personal and professional narratives some reflections on women's ways of understanding equity, pedagogy, curriculum, citizenship, and leadership."@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/2227?expand=metadata"@en . "12253542 bytes"@en . "application/pdf"@en . "THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT SOCIAL STUDIES: WOMEN'S PERSPECTIVESbyMOIRA CHRISTINE EKDAHLB.A., Simon Fraser University, 1970A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OFTHE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OFMASTER OF ARTSinTHE FACULTY OF EDUCATIONDepartment of Social and Educational StudiesWe accept this thesis as conformingto the required standardTHE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIAJune, 1993\u00C2\u00A9 Moira Christine Ekdahl, 1993In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanceddegree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make itfreely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensivecopying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of mydepartment or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying orpublication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my writtenpermission.(Signature) Department of cc:taw...tzar! ( CV CiL4 atuj atttatitatal)The University of British ColumbiaVancouver, CanadaDate^ICECt.,^Tu.Aki--DE-6 (2/88)ABSTRACTPersonal observation, supported by Ministry of Education statistics, indicates that womenare underrepresented in social studies teaching in BC. Social studies is about how humansinteract and have interacted in the social world. Yet, these interactions are defined largely bymen and are about men. The experience of women as teachers of social studies is both littlestudied and extremely important for understanding the subject and improving its teaching. Thisthesis looks at their experiences, as constructed in the stories of six women who have beenleaders in the teaching of social studies and geography. It draws from their personal andprofessional narratives some reflections on women's ways of understanding equity, pedagogy,curriculum, citizenship, and leadership.TABLE OF CONTENTSAbstract^ iiTable of Contents^ iiiList of Tables vAcknowledgments viINTRODUCTION^ 1The Research Questions^ 5Organization of the Thesis 6CHAPTER 1: REVIEW OF LITERATURE^ 8Overview of the Study's Theoretical Framework^ 8Empowering Pedagogies: Feminist and Critical Discourse^ 9Women and the Discourse of Social Studies 13Women and the Discourse of Science and Mathematics Teaching^27Women and the Discourse of Teachers' Work^ 31The Ecology of Women's Identity Construction in SocialStudies^ 36Conclusion 39CHAPTER 2: FEMINIST METHODOLOGY^ 41CHAPTER 3: THE WOMEN'S PERSONAL STORIES^ 72The Life Story of Amanda-Leigh^ 73The Life Story of Tammy 77The Life Story of Joan^ 82The Life Story of Ellen 86The Life Story of Alison 91The Life Story of Louise^ 97Conclusion^ 104CHAPTER 4: NEGOTIATING THE CLASSROOM^ 107Pedagogical Perspectives^ 107Pedagogy: The Questionnaire Responses 111Pedagogy: The Conversations^ 114Democratic Pedagogy: Amanda-Leigh^ 114Critical Feminist Pedagogy: Tammy 117Inquiry Teaching: Joan^ 120Connected Pedagogy: Louise 123Social Science Teaching: Alison^ 128Disconnected Pedagogy: Ellen 132Conclusion: Women's Different Pedagogies 137CHAPTER 4: NEGOTIATING THE CLASSROOM, continued:Curricular Perspectives^ 139Curriculum: The Questionnaire Responses^ 142Curriculum: The Conversations^ 144Theme: Curriculum Autonomy 144Theme: Environmental Awareness^ 149Theme: Inclusion of Women 150Theme: The Business of Teaching Geography 12^155CHAPTER 5: NEGOTIATING THE CONTEXTS OF TEACHING 171Stories of \"Power With\": Transformational Leadership^ 174Stories of \"Power Over\": Transactional Leadership 178Narrative Themes^ 193Theme: Women and Anger^ 193Theme: Women's Discomfort 196Theme: Women's Laterality 199Theme: Women's Nurturing^ 202Theme: Women's Voices 206Dimensions of Leadership and Authority in Women's Terms^209Narrative Themes^ 210Theme: Educational Leadership^ 210Theme: Mentorship^ 215Conclusion: Negotiating Identities as Women in SocialStudies and Leadership 221CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSIONS^ 223Themes of the Study 223Constructing Women's Citizenship within EducationalCommunities^ 228Feminist Research as Praxis 236Implications of the Research 245Epilogue^ 249APPENDIX I: Report 2082, Male/Female Distribution by Subject^250APPENDIX II: Questionnaire, Responses^ 252APPENDIX III: Sample Interview Questions 259BIBLIOGRAPHY^ 262LIST OF TABLESTable 1:^Comparison of % Female TeachersSelected Grade 12 Academic Courses1992-1993 Ministry of Education Report 2082^ 2Table 2:^The Teachers' Curriculum Understandings 142ACKNOWLEDGMENTSMy journey through writing a thesis to claim a place and find my academic identity asa \"master\" of the educational discourse of social studies has been longer than many and notwithout its share of obstacles. I have learned several different languages and acquired map-reading skills along the way. I will not forget the vistas from the academy when I return to thefoothills of teaching.Dr. Donald C. Wilson's invitation to the graduate program in social studies meant the startof the search for the meaning of my work as a teacher and of my intuitive, partial, and tentativeunderstandings of women's teaching of social studies. Particular thanks are due to Drs. JaneGaskell and Peter Seixas, my co-advisors, who took over when Don's health meant he could nolonger guide my way. Drs. Cathie Cornbleth, Lynda Stone, Phyllis Shapiro, Deborah Court andWanda Cassidy provided summer places of learning, special resting places which restored myenergy, gave space and encouragement for reflection along the way, and added vital directionsto the map. I would like to thank them all for their support, knowledge, and encouragement.I thank Dr. Valerie Raoul for her interest in this project.My children, Ken and Janika, were not teenagers when the project began. They arebigger than I remember the last time we played. I look forward to learning how to play again.I thank them both for their patience and for not getting lost while I've been away.Thanks, too, to Clark, who, in the midst of and despite our clutter, helped me to find mydirection again. Our lessons were important to the feminist processes which I was exploring.I'm stronger for both journeys. I wish him luck on his journey to finding the way to tell his ownstory.The encouragement of special long-time friends has made the journey easier. Pam,Georgette, Rosaleen, and Derek have each in different ways made the travelling easier. I thankthem all for the breaks, meals, phone calls, caring, invitations, and assistance which have keptme on the right track and provided sustenance and encouragement along the way. Thanks tooto those whose mentoring I have valued; Dr. Len Drugge, Harvey Barnes, Derek Grant, and FredBrown have, in their leadership capacities, made a difference for schools, for teachers, forstudents, and for me. Their particular invitations in education gave me confidence as apractitioner; their understandings of education provided the spark of energy required to undertakemy own search for such insights. Particular thanks to Fred for his technical support of thisproject.I have made new friends en route. Tim was always there on Fridays to keep me fromdrifting from the path. Alan Sears and Craig Harding, doctoral students in social studies, wereextremely supportive and helpful. But my most profound thanks are for the women of this studywho spent hours reading, talking, and encouraging this journey to its completion. What they doas women teachers of social studies is important. In their stories of teaching and leadership aredirections for transforming the stories of social studies and education. They have helped re-drawthe maps to include women's alternate paths and understandings of the sometimes difficult terrainalong the way.- vi -_INTRODUCTIONSocial studies is concerned with the processes through which individual and socialidentities are formed and transformed; it is about \"the study of human action in the social world,and the activity of learning itself takes place within such social action\" (Whitson and Stanley,as cited in Stanley (1991, p. 258). But women are marginalized in social studies, leaving \"humanaction in the social world\" to be defined largely in male terms. The experience of women asteachers in social studies is both little studied and extremely important for understanding thesubject and improving its teaching. This thesis looks at the experiences of six women who havebeen leaders in the teaching of social studies and draws from their experiences some reflectionson equity, pedagogy, curriculum, and leadership.In a comprehensive analysis of the present state of social studies in the U.S., Jenness(1990) alludes to the absence of women social studies teachers in one school, adding that \"it iswell established that nationally, most social studies teachers are men\" (p.361); he footnotesfigures of 60 to 75% male teachers. Rutter (1986) also notes the imbalance:Three-quarters of social studies teachers are male; 92% are white.Social studies is the most male-dominated subject although science,math, and computer science also have large proportions of maleteachers (p.252).BC Ministry of Education data (1992b; see Appendix I) confirm personal observation thatwomen are underrepresented in social studies in British Columbia to a greater degree than theyare in the US. Table 1 compares the presence of women teaching senior social studies elective- 2 -courses with academic areas not traditionally taught by women and with academic areas moretraditionally associated with women's teaching:Social Studies Math/Science English/LanguagesLaw 12 9% Physics 12 7% English 12 44%Geog 12 14% Chem 12 11% Eng Lit 12 47%Hist 12 17% Math 12 17% French 12 71%Table 1: Comparison of % Female TeachersSelected Grade 12 Academic Courses1992-1993 Ministry of Education Report 2082Kelly and Nihlen (1982) suggest the greatest implication of women's underrepresentation: Thegender of a teacher, when sex-segregated by subject area, may well tell students that particularsubject matter is legitimate knowledge for one sex rather than both sexes\" (p.169).The Ministry of Education publication entitled Gender Equity (1991) notes the unevendistribution of women across subject areas.Female teachers are a small minority in several key areas:computer education (10.6%), mathematics (20.9%) science (17.8%)and social studies (25.3%) (p.8).The underrepresentation of women in social studies is not generally acknowledged, although thereis recognition of the problem in the other more technical areas. The figures cited for socialstudies, however, obscure another reality of women's teaching of social studies and that is theiruneven distribution. Most of these women (70%) teach junior social studies, that is, socialstudies 8, 9, and 10. Kelly and Nihlen's (1982) point that \"the higher the level of education, thefewer the number of women in administrative and teaching positions\" (p.168) is confirmed insocial studies teaching. The higher the grade level, the less noticeable the presence of womenin social studies; besides the figures for senior elective courses in social studies already shownin Table 1, in grade 11 social studies, 22% of teachers are women, as compared with grade 8,31%. Women who teach senior courses (grade 11, Law 12, History 12, Geography 12, and- 3 -Western Civilization 12) constitute only 7% of secondary social studies teachers in BC. In fact,men are nearly five times more likely to teach senior courses than women. The figures varyconsiderably from district to district within the province, as well, with some small districts havingno women at all teaching social studies. (Interestingly, however, 58% of teachers of SciencesHumaines, that is, French Immersion social studies, are women.) Enrollment in preservice socialstudies methods courses promises little change. In UBC's Teacher Education program (1992-1993), only 14% of the students in social studies methods courses are women, as compared with30% in science and 40% in mathematics methods.The dominance of men is also expressed in curriculum and in the way in which socialstudies is taught. Current social studies curricular objectives explicitly include the transmissionof a nation's legacy: its culture, its history, its citizenship expectations. Jane Roland Martin(1982) says that this has been mainly a male legacy:When the activities and experiences traditionally associated withwomen are excluded from the educational realm and when thatrealm is defined in terms of male activities and experiences, thenthese become the educational norms for all human beings (p.146).Feminists have shown that the treatment of history in schools has been based on the \"whiteman's\" discovery and exploration of the new world and on his attempts to make sense of theseprocesses in legal, artistic, military, political, economic, and social terms. History as it has beentaught, says Rich (1986), is \"white man's nostalgia...[which] sees only certain kinds of humanlives as valuable, as deserving of a history at all\" (p.140).Even a reformed liberal-progressive curriculum inadequately addresses the realcontributions of women (McKenna, 1989). Such a curriculum insets the experiences of women;stories of great women like Elizabeth I and Eleanor of Aquitaine, pictures of women, and- 4 -references to women's achievements such as the attainment of the suffrage, have been added tothe main story as sidebars in textbooks in response to the feminist challenge.On the positive side, women have gained access to a world onceexclusively maintained for men. On the negative side, socialstudies ... has been flooded with trivia and is threatened bycontinuing fragmentation. Further, women's genuine contributionshave been glossed over because they do not fit the male model ofachievement (Noddings, 1992, p.240).Male dominance may also be viewed in pedagogical terms. Profiles based on large-scalesurveys of social studies teachers conclude, for example, that social studies teachers are morelikely to coach sports than other academic teachers but are often isolated professionally, havinglittle time to collaborate or take part in professional development; they rely on a narrow rangeof traditional teaching and evaluative strategies; they value coverage of content and are text-focussed in their approach to curriculum; their lessons are teacher-centred; most do not belongto professional associations (Clarke, 1982; Goodlad, 1984; Rutter, 1986; Cassidy and Bognar,1991; Aoki, 1977; Cuban, 1991). While such profiles hardly describe exemplary teaching formen or women, it can be argued that they are closer to what feminists critique as male -- or atleast not female -- pedagogy. Feminist scholarship suggests that women, valuing connection,create teaching and learning contexts which are more collaborative, collegial, cooperative, andinteractive (Tetreault, 1986).Social studies research has not recognized gender as a factor in teaching. Leming (1986)ignores gender in his call for research on curriculum effectiveness and for descriptions based oninsights and commonalities of exemplary programs in social studies. Dynesson (1984) is alsosilent on gender in calling for innovative social studies research in several areas, including: therole of the social studies classroom on cultural transmission; the connection between culturallearning, cognition, human behaviour, and the social studies classroom; the relationship between- 5 -teachers' communication skills and student learning; the links between instructional modes andlearning outcomes; the relationship between cultural learning and discovery/inquiry methods ofteaching; the connection between teachers' concern for students and the use of instructionalmaterials; and the personal and professional attributes of effective teachers of social studies.Armento (1986) claims that social studies pedagogy can be better understood by considering theaffective and cognitive dimensions of both teachers and students, as well as the ecological andpolitical institutional factors in which teaching is contextualized. She also suggests thatresearchers examine the ways in which teachers \"care\" in encouraging students to \"connect\" withsocial studies, social issues, and sociopolitical action. \"New social studies constructs, such asthe ethic of caring, should be carefully considered for their relevance to research on teachingsocial studies\" (1991, p.193). All these questions have a gender dimension which needs to beexplored. Since gender is a factor in curricular and pedagogical transformation processes and,as Fouts (1990) indicates, in student response to curriculum and teaching practice, then researchinto social studies teaching can be informed by research into women teaching social studies.THE RESEARCH QUESTIONSThe purpose of this investigation is to begin such research by describing the experienceof women who are considered leaders in the field of teaching social studies. The experiences ofthese women will be important because, as Cuban (1991) suggests, social studies researchersshould focus on teachers as individuals in particular settings and in particular environments toexamine the beliefs that inform their practice:By the 'individual,' I mean seeking answers in how teachers thinkand behave, but with an emphasis on the will of teachers to makechoices and bend situations to meet their goals. By 'setting,' Imean the immediate context of the work that teachers do, that is,the classroom and school. By 'environment,' I mean the district,the community, the state, and the federal structures that influence- 6 -the school, and the larger culture with its values that inevitablypenetrate the classroom (p.206).Inclusion in Ministry of Education committees on curriculum development andevaluation/assessment is used in this study as the criterion of leadership, although otherdimensions of leadership are also evident. Asking why these exemplary women teach as theydo and understand their work as they do facilitates an investigation of the many factors that shapetheir practice of teaching as women. The study seeks perspectives, insights, differences, andcommonalities to illuminate how these women perceive the experience of social studies in theirown terms.Research questions which underlie the investigation are:1. What are the personal and professional attributes of women whohave shown leadership in the field of social studies?2. How do successful women respond to the experience of teachingsocial studies? That is, how do women negotiate, conform to, orresist the dominant expectations inherent in the domain of socialstudies?3.^What incentives and/or obstacles -- personal, structural, orcurricular -- do women perceive in the teaching of social studies?ORGANIZATION OF THE THESISChapter 1 reviews current literature which pertains to the study. Chapter 2 describes themethodology used in conducting the study and analyzing the data obtained. Chapter 3 tells eachwoman's personal story, describing the 'individual,' in Cuban's terms, and what she brings asa woman to the profession of teaching and to the teaching of social studies, in particular.Chapter 4 focuses on classroom 'settings' and examines the particular curricular and pedagogicalstories by which they describe their practice of teaching. Chapter 5 looks at the larger landscapesof the women's teaching, the 'environments' or particular contexts for teaching social studies,including departments, schools, professional groups, district, and Ministry of Education- 7 -committees in which they encounter the institutional and social forces which shape their lives asteachers. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 analyze the data with the understanding that, consciously orunconsciously, these women have particular beliefs and ways of knowing and of viewingthemselves culturally and socially, that is, particular standpoints and identities, by which theynegotiate and transform curriculum, practice, and experience in their teaching lives and aroundwhich they construct their stories. Chapter 6 reviews the major themes of the study andconsiders the implications of the findings of the study for teaching practice, for pre-serviceeducation, for students, for curricular reform and re-vision, as well as for hiring and promotionalpractices as these pertain to women and social studies, and for feminist research.8CHAPTER I: REVIEW OF THE LITERATUREIf, as Stanley (1991) tells us, social studies is the study of human action in the socialworld, then teaching and learning take place within patterns of social action which tie the socialstudies classroom inextricably and directly to the world beyond. To study the teaching of socialstudies from a gender perspective is to study the gendered patterns of social interaction.Overview of the Study's Theoretical FrameworkAs a study of women's experience of teaching social studies, the study is grounded in thetheoretical discourse of feminist and critical pedagogy, though these are perceived as problematicwithin the context of the study. Additionally, a gender lens is used to view the discourse ofsocial studies, seeking to expose the hidden and androcentric agenda of research, of teaching, andof the explicit curriculum, including history, geography, politics, and citizenship. Social studiesliterature, at worst, omits girls' and women's concerns and, at best, marginalizes them. Unlikethe literature of math and science teaching, social studies literature does not specifically discussa girl-friendly curriculum or teaching style. Research into social studies teaching indicates thepersistence of a tradition of text-focused, lecture-style, teacher-centred teaching, despite researchand reform initiatives for incorporation of more learner-focused (or student-friendly) strategiesto actively involve students in the construction of knowledge. Yet the discourse for women'steaching and leadership suggests that women prefer the more open, collaborative, integrative,horizontal agenda associated with current educational reform initiatives in BC. A poststructuralperspective cautions us to consider that there are many ways of being a woman and that gendergeneralizations are restricting, naive, contradictory, and potentially politically dangerous. Thediscourse of teachers' work exposes the contradictions which may be particularly significant forwomen, as education is increasingly tied to conservative economic and technical agendas. The- 9 -review of literature explores the theoretical underpinnings and paradoxical nature of the contextswithin which women experience and negotiate in complex ways their identities as teachers andleaders in social studies. Specifically, the study looks at the implications for women of thediscourse of teacher identity, of empowering, that is, critical and feminist, pedagogies, of socialstudies, as compared to science and mathematics, teaching and curriculum, and of the nature ofteachers' work.Empowering Pedagogies: Feminist and Critical DiscourseThe first area of review, the literature of feminist discourse and pedagogy, explores amodel for teaching which, the literature suggests, is grounded in women's experience. Feministteaching is connected, caring, collaborative, collegial, cooperative (Noddings, 1984, 1992;Shrewsbury, 1987; Schniedewind, 1987; Culley and Portuges, 1985); it assumes an ethic ofresponsibility to others rather than of individual rights (Gilligan, 1982; Gilligan, Lyons, Hanmer,1989). Feminist pedagogy has an explicit political ideology which seeks to transform classrooms,connected ecologically and holistically to local, regional, and global communities, with goals ofgender and social justice and commitment to growth, renewal, and life (Shrewsbury, 1987).Feminist pedagogy is based on a questioning of traditionalauthority relations between teacher and student and a distrust ofbureaucracy. It eschews the separation of the public classroomfrom private experience, and does not recognize a clear distinctionbetween emotion and reason. It is quite opposed, then, totraditional academic structures (Gaskell, McLaren, andNovogrodsky, 1989, p.197).This gender model raises questions: do the women in the study, consciously or unconsciously,incorporate Nodding's (1988) \"caring\" in their teaching and curriculum transformation?Kristeva's (1986) \"cyclical time\"? Ruddick's (1986) \"maternal thinking\"? Gilligan's (1982)\"connectedness\"? Belenky et al's (1986) intuitive and contextual \"ways of knowing\"? If so, aretheir \"women's ways\" somehow in conflict with the explicit or dominant pedagogical/curricular- 10 -ideologies of social studies teaching? Do they incorporate the cooperative, interactive, subjectivestrategies of Maher's (1987a) \"feminist classrooms\"? What \"connectedness\" do they have aswomen to curriculum and to teaching?The discourse of critical and democratic pedagogies has important implications forfeminist pedagogical models; all seek to empower students to act in ways which will benefit ortransform society (Apple, 1990; Wood, 1990; Osborne, 1991). Such teaching is progressive,democratic, reflective, relational, and dialectical. \"Pedagogy,\" says Osborne, \"is a powerful formof political education\" (p.13); a pedagogy which empowers students \"points to a political process\"which is directed to individual and social transformation (p.62). The critical/feminist perspectivechallenges the assumptions of universality which underpin traditional teaching and curriculum.This traditional refrain drowns out the voices of others in its exclusive monologue. Do thewomen of this study, in the content they teach and in their own actions and appearance, createa learning context which embodies \"commitment to a more just society for everyone\" (Weiler,1988, p.115)? Do they define themselves as \"creators and enactors of curriculum in improvingteaching and schooling\" (Miller, 1986, p.112), rather than as purveyors of the traditions ofteaching and curriculum? Do they engage in dialogue, as Miller suggests, \"among men andwomen who see the transformative power of education and who strive for the transformationsthat are possible through participation in knowledge creation as well as dissemination\" (p.121)?Do democratic and liberatory curricular goals impart to those who teach a sense of the politicsof personal power which, within institutional sites of hierarchy and patriarchy, is bothcontradictory and constrained?Constraints which some may feel in pursuing teaching or career goals create questionsabout the role of agency in the lives of women. Do themes of being acted upon and nurturancelimit women's sense of agency in teaching? Is there an active and/or intuitive awareness of the- 11 -institutionalized nature of male-dominance in pedagogical practice, in the ideologies which createthe master narratives of curriculum and which underpin the criteria for leadership? Are somewomen more constrained than others? How do they resist the constraints? Weiler (1988) tellsus that women resist notions of victimization; they still view themselves as making particularpersonal, academic, career, curricular, or pedagogical choices despite circumstances of constraint.Post-structural feminists acknowledge the \"essentially paternalistic project of traditionaleducation\" (Ellsworth, 1992, p.99) but offer critiques of critical and feminist theory, as well asdemocratic notions of education. Post-structural feminisms stand firmly on the feministfoundation or standpoint in rejecting normative masculinist representation but \"make conceptualspace for difference in subject location, identity and knowledges, [so as to render] such afoundation anti-essentialist and indeterminate\" (Luke and Gore, p.7). Critical theory is politicallygender-blind in its assumption that all have individual and equal rights to challenge the authorityof knowledge and power (Luke, 1992; Lather, 1992; Kenway and Modra, 1992; Martindale, 1992;Greene, 1988). Critical and democratic pedagogies fail to address the problems of inequitablepower relations in which some are more respected and empowered than others, some moreaudible (Briskin and Coulter, 1992; Lewis, 1992; Currie, 1992; Hoodfar, 1992). Progressive andfeminist pedagogies create essentialist traps for women in the very gender stereotypes they seekto escape (Kenway and Modra, 1992; Walkerdine, 1992). Post-structural feminisms refuse theEither/Or dualisms of Western liberal thought (Miles, 1989; Kenway and Mocha, 1992) as\"conceptual residue of the age of modernity\" (Luke, p.45), speaking instead of multiplicity andcontradictions (Gore, 1992).Fuss (1989) confronts the contradictions of poststructural feminism, however, in itscreation of the binary opposition of essence and difference; interrogating essence, she says, doesnot mean dismissing it, but coming to terms with its internal contradictions and being more- 12 -attentive to its cultural and historical specificities. The tensions created by the apparentcontradictions between essentialists' beliefs that the natural is constrained by the social and socialconstructionists' beliefs that the natural is produced by the social produce feminism's greatestinsights. Essence, in Fuss's view, lacks essence in that it is historically contingent, an elusiveand shifting category which must be risked and negotiated and accessed, not erased. One'ssubject-positions are not defined by clear and linear boundaries but are rather multiple, shifting,and changeable; allowance must also be made for real and material differences of privilegebetween women. The politics of essence, she suggests, depend upon \"who is utilizing it, how itis deployed, and where its effects are concentrated\" (p.20):I cannot help but think that the determining factor in decidingessentialism's political or strategic value is dependent upon whopractices it: in the hands of a hegemonic group, essentialism canbe employed as a powerful tool of ideological domination; in thehands of the subaltern, the use of humanism to mime ... humanismcan represent a powerful displacing repetition. The question of thepermissibility, if you will, of engaging in essentialism is thereforeframed and determined by the subject-position from which onespeaks (p.32).The essence of all feminisms is politics, says Fuss, though the risky debate over what kind ofpolitics continues and is essential in producing the critical tensions necessary to preventsolidification and paralysis.Beyond the philosophical debate about women's identities, Greene (1988) illuminates thereality of women's locations. Women are situated in the concreteness and particularities of theeveryday; they negotiate freedom and identity within constraints as on-going transactions of thematrices of social, cultural, economic, political, and psychological conditions. From theirdifferent standpoints, women negotiate a more complex, tentative, and difficult process to claimequality and the right to be heard than has been suggested in the discourse of the liberatory orempowering pedagogies and theories.- 13 -Women and the Discourse of Social StudiesA second area of literature relevant to this study is social studies research which addresseswomen's experience and concerns in some way. Sometimes the literature is notable for itsomission of a gender dimension, however, as Bernard-Powers (in press) cord' Ins in her feministlook at social studies research. \"Inattention to gender concerns is a major flaw in the review ofresearch in social studies,\" she claims. Within this broad area of social studies literature, thereare a number of sub-categories and tangents which relate to concerns identified for women insocial studies teaching.There are very few studies of women teaching secondary social studies, in fact, and theseare very recent. Few have been conducted from a feminist perspective. Cornett (1990) studiesthe impact of personal judgement on the professional decisions of an experienced secondarysocial studies teacher who happens to be a woman. He focuses on the factors which constituteher frame of reference for enacting curriculum in a senior elective course; gender is not seen asone of the filters.Bennett and Spalding (1992) identify seven different pedagogical perspectives in theirstudy of 68 academic teachers. Only in social studies are these all operational. They present\"colour portraits\" of each perspective; four of the portraits are of women. Theirs is aninterpretive, rather than a critical feminist, frame of reference, yet we can see in their portrait ofKatherine a woman uncomfortable in her attempts to conform to traditional curriculum objectivesand transmission pedagogy. Little about Katherine's teaching as an inculcator represents thefeminist pedagogical model. Marilyn who empowers, Caroline who nurtures, and Jenna whofacilitates thinking present happier portraits of women teaching social studies. While theresearchers identify the importance of teacher perspectives, or values, attitudes, and beliefs, to- 14 -teaching style, there is no gender lens by which to view these women's pedagogical perspectivesin social studies teaching.Another study by Evans (1988) focuses on the relationship of teachers' conceptions ofhistory to their interpretations of curriculum and to student responses to history. Evans' internsare three young men whose quite different views of history are \"shaped by interaction withcultural institutions\" (p.212). He speculates that gender may be one of several other importantdeterminants. These conceptions of history are important in transforming the curriculum and areshared by the students in their classes. Evans' study raises questions about the ways in whichbeing a woman influences conceptions of history and social studies, the transformation ofcurriculum, and ways in which students receive that transformed curriculum.Students who chose Tetreault's (1986) ten-week eleventh-grade women's history optionstruggled with the \"opinioney\" nature of the program; prior to her class, they had viewed historyas \"an objective record of the facts\" (p.81). The women's history class had altered their views:They had a glimmer of an understanding that learning history froma woman's perspective challenges the continuation of a dominantmale culture and threatens the common-sense rules that governmale and female relationships and responsibilities. Women'shistory gave them a critical edge (p.82).Another area of social studies literature reviewed for this study looks at the current reformdebates about schooling and about social studies (Goodlad, 1984; Jenness, 1990; Shaver, 1991).What are the implications of reform for women? Little or no reference is made to women or tothe \"proliferation of feminist scholarship\" and the changes alluded to by Tetreault (1987a) ashaving taken place in the last 15 years in thinking about women, gender, and social studies. This\"current renaissance,\" as she calls it, has reframed the way in which we see history:Women were an anomalous element in the content, structure, andmethodology of these disciplines, whose paradigm was one in- 15 -which men -- in most instances, dominant white men -- andtraditional male activities were the norm (p.170).Grambs (1987) discusses resistance to women's scholarship in social studies:There is an abundance of interesting, exciting, and revolutionaryfindings in all the social sciences and all branches of history. Yetthe experience and testimony of students and teachers, as well asstudies of school texts, indicate that women and scholarship aboutwomen's experience are still marginal, if not entirely missing(p.228).Fullinwinder (1991) analyzes the contributions of philosophical inquiry to social studiesresearch and teaching; feminist challenges to philosophy, he suggests, are like \"depth charges\"which may not affect philosophy so much as:... so roil the cultural surface that any number of creaky, barnacle-encrusted social, political, and educational traditions floating thereare put in peril of sinking. The wide-ranging feminist critiquesalone show how much of that surface needs rehabilitation, howmuch of our \"common sense\" about politics, education, science,sports, military service, business, finance, religion, and art needsrethinking. This rethinking, and the \"unthinking\" that must precedeit, need not involve plumbing the depths for metaphysicaldoctrines, but they do require that we \"think behind appearances,\"that is, that we bring to awareness beliefs and methods we more orless have taken for granted and have never much thought about, atleast from the point of view of gender. Making gender a centralcategory changes everything. What we thought was adequate,complete, impartial, neutral, objective, and comprehensive oftenlooks, through the prism of gender, to be partial, one-sided,incomplete, loaded, selective, and biased (p.17).He continues by examining the implications of the absence of women in law and science, inparticular \"questions about the very meaning of good science, the very meaning of justice in thecourtroom\" (p.17). Fullinwinder, like others, does not recognize the problems of the relativeabsence of women teaching social studies which must surely call into question the very meaningof a good education when \"human action\" is, in fact, largely a description of \"man's action\" inthe social world. Nor is the feminist challenge to social studies a main point in his argument.- 16 -Social studies literature also focuses on teaching models. In addition to constructinggeneralized profiles of social studies teachers, studies search for models of teacher competencein social studies. Cuban (1991) reviews the history of studies of social studies teaching, notingthe persistence of particular instructional patterns.Remarkable improvements in the occupation of teaching areparalleled by constancy in a narrow band of teaching practices andstudents' complaints about that teaching (p.205).Others confirm the predominance of the transmissive style of social studies teaching which istext-based, teacher-centred, and lecture-oriented, and which creates passive learning environmentsfor students (Rutter, 1986; Goodlad, 1984; Cuban, 1991; Armento, 1986; Wineburg and Wilson,1991; Thornton, 1991). Cohen (1988) traces the historical roots of the traditional model ofteaching as telling, knowledge as discovered, not constructed, and learning as passive to its earlyroots in medieval Europe, Christianity, Judaism, and Protestantism, seeing it as an inheritance thatis both conservative and unwittingly passed on. \"Traditional teaching in schools echoes andreflects popular practices outside schools\"; parents and other students influence students' learningabout learning. Despite the rhetoric of new pedagogies, \"many educators and local districtscarefully avoid new ideas and practices, and teachers who might embrace them\" (Cohen, 1988,p.48).Thornton (1991) reviews research that focuses on the teacher as the key to the socialstudies curriculum which students receive; curricular/instructional gatekeepers employ decision-making skills through a particular frame of reference, also called personal perspective, personaltheory, implicit theory, and personal practical knowledge (Clandinin and Connelly, 1986; Stanley,1991). Thornton calls for well-crafted studies of exemplary cases of gatekeeping as \"images ofthe possible,\" noting the concerns of feminist and critical theorists with the lack of a theoreticalor research challenge to the status quo. According to Armento (1986),- 17 -What the field [of social studies teaching] needs ... is broaderrecognition and better application of the idea that pedagogy cannotbe properly studied without fully considering ecological andpolitical institutional factors and student and teacher affective andcognitive factors (p.949).Critical/feminist pedagogical models of interactive, cooperative, democratic, caringteaching suggest that the traditional transmission model of social studies teaching would notappeal to women. Competent teachers, suggests Stanley (1991), \"stress active studentparticipation in the learning process and reject most transmission models of instruction, includingmuch of the teacher effectiveness model\" (p.257). Studying women's curricular/instructionalgatekeeping strategies, and the personal practical perspectives which govern these, could perhapsgenerate new models of competence for men and women teaching social studies and alleviatesomewhat the tension and discomfort of borrowing unwittingly a traditional social studiespedagogical model which does not fit all teachers and all learners and our times. There areadditional implications for implementing reform in social studies in BC in studying women'sways of teaching.There are many studies of student attitudes to social studies (Fraser, 1981; Haladyna eral, 1982; Schug et al, 1984; Shaughnessy, Haladyna, 1985; Fouts, 1990). They show thatstudents lose interest in social studies as they progress through school and that the teacher issignificant in creating a successful learning environment and in shaping student attitudes. OnlyFouts' study added the perspective of gender; he studied twenty junior high social studies classes,ten taught by women, ten by men. Fouts was not able to research senior students' attitudesbecause \"there were no women at the [senior] high school level in this district\" (p.418). Hefound that girls responded more positively to social studies when they had a woman teacher thanwhen they had a man. He speculates that girls and women are uncomfortable with thecurriculum and that the women teachers bring unique perspectives, values, and insights to the- 18 -social studies classes or use feminist teaching methods to create a learning environment moreappealing to girls. In particular, Fouts' study raises questions about the importance of womenas role models in social studies and the effects of their absence or relative absence in teachingthis subject. Two other studies, not based on social studies teaching but on observations of allsubject areas, suggest that girls respond more positively to women than to men teachers(Stanworth, 1983; Riddell, 1992). Recent studies show that girls respond positively to \"girl-friendly\" classrooms where high value is placed on interactive, social learning as girls' ways ofbeing in classrooms (Riddell, 1992; American Association of University Women, 1992; Whyte,et al, 1985; Sadker and Sadker, 1986). No literature specifically addresses the importance ofwomen as role models for students and the particulars of women's relating to students in socialstudies. If, in fact, women embody and teach more caring, holistic, integrative, and relationalnotions of citizenship and social life in their classrooms, the dynamics of women's teachingsocial studies might well be the subject of ethnographic and critical research or theory.Stanley (1991) reviews research on teacher competence in social studies and concludesthat it requires technical skills, practical knowledge, and critical awareness. He worries that theassumptions of teacher effectiveness in social studies are too limited and technical to measureteaching \"for more complex goals such as reflective examination of social issues .... There is adanger that teacher competence for social studies will be defined too narrowly\" (p.259). Shulman(1986) acknowledges that teachers of social studies may experience discomfort with culturalliteracy, standardized curriculum, and standardized assessment which prescribe standards ofpractice and de-skill the profession. Jenness (1990) discusses the call in social studies in the U.S.for a return to the basics, a focus on cultural capital, excellence, and technicism, what he callsthe \"excellence, equity, and efficiency\" problem, which he sees as a response to rapid technical- 19 -change and globalization. Tetreault (1987b) correlates this to the call for higher standards andstandardized curriculum,an implicit call for returning to a standard that presumes maleexperience and human experience are equivalent. Gender is rarelya relevant category in the analysis of excellence in schools (p.167).Yet reform that is learner-focused (Year 2000), or that incorporates global awareness (Cassidyand Bognar, 1991; Bernard-Powers, in press; Noddings, 1992), for example, can hardly fail toreflect the perspectives of women educators whose critical awareness sees the technical andtraditional directions of education as contradictory, uncomfortable, controlling, and constraining.Most of the research into women and social studies pertains to the absence of women inhistory textbooks (Baldwin and Baldwin, 1992; Light, Staton, and Bourne, 1992; Contreras, 1987;Gaskell et al, 1989; Bernard-Powers, in press) and the biased treatment of women in standardhistory curricula (Novogrodsky and Wells, 1989; Brandt, 1989; Coomber and Evans, 1989;Flaherty, 1989; Gross, 1987; McKenna, 1989; Grambs, 1987; Maher, 1987; Makler, 1987;Tetreault, 1987; Styer, 1988; Prentice and Pierson, 1989). The relevance of this literature to thestudy is in its identification of the discomfort women may feel as a response to omission ormarginalization in the standard curriculum.Brandt (1989) says that most history specialists understand subjectivity in historicalrepresentation but do not see gender as a factor; she suggests that most teachers have not takencourses in women's history. McIntosh's (1983) five-phase classification of curricula suggeststhat, in phase one, there is little or no mention of women; in phase two, a handful of women whohave competed successfully in a male world in men's terms are added on to the curriculum; inphase three, in recognition of the gaps and biases, there is an examination of the politics ofcurriculum and suggestion of alternatives; in phase four, women's lives and experience are- 20 -incorporated into the curriculum, changing the boundaries of power for the teacher; in the finalphase, new ways of thinking about knowledge create a new curriculum:... a circular, multi-cultural, inclusive curriculum which socializespeople to be whole, balanced and undamaged, which includesrather than excluding most parts of life, and which fosters apluralistic understanding and fulfils the dream of a commonlanguage (p.33).The particular issues which underlie this body of literature create tensions for critically awarewomen teachers who consciously transform the explicit curriculum of social studies with itsimplicit message that the male standard is universal.Tensions are not alleviated by studies of teachers' curricular choices in social studies; twoshow that gender concerns rate low in social studies teachers' priorities. Flaherty (1989) notesa \"resistance to teaching about women in history that still prevails within many historydepartments\" which too often, in his view, are \"boys' clubs\":Teachers across Toronto were asked to rank in order of priority theunits they would most like to see developed ... the one dealing withthe women's movement in Canada and the USA came in last onthe list (p.15).In Case's (1992) study, creating a gender sensitive curriculum came last on a list of 26 principlesof teaching and learning that the social studies teachers in BC would support in further definingdirections for social studies in the province's Year 2000 reform.Jane Bernard-Powers (1993) concludes that \"the climate is chilly for gender fair, culturallyinclusive social studies.\" Literature about the absence of women in historical representationsuggests questions for this study. Are the women of the study aware of omission or oftrivialization or of marginalization? Do they compensate in transforming the curriculum? Dothe women of the study create and enact a more inclusive curriculum? Have they taken coursesin women's history or women's studies? Are they aware of the limited space they occupy in the- 21 -margins of social studies teaching? Do they understand their own stories as the interesting andcolourful sidebar narratives of the few exceptional enough to be added on to the master narrativeof social studies teaching?But social studies is not synonymous with the study of history, though the embeddednessand pre-eminence of history in the social studies curricula might suggest this. Geographers areconcerned with place or location; they study movement, interactions between the human andphysical environments, the nature of the landscape, its climate, its regions, its relationships.Critique of the gendered nature of social studies curricula by feminist geographers focuses on theandrocentric bias in traditional geography which has not accounted for the particular and diverseways women experience place. Themes of confinement, spatial constraint, and restrictedmovement emerge from geographic studies of women's experience of cities and suburbs, ofaboriginal or minority cultures, and of developing countries, for example (Pratt, 1993; Matthews,1987; McDowell, 1988; Monk, 1988). Women's access to services, resources, development, paidwork, and capital influences the way they experience local and global economies; their real placein the world too often has little to do with the romantic or exotic portrayal of textbooks, if anyaccount exists at all (Monk, Betteridge, and Newhall, 1991). Even those familiar with women'somission from the master narratives of education express unease in telling other women's storiesand understandings of their global locations in classrooms. A woman historian, attending aconference on global feminism, said, \"Although I was accustomed to generalizing about pastwomen's experience ..., I was loath to represent living women about whom I knew little beyonda text, however compelling that text might be\" (Monk, Betteridge, and Newhall, 1991, pp.243-244). The realization of goals of teaching for and incorporating global feminism or thegeography of women in the curriculum is a difficult but important direction in social studies.- 22 -Women have been constructed as immigrants to malestream geographic thinking; attentiveto the psychic implications of finding their place, women are attuned to the connections orrelationships which allow them to feel at home within an environment. Feminist geographersilluminate women's special connection to the natural world as standing in direct and politicalopposition to traditional themes in economic and physical geography, themes of claiming,naming, using, measuring, and doing business with the world's physical and human resources.Studies demonstrate women's notions of sacred sites and interior landscapes, the negative effectsof development and new technologies on women, and women's efforts to address environmentaldeterioration, for example (Monk, 1988). Gender distinctions, as these are reflected in spatialterms, represent \"complex interactions of economic, ecological, ideological, and historicalcircumstances\" (Monk, 1988, p.5).The literature of feminist geography provides a metaphor for the study of women's placesas leaders and teachers in social studies, in addition to questions about their experience. Asgeographers, do the women of the study transform the teaching of geography to reflect thediverse ways women live their lives in the world today? What micro-geographic and macro-geographic understandings do they have of women's place, that is, where place has both real andsymbolic dimensions? Do they reflect women's particular connectedness to the natural andhuman environments in which they live and work and about which they teach? Do they havegeographic notions or maps by which they understand their own place or ecological situatednesswithin the landscapes of leadership, teaching social studies, and schooling? Women's geographicinquiry seeks answers to questions, such as: where are the women located? where are they, inrelation to men? and what is the significance of this distribution? (Monk, 1988)Social studies is, however, primarily about educating citizens. It has a politicaldimension. The politics of social studies curricula depict a man-made world defined by- 23 -masculine ideologies. If world politics were feminized, suggests Miles (1989), the world wouldbe a better place, more human and more caring:The female characteristics, concerns, and abilities marginalized inindustrial society are necessarily central to the building of a new,more fully human society. The holistic, collective, intuitive, co-operative, emotional, nurturing, democratic, integrated, internal, andnatural are affirmed against the over-valuation of the competitive,analytical, rational, hierarchical, fragmented, external, and artificial(man*-made) .... The deep dualities of life in our fragmentedsociety are overcome (p.21).In the words of the radical feminist Adrienne Rich (1986), history as \"advertisement forthe state\" has existed as long as the state itself; it is used to justify \"the hands that already holdpower, of proving that others are unfit for power\"(p.140). She argues for affirmation of women'spolitical integrity and a consciously critical stance toward both white and male culture. Women'spower, she suggests, is transformative; it is the energy of creation which shares, empowers,teaches, and is concerned with the basic forms of food and shelter and health care and literacy(p.5). \"We live in a society which has brought the entire planet to the brink of having no future.We are experiencing a kind of global anger and grief'(p.153). Rich sees the absolute necessityof raising questions to establish women's terms for political location and identity:Where, when, and under what conditions have women acted andbeen acted upon, as women? Wherever people are strugglingagainst subjection, the specific subjection of women, through ourlocation in a female body, from now on has to be addressed. Thenecessity to go on speaking of it, refusing to let the discussion goon as before, speaking where silence has been advised andenforced, not just about our subjection, but about our activepresence and practice as women .... The liberation of women is awedge driven into all other radical thought, can open out thestructures of resistance, unbind the imagination, connect what'sbeen dangerously disconnected. Let us pay attention now ... towomen: let men and women make a conscious act of attentionwhen women speak; let us insist on kinds of process which allowmore women to speak; let us get back to earth -- not as paradigmfor 'women,' but as place of location (p.214).- 24 -Women, as citizens of school communities, participate in the discourse of a democraticeducation, the meaning and content of which is situated in public and formal structures of power.Yet women in education and in government office \"are still traipsing along at the tail of theprocession\" on men's traditional path (Bernard-Powers, in press).Noddings (1992), whose voice is maternal, introduces the \"caring\" concept as a way ofre-inscribing social studies teaching and curriculum. Noddings' caring, however, has a politicaland social agenda, seeking to transform \"human action in the social world\" by focusing onwomen's concerns with peace and environmental stewardship and community building and socialissues, for example. Martin (1985) speaks in more starkly analytical tones about Americansociety when she argues for consideration of educational narratives grounded in the knowledge,skills, and attitudes of the reproductive processes of society; as Canadian educators, we too canreflect on her comments:Ours is a country in which one out of four women is raped at sometime in her life, one out of four girls and one out of ten boys issexually abused before the age of eighteen, and some $4-6 billionper year are grossed by the pornography industry. Our countrybelongs to a world on the brink of nuclear and/or ecologicaldisaster. Efforts to overcome these problems, as well as the relatedones of poverty, economic scarcity, and racial injustice, floundertoday under the direction of people who do not know how tosustain human relationships or respond directly to human needs,indeed, do not even see the value of trying to do so. We shouldnot suppose that education can solve the world's problems. Yet ifthere is to be any hope of the continuation of life on earth, letalone of a good life for all, those who carry on society's productiveprocesses must acquire the nurturing capacities and ethics of care(p.187).Bennett and Spalding's (1992) portraits of Marilyn, Jenna, and Caroline (mentioned earlierin this chapter) are perhaps the first of \"caring\" women in social studies. Compared toKatherine's discomfort with traditional curricular interpretations, Marilyn, Jenna, and Carolinewould, I suggest, be far more at ease with Noddings' curriculum and Martin's politics. Are the- 25 -women of the present study uneasy or uncomfortable with conforming to Noddings' view ofwomen's maternal ways, to Martin's critical feminist social analysis, or to traditionalexpectations? Have they integrated caring as a creative, transformative energy into their teachingpractice and their transmitted curriculum? Does caring and the need for connectednesscharacterize all women's teaching, and would the inclusion of a more caring component inteaching create new, more democratic, more fully human descriptions of schools and ofcommunities and produce more women teachers?Politically and socially located by notions of identity and citizenship which do not accountfor their experience, women can transform and enact social studies curriculum and teaching toput their issues on the political agenda of the classroom. The concerns of women's culture forcooperation, conflict-resolution, social justice, peace, environmental stewardship, communityparticipation, domestic issues of housing, educating, and nurturing in/form alternative conceptsof citizenship and democracy which reflect women's political understandings (Bernard-Powers,in press; Martin, 1985; Noddings, 1992; Pagano, 1988; Rosenberg, 1987; Spender, 1982; Vickers,1987). Such political standpoints also challenge the politics of power in which their teaching isecologically bound. Schools are sites of contradiction wherein the gap between the rhetoric ofvarious pedagogies and curricular goals and personal ideologies and the reality of socialconstructions of gender and institutional politics exposes for women (and others) the verysubordination they teach to overcome. For some whose identity does not fit those identities andlocations constructed for them, the personal can be more political than for others.Recognition of the politics of teaching and of teaching social studies, in particular, setsup a number of questions for the study: Do women consciously or unconsciously redefine theworld, seeking greater integration of such dualities as the public and private, production andreproduction, the personal and the political, the means and the end, man and nature, theory and- 26 -practice, commitment and objectivity, the emotional and the logical, the intuitive and the rational?(Miles, 1989, p.21) Do they have a transformative agenda, seeking the world of Kristeva's\"future perfect\" (p.189)? How do women who are leaders in social studies embody ideologicalconcepts of power and authority both within classrooms and in other educational contexts? Howdo they respond to the power of authority (their own and others') and to identities and locationsdefined for them in others' terms? Do they articulate differences in their concepts of citizenshipand of democratic process which suggest that the concepts in current democratic discourse aresocially and educationally grounded in masculinist assumptions? How do they negotiate the gapsand the path which traditional authority models offer them?Pagano (1988) considers the question of subversiveness in the feminist challenge to thedominant order of institutions. Women, traditionally charged with the guardianship of culture,do not beget it; they mind it; that is, they tend it and they obey it. They are the products of theinstitutions which embody our cultural heritage. Comparing women's teaching to women's art,she calls for an art of teaching constructed as a \"different story\" based on respect andconversation between men and women and a re-thinking of educational goals:Disrespect of self and others, disregard for the future of the planet,failure to take social and political responsibility, moral apathy,spiritual enslavement to fashion or anything else -- such things asthese seem to me subversive of educational goals, for it seems tome that a sense of respect and regard ought to be a primaryeducational goal .... And yet the structure of our institutions, thelaws, the regulations and the regularities, the form and the contentof our teaching places those cares beneath what we may take as aconcern to safeguard private property. For knowledge has come tobe a sort of property .... But more important than the status ofknowledge as private property, I think, is our expectation thatknowledge do more than it can .... We academics suppose that toknow the good is to do it. We suppose that the truth will set usfree. And knowledge, we hope, will heal the narcissistic wound,will assure us our integrity .... The language and knowledgecontained in the narratives of the values and commitments of thecommunity for whom that language and knowledge served as the- 27 -single mode of discourse is undermined finally by the exclusion ofwomen from those narratives -- by inattention to the maternalsubtexts of the stories of what teachers and students are like. Thecards are stacked against us because of what is foregrounded in ournarratives and what is denied, split off, but which nonethelesscomplicates the foregrounded story (p.337).Women and the Discourse of Science and Mathematics TeachingThe literature of science and mathematics teaching, unlike social studies, has begun toaddress the absence of women and explore its meaning. This literature shows that despite equalaccess and assumptions of equal treatment, science and math education have not achieved equaloutcomes (Kahle and Matyas, 1987; Lewis, 1991; Robertson, 1988). \"Study after study in thedeveloped Western world suggests that girls and women receive very different educations in mathand science than boys and men do\" (Kahle and Matyas, 1987).Recommendations for making science and math more girl-friendly focus on eliminatingthe masculine image of curriculum and methodology which limits some students' ideas aboutappropriate activities and careers (Gibson, 1992; Kahle and Matyas, 1987; Robertson, 1988). AsSheila Tobias says, \"for many girls, all or some of science is outside their comfort zones andcognitive self-images. To keep girls in science, it is necessary to shift these limits\" (as cited inGibson, p.4). Feminist pedagogical principles underpin the gender-sensitive strategies of makingcurriculum relevant, connecting it to social concern, emphasizing the personal and historical,discovery and aesthetics, the joy of science, and incorporating social learning skills such ashands-on processes, connections, creativity, listening, supporting, negotiating, and co-operating,as well as observing, analyzing, and reporting (Gaskell, McLaren, Oberg, and Eyre, 1993;Gibson, 1992; Menzies, 1991; Willis, 1989).In schools, mathematics and science typically are represented asmere bodies of knowledge rather than ways of knowing and findingout, and as objective truths about the world and collections of rulesand facts which students must learn simply to regurgitate.- 28 -Mathematics and science are products of historical and socialconditions and developments and each present models of reality butlittle of this is communicated in many classrooms .... The tentative,intuitive, exploratory and fundamentally human, and thereforefallible, nature of these fields is overlooked or misunderstood ....Furthermore, mathematics and science curricula tend to emphasizethe experiences, concerns and interests stereotypically associatedwith masculinity and rarely is mathematics and science embeddedin social and human concerns and issues (Willis, 1989, pp. 3-4).Ursula Franklin, however, an experimental physicist and professor at the University of Torontoknown for her interest in the social impact of technology, encourages all women to become\"citizen scientists,' that is, to gain a general knowledge of scientific and technical informationin order to understand issues which interest them both personally and politically\" (Clarke, 1991,115).The science/math discussion of equity attends to the absence of women by proposing theintegration of studies of women scientists and of encounters with actual science/math role models(Kahle and Matyas, 1987; Robertson, 1988; AAUW, 1992; Gardner, Mason, and Matyas, 1989;Whyte, 1985). \"It has been suggested that models may be effective whether they are encounteredthrough written materials, on television, or in person\" (Kahle & Matyas, pp. 21-22). Willis(1989), noting the greater perceived instrumentality of math and science for adult men than adultwomen, suggests that a few role models are not sufficient, calling instead for a \"critical mass ofwomen in these fields [so that] girls perceive these options and occupations as part of theirnatural range of choices\" (p.5). The role models are often depicted as visiting women scientistsor women scientists in textbooks and text histories. Willis (1989) emphasizes the need forteachers sensitive to gender inclusivity in math and science but falls short of calling for morewomen teachers, not only as mentors and role models for students but also as those for whominclusivity has the greatest personal/political significance.- 29 -In the 1990 BC Mathematics Assessment Report, Gaskell, McLaren, Oberg, and Eyre(1993) respond comprehensively to gender issues in math and science; they do suggest that moremathematics and physical science teachers should be women:The vast majority of senior mathematics and physical scienceteachers are men. This may pose serious difficulties for girls toidentify with subjects primarily taught by men. In our study, somegirls who were taught by a female mathematics or physical scienceteacher seemed to feel more positively about their experiences withthe subject. The gender of the teacher was one of many factorsinfluencing the girls' experiences, but an important one,nevertheless. Apart from serving as role models, women teachersbecause of their experiences may approach mathematics and thephysical sciences in distinct ways. By taking different approachesto mathematics and the physical sciences a broader range of girlsand boys may be more attracted to these subjects (p.161).This study, which included teacher and student perceptions of gender issues in science andmathematics, also found that most teachers did not consider gender an important issue in theirschool, that women teachers were more concerned than men about problems faced by girls inmath and science, and that most teachers felt that girls would benefit from more women rolemodels in math and science, though they did not support affirmative action hiring. \"Few teacherswere concerned about the problems girls faced ... in being a minority, being taught almostexclusively by men, being taught a 'male-oriented' curriculum, and being prepared for 'male-oriented' careers\" (p.73). Students' responses showed the importance of teachers in developingstudents' interests and abilities in math and science and of good teaching at the senior levels;they liked teachers who used a variety of approaches, who did not rely solely on the textbook,and who \"really cared\" about them. Girls, more often than boys, felt excluded by teachers whofocused on the \"smart\" students, which often meant smart boys.Many students speculated that girls would have better experiencesin mathematics and science if they were taught by more womenteachers. The main benefits for girls would be that they could talkmore easily to women teachers, since the latter would more readily- 30 -understand their experiences and incorporate them into thecurriculum and that women teachers would inspire the girls moreto pursue mathematics and science fields. Some of the boys alsothought that boys' experiences would improve if more womentaught these subjects. They thought this would bring more varietyto the subjects (p.124).Women's absence in math, science, and computer studies both as role models and aslearners, the literature suggests, has real economic and social implications. Young women withscience and math training (Gardner, Mason, and Matyas, 1989), are \"important not only topromote educational equity and equal career opportunities, but [they] will be a major determinantin our nation's future economic and research competitiveness\" (p.72). The National ScienceFoundation made this agenda specific, stating that the economy of tomorrow \"will require apopulation skilled in the sciences and mathematics .... We must take advantage of all ourresources, particularly women and underrepresented minorities\" (1987, p.2, as cited in Gardner,Mason, and Matyas). Industry, Science and Technology Canada argues for more womenscientists and engineers on the bases of employment equity and the need for industry's realizationthat \"the skills and creativity of a diverse work force are essential for gaining and maintaininga competitive edge\" (Women in Science and Engineering, Volume 1, 1991, p.1, as cited inGaskell et al, 1993, p.4). Gaskell et al (1993) do not see the solution in asking girls to changeto become more comfortable with these subjects as they are currently constructed, but rather insubjects being reconstructed to incorporate the experiences and points of view of women:It is ... important that the reasons for encouraging more women intomathematics and physical science are not only economic. It is amatter of justice and equity. Mathematics and physical science arepowerful forms of knowledge in our society. It is important thatall people have access to those forms of knowledge so that theycan participate equally in defining the kind of society in which welive (p.5).- 31 -This is clearly not the discourse of social studies. The lack of focus on the importanceof increasing the \"competitive edge\" by \"taking advantage\" of women's and girls' particular skillsor strengths as citizens, for example, and on the development and inclusion of girl-friendlyteaching and curriculum in social studies as the study of \"human action,\" suggests conservative,masculinist, and non-democratic assumptions about the kind of citizenship required in a worldgoverned by technical rationality, and about who can define the society in which we live.Integrating notions of educated citizens as not only thinking, reasoning, and skilled, but also ascaring, compassionate, empathetic, and nurturing may be not only irrelevant but incompatiblewith education's desired end (Martin, 1982). Does an increasingly technical society requirecritically reflective, politically informed, and caring citizens? Can such a society account for orafford re-definition in terms of women's particular concerns as citizens?Women and the Discourse of Teachers' WorkA fourth area of literature relevant to this study can be broadly categorized as describingthe nature of teachers' work. MacLeod (1988) talks of the paradox of progress in education,caught as it is in a struggle between the idealism of the sixties in its concern for balance, humanrights, and justice, and the materialism and restraint of the eighties, characterized by conservativeagendas and hierarchical authority structures. Historically, teaching has been considered\"women's work\" and the \"natural calling\" for women (MacLeod, 1988; Casey and Apple, 1989;Walkerdine, 1992), yet women are increasingly disillusioned, feeling out of step with theemerging goals and caught in the contradictions of teaching and leadership (McLeod, 1988).The model of technical rationality which has increasingly permeated teaching since theeighties, underpinned as it is by the conservative ideologies of the right, is a social model.Bernstein (1990) points out that, with rising unemployment, new communications technology, andincreased international competition as present global trends, \"the linkage between education and- 32 -production is seen as crucial, and the failure of the economy to develop is blamed on the failureof education to provide relevant skills\" (p.153). Education is thus vocationalized and governedby the principles of business and industry. \"The ideology of the market is celebrated, the mythof its powers of social, individual, and economic redemption is used to undermine the oldcollectivism [of the 60s1\" (p.154). Students, girls and boys, are trained as the productive laborforce required for a highly technical and rapidly changing world (Apple, 1990). Girls and womenas trained technical workers are viewed as instrumental to the development of a future labourforce which will ensure economic viability for western nations in the changing global economy.Vocationalization and technicism in education are about students' preparation for theproductive processes of society and not about students' education for society's reproductiveprocesses (Martin, 1982). Martin sees little concern for men's and women's working and caringfor others in either vocational or liberal education:The distinction between liberal and vocational educationcorresponds not to a distinction between the two kinds of societalprocesses but to one between head and hand within productiveprocesses. Liberal education is ... the preparation for carrying onprocesses involving the production and consumption of ideas, whilevocational education is preparation for processes involving manuallabor (pp.137-138).Critical and feminist educators identify additional problems with the professionalizationof education, which sees the increasing impact of business metaphors and strategies in an attemptto make education more effective, accountable, and measurable, or more business-like. Businessas a metaphor for education creates images of students as products, teachers as assembly-lineworkers, and administrators as managers. Apple (1990) says that such technical and conservativeideas imposed by \"efficiency experts posing as educators\" are not the only or best ways to definecurriculum:- 33 -All too often, we are told to treat education as a technicalenterprise, and to value teaching and curricula only for theircontributions to meeting the needs of business and industry, to a'productive labor force,' and to instilling a 'common' set ofknowledge and values defined by the conservative agenda (p.187).The themes of the de-skilling and professionalization of teachers are critical and have agender dimension in their capacity to devalue women's work as teachers, as curriculum creatorsand enactors, and as leaders. Teacher autonomy comes under increasing bureaucratic control,threatening the \"fundamental existential identity\" of those who work for the children they teach(Casey and Apple, p.182). The discourse of teacher-as-professional presents effectiveness inteaching and leadership as particular skills measurable against male norms, defining women'sways or skills as deficient (Weiler, 1988; Wood, 1990; Casey and Apple, 1990; Acker, 1989;Erdman, 1990; Grant, 1989; MacLeod, 1988; Miller, 1986; Shakeshaft, 1986; Helgesen, 1990;Connell, 1985). Apple and Jungck (1990) suggest that women's \"commitments to environmentsthat embody an ethic of caring and connectedness ... may actually provide the resources forcountering such rationalized curricular models\" (p.249) which intensify teachers' work and stripaway teacher autonomy. The collective memory of difference, they say, is restored withrecognition of the sense of loss, the absence of community, and the need to resist. In resistancecan be found \"the very possibility of difference .... that possibility is of no small importance\"(p.251).Sadker, Sadker, and Klein (1991), in their review of major areas of gender equityresearch, find that women's ways of teaching and managing or leadership place high value onconcern for others, on democratic, participative style, on community participation, and onteaching and learning. They cite research by Shakeshaft (1987) which shows that \"women'sways of managing are congruent with the findings from research on effective schools,[suggesting] that schools and conceptions of educational administration should be restructured- 34 -to take advantage of these female strengths\" (p.285). Shakeshaft herself says, \"Women teachersand administrators are more likely to exhibit behaviors conducive to good schooling\" (p.502).Shakeshaft illuminates the problematic and gendered vocabulary of effectiveness when she statesthat \"the link between female socialization and styles of effective leadership is ignored in theliterature on school improvement.\"Fullan (1982), like McLeod, notes the paradox of schooling: schools are expected toengage in continuous renewal, but school organization, teacher training, educational hierarchies,and the politics of decision-making result in a system more likely to retain the status quo. Hediscusses the administrator's role as an educational leader in bringing about change, though mostprincipals, he notes, do not play this role. Instructional leadership for meaningful change inschools incorporates teachers in a collaborative process and does not confuse authority to legislatewith the power to implement it. Such collaboration, however, breaks down traditionalhierarchical power relations. In a more recent article (1993), he shifts the moral responsibilityto teachers to become agents of change. They are to seek change by incorporating personalvision-building, inquiry, mastery, and collaboration.Wilson (1993) echoes Fullan's ideas for what she calls teacher leaders, explicitly derivingher model from leadership behaviours in business and sport. Leaders, she says, inspire a sharedvision, enable others to act, model the way, and encourage the heart as \"cheerleaders andcoaches.\" Teacher leadership, she suggests, is a feminine paradigm.The masculine style [of leadership] uses structural power, which isbased on authority associated with position, title, and the ability toreward and punish. The feminine style relies on personal power,which is based on charisma, work record, and contacts. Masculineversus feminine styles of leading also are labeled transactionalversus transformational (p.27).- 35 -The paradox and contradictions inherent in such imperatives for educational change as describedin Fullan's teacher as agent-of-change and in Wilson's teacher leader, however, further serve tokeep women whose educational vision is holistic, integrative, or transformative sidelined inpositions of subordination within existing hierarchical power structures. Those who wouldchange the system are encouraged on moral grounds to provide the energy for change withoutthe monetary, authority, or status rewards and more often than not without support. In this way,women's \"natural\" style can be used to continue to ghettoize and take advantage of them.New management models which depict administrators as those who \"distribute, award,dole, dispense, and execute\" do not appeal to women who are concerned with educationalleadership, expertise, and excellence (McLeod, 1988, p.21). Women are not rewarded for theircommitment to the classroom or to education and are not likely, because of their absence asadministrators, to participate in decisions for change that better reflect their priorities.The literature of women's work and careers in teaching addresses the politics of locationfor women. Women's work as teachers and leaders is ecologically contextualized by the social,structural, personal, and political constraints within which they act (or are acted upon). Asteachers of social studies and as leaders, women are geographically isolated and located at themargins of the master narratives of curriculum and schooling. The literature of teachers' worksuggests questions about women's places in the educational procession and about women'sunderstandings of democratic freedoms and of the terrain of leadership. Are they free toarticulate and enact their notions of citizenship and leadership, particularly where these contradictor challenge traditional models? Are they free to give voice to informed opinion/response toleadership? Are they free to choose to move or speak or interrupt or express anger at injusticeor inequity? Are some leadership roles more accessible or appealing to women than others? Are- 36 -some leadership roles more accessible or appealing to some women than to others? Do theircareer paths suggest alternative operational maps than those given by the male leaders?Such questions are metaphorically about the geography of women's teaching and are asapplicable to the local analysis of women's work in schools as communities as they are toteaching about the global contexts for women's working and living:No geography that hopes to motivate students to create a 'betterworld' and prepare them to bring that world into being canpresume it will achieve its goals if it leaves out half of humanity,fails to challenge gender inequities, and does not show women andgirls as valid and valuable sources of information and importantcontributors to society. To 'engender' the new geography calls fora transformation of our vision, so that we see the world instereoscopic perspective and create a curriculum that serves theinterests of women as well as men. The task will require asubstantial effort (Monk, 1988, p.97).The Ecology of Women's Identity Construction in Teaching Social StudiesThe final area of literature reviewed for this study focuses on the particular contextswithin which women teaching social studies negotiate the construction of their identities. Socialforces shape identity according to criteria of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, age,and physical ability. Weiler (1988) studies the dialectical relationship between structural forcesand personal consciousness which is apparent in the lives of women high school teachers.The life experiences and choices made by these women reveal thepower of ideology and of material forces on them and at the sametime demonstrate their ability as human beings to understand,criticize, and act as agents in history (pp. 74-75).The fact of their gender is negotiated, contested, and experienced dialectically in the dynamicsand terrain of everyday social and professional relationships.Bernstein (1977) further explores the social and political inscription of identity. Hesuggests that \"educational identities\" defined by \"subject loyalties\" are socialized withintraditional systems of schooling. Clearly bounded, hierarchical knowledge frames prescribe- 37 -conditions for membership based on subject specialization; these conditions actively resist change,seen as \"pollution of the sacred\" (p.96). Within these systems, autonomy of content constructsthe separateness and isolation of disciplines, the identities of individuals within the disciplines,and vertical relations of power. States of knowledge, as opposed to ways of knowing whichcharacterize the more open, integrative systems for learning, preclude an explicitly offeredideological reference base; teachers' diverse ideologies operate visibly within the bounded frames.\"There is no neutrality in culture\" (p.2), as Rich (1986) says; all art, science, and scholarship isideological.Lightfoot's (1973) study shows that mythic depictions of schools as \"shielded from thenegative, destructive influences of partisanship and politics,\" (p.197) deny the social realities.Teachers, she concludes, construct their educational philosophy and practices around theirpersonal and political ideologies within curricular and social constraints.The kinds of critical and elaborative thinking permitted andencouraged by the teacher not only reflect the teacher's politicalidentifications but also are an integral part of the politicalsocialization of students (p.198).Curriculum and practice thus inform and are informed by teachers' professional, political, andsocial identities.Vickers (1987) and Pagano (1988) tie the social reproduction of cultural identities inpatriarchal societies to the dynamics of gender role socialization and to women's work. Theyargue that the construction of cultural cohesion, stability, and continuity within communities andsocieties depends upon women's \"social nurturance,\" which establishes \"incontrovertable linksamong people which can be socially elaborated to create loyalties, identities, rights andresponsibilities, inclusions and exclusions\" (Vickers, p.483). Women rarely produce culture in- 38 -their own terms; they reproduce it within the constraints of male-defined constructs for identitymaintenance.Noddings (1990) claims \"that curriculum and teaching are not easily separable and thata thinking, teaching self cannot be deftly plucked out of either teaching or curriculum and setaside\" (p. ix). She sees that community and curriculum in/form each other and that teachers'values, desires, and encounters not only shape their work but are shaped by that work.\"Personal practical knowledge,\" that is, the personal and practical filters which areengaged as teachers mediate the demands of particular teaching and learning situations (Clandininand Connelly, 1986), has pronounced social and political dimensions in the constructed identityof social studies teachers. The women in this study are located or contextualized in the broaderlandscapes of their work as teachers in departments and schools and as leaders in theirprofessional community. They actively negotiate and construct personal, subject, and leadershipidentities within complex relations of power; their stories illuminate the politics of schooling andgender which characterize the contexts of their teaching. They also enact a gendered andpolitical curriculum which advocates liberal progressive notions of humanism, educatedcitizenship, social justice, critical thinking, and democracy in masculine terms. They negotiatetheir identities within social and structural constraints, participating as politically-informedcitizens who are strong, knowledgeable women within the various communities of teaching.Social studies teaching and being a social studies teacher are extremely politicalexperiences; this study speculates that these experiences are generally more consciously politicalfor women than for men. Social studies teachers' perceptions of their teaching and curriculumare intricately woven stories which, like tapestries, are composed of threads which are theirpractical knowledge of teaching and curriculum, their political ideologies, their personal values,and their understandings of the politics of schooling, pedagogy, curriculum, social identity, and- 39 -location. Each woman's tapestry told as a story depicts her understanding of the experience ofsocial studies teaching. Each tapestry is, therefore, a unique expression of her \"fundamentalexistential identity\" (Casey and Apple, 1990) and yet still discernible as the work of a woman.The tapestries, their personal stories, of women's teaching and leadership in social studies haveobviously political messages.ConclusionPost-structural feminist political critique of educational narratives places difference at thecentre of the discussion agenda. It shifts from a focus on the male/female dichotomy of Westernliberal thinking, a dialectic which frames women's \"voice\" as \"different\" (Gilligan, 1982), to themultiple, partial, and often contradictory voices of women's different ways of being withinparticular contexts of power. This critique suggests that women differentially negotiate theirdiscomfort and contradictions found in the traditional patriarchal discourse of dominance andsubordination. Some learn the language and acquire skills in negotiating identity, curriculum,pedagogy, and the dynamics of difference. Some interrupt the master discourse, seekingacknowledgment of their stories, their anger, or their capacities as educators or educationalleaders, though the consequences of speaking out of turn or without proper respect or in too louda voice may be harsh, even violent (Briskin and Coulter, 1992; Connell, 1985; Culley, 1985;Cunnison, 1989; Currie, 1992; Ellsworth, 1992; Faludi, 1991; Gore, 1992; Greene, 1988;Hoodfar, 1992; Kenway and Modra, 1992; Lewis, 1992; Luke, 1992; Manicom, 1992;Wallcerdine, 1992).Yet the social costs of ignoring the particular concerns and capacities attributed to womenand to women's culture are high, as suggested in the comments cited earlier by Martin (1985),Noddings (1992), and Pagano (1988). The absence of women in social studies teaching, ofmodels of women's ways of teaching, and of women's concerns in curriculum and leadership has- 40 -implications for what young people learn about women's places in society, about women'sunderstandings of society, about women's voices and stories in the discourse of politics, culture,society, and schooling, and about the possibilities of meaning for social action in truly humanterms. To deconstruct the essential aspects of women's understandings of social studies ratherthan negotiate these would, according to Fuss's (1989) analysis, throw the baby out with the bathwater and render the feminist thesis politically powerless.There is enough literature to suggest that there are many ways of being a woman. Recentfeminist scholarship recognizes multiplicity. Feminisms acknowledge the maternal and caring,the intellectual and reflective, the radical and political, the subordinated and silenced, and thepreviously ignored and marginalized strands which weave the tapestries of women's experiences.The literature also suggests that the differences of and between women's stories about socialstudies teaching, curriculum, and leadership are worth exploring. The focus of this study is onwomen's stories, but it is undertaken with the explicit understanding that many others aredisenfranchised by or excluded from a generalized discourse which cannot measure effectivenessin social studies teaching and learning in the truly human terms which celebrate and speak ofdifference, recognize commonalities in multiplicity, seek social transformation through visionsof the \"future perfect,\" and give place to the passion for a pluralistic and caring society as ourmost fundamental and mutual goals.The movement for change is a changing movement, changing itself,demasculinizing itself, de-Westernizing itself, becoming a criticalmass that is saying in so many different voices, languages,gestures, actions: It must change; we ourselves can change it.We who are not the same. We who are the many and do not wantto be the same (Rich, 1986, p.225).- 41 -CHAPTER 2: A FEMINIST METHODOLOGYThe methodology of this study is grounded in the emerging traditions of critical andfeminist research. In seeking to \"[demystify] the patterns of knowledge and social conditions thatproduce domination and restrict human possibilities \" (Popkewitz, 1986, p.19), feminist projectsenter the discourse of the critical paradigm. There is open commitment to creating a more justsocial order, a \"transformative' agenda with respect to both social structure and methodologicalnorms\" (Lather, 1986a, p.258). Eichler (1983) states:Unless we can establish some connection between the topic and theachievement of social justice for women, either in concrete terms,or in abstract terms through the manner in which the knowledge isgenerated, it does not qualify as feminist research (p.47).Critical and feminist research projects are concerned with research as praxis (Weiler,1988; Lather, 1986a):This form of discourse \"tells\" us about how institutional conditionscreate particular ways of thinking and reasoning and then seeks torelate these conditions to larger social issues of cultural, social, andeconomic change. The research is concerned with how ourfeelings, beliefs, concepts of self and knowledge relate toideologies and how particular social forms limit and create humanpossibilities (Popkewitz, 1986, p.13).Feminist research projects-as-praxis do not pretend to be neutral. They are personal and political,seeking to describe from women's perspectives their contextualization within the distinct andoften disenfranchising political cultures of their lives and their work (Currie, 1992; Ellsworth,1992; Gilligan, 1982; Gore, 1992; Lewis and Simon, 1986; Luke, 1992; Martin, 1985; Oakley,1982; Tetreault, 1986; Vickers, 1989; Walkerdine, 1992; Weiler, 1988). Such projects explicitlyintend to challenge the social order by exposing the conflicts, tensions, and mediations of womenin male-dominated institutions (Westkott, 1979). They ask, \"How do male-based constructs needto be reformulated from the vantage point of female experience?\" (Lather, 1986b).- 42 -As women we inhabit our world with a 'double consciousness.'We are in and of our society but in important ways also not 'of' it.We see and think in the terms of our culture; we have been trainedin these terms, shaped to them; they have determined not only theways in which we have been able to perceive and understand largeevents, but even the ways in which we have been able to perceive,structure and understand our most intimate experiencing. Yet wehave always another consciousness, another potential languagewithin us, available to us. We are aware, however inchoately, ofthe reality of our perceptions and experience; we are aware thatthis reality has often been not only unnamed but unnameable; weunderstand that our invisibility and silence hold the germs of bothmadness and power, of both dissolution and creation (Du Bois,p.111).Feminist research projects are often structured around women's intimate experiencing,consciousness, and language. One of the ways to create the context for such understanding isto establish conversations between equals where knowledge is shared through stories. Thecontext is reflective and collaborative. The sharing of knowledges connects the researcher andthe researched, their public and private spheres, their personal and political identities, theirknowing and feeling selves, their multiple and partial voices (Weiler, 1988; Clandinin andConnelly, 1986; Vickers, 1989; Miles, 1989). Martin (1985) reclaimed a conversation amongsttheorists of women's education; she says:A good conversation is neither a fight nor a contest. Circular inform, cooperative in manner, and constructive in intent, it is aninterchange of ideas by those who see themselves not asadversaries but as human beings come together to talk and listenand learn from one another (p.10).April, 1993: This project began with my critical reflection upon the experience of beinga woman teaching junior social studies. It was not the absence of women's stories in the historyor geography I taught that first caught my attention so much as the absence of women aroundme and the presence of men around and above me. At the invitation of Dr. Donald C. Wilson,a university professor of social studies whose children I was teaching, I became a part-time- 43 -graduate student, entering a shadowy world of night classes and summer sessions and partial butcompelling glimpses of the world of theory, experienced as compartments of time which I hadmanaged to juggle free of my other roles as teacher and single mother of two. By the summerof 1991, I was ready to construct my thesis around the questions arising from my experiencesas a woman teacher and graduate student of social studies.Summer, 1991: Eleven days marking Geography 12 provincial exams in Victoria, BC.I like marking exams, as much for the professional immersion as the space it gives for me. Foreleven days, after 3 o'clock, I am nobody's mother, teacher, student, lover, housekeeper. Thethesis-project-as-idea came with me, as it would for another two years. Women who markGeography are few in number (never more than eight in a room of 34, in my experience). Thereis time to talk. The geographic isolation which is women's experience in social studies is givenover to connection. In our conversations were the threads of ideas and the themes of my study.I had the rest of the summer to write a thesis. I realized that I could tell these stories. I wouldborrow Martin's notion of reclamation and claim a place for the conversation of womenpractitioners of education.'Heilbrun (1988) talks about writing a woman's life. From a literary perspective, women'sstories should be consciously and collectively articulated. Women, she says, must overcome thetraditions which cast them as the heroines of literature who are isolated from each other and notallowed to offer other women the most personal accounts of their lives.1 The italicized paragraphs which interrupt the academic discourse of this thesis arereflective passages derived from the journal which I kept during the research andwriting periods. They represent my on-going personal negotiations of meaningduring the processes of re-constructing and writing other women's stories as wellas of the need to acknowledge and construct a space for my own voice in thisstory.- 44 -What [has become] essential for women [is] to see themselvescollectively, not individually, not caught in some individual eroticand familial plot and, inevitably found wanting. Individualbiographies and autobiographies have always been conceived of asindividual, eccentric lives (p.46).Collectivity and connection make women's life stories credible, taking them out of the sociallyconstructed realms of fantasy and madness. Stories of women's lives can only be told when they\"no longer live their lives isolated in the houses and the stories of men\" (p.47). Women's stories,she says, will be found first in their talking together. Dialogue with others is a process ofnegotiating images of ourselves as human beings in relation to the social world.The idea of knowledge emerging from a self-other dialectic isreflected in the historical exclusion of women from educationalinstitutions where knowledge has been transmitted through booksand lectures and in women's participation in societies andfriendships where social knowledge has emerged from dialogue(Westkott, 1979, p.426).Feminist scholars challenge the methodological norms of objectivity. Questions emergefrom the researcher's concerns and experiences; answers are found in confirmation, expansion,opposition, and silence. Affirmation in listening to stories is important as \"a practice of respectfor women's knowledge,\" and a means of eliciting further information (Litner, Rossiter, andTaylor, 1992, as cited in Briskin and Coulter, 1992, p.255). At the same time, \"knowledge is anunpredictable emergent rather than a controlled outcome\" (Westkott, 1979, p.426).[Feminist methodology] requires ... that the mythology of'hygienic' research with its accompanying mystification of theresearcher and the researched as objective instruments of dataproduction be replaced by the recognition that personalinvolvement is more than dangerous bias -- it is the conditionunder which people come to know each other and to admit othersinto their lives (Oakley, 1986, p.253).- 45 -Du Bois (1983) tells us that women's scientific methods explain and understand reality as whole,eventful, and complex, as contextualized within and as part of its own matrix. And this matrixincludes the knower\" (p.111).In thinking critically about women's experience in social studies, I had originally intendedto interview a group of ten women whose experience as teachers and as leaders in the fieldreflected the whole range of teaching senior social studies electives. Teaching senior academiccourses is, within teacher culture, generally seen as having a kind of specialist status which, Iwould suggest, is tied to factors of seniority, experience, and intellectual recognition andunderpinned with assumptions about teaching ability and content knowledge. At the summermarking sessions, I approached women marking History 12 and gathered names of women whotaught Law 12 and Western Civilization 12. Everyone I spoke to seemed interested in theproject. My list grew with direct approach, referrals, and suggestions to a group of about 15.The decision to focus on six who taught Geography was one of expedience; these were my peers,the women I knew best and with whom I could most readily converse about curriculum andteaching. Within that geographic region or community of women having common curriculumand academic interest, there were six whose stories represented differences of age, family status,and experience in teaching. Additionally, they had all taught or were teaching social studies,grades 8 to 11. As women, we shared a culture of being white, middle-class, and European inheritage. There was no choice in these factors, but such a group could serve to illuminategender, as opposed to ethnicity or class, as the factor which distinguished them from the menwho teach social studies.In selecting the group, I also assessed the leadership that each had demonstrated bothwithin social studies and in teaching. The formal working definition of leadership utilized in this- 46 -study was the inclusion in BC Ministry of Education curriculum development, assessment, andevaluation committees and the teaching of Geography 12. Leadership, however, was alsosignalled by additional factors, such as administrative advancement, collegial respect, involvementin extracurricular, district, professional, Ministry, and community activities, and writing forpublication. Each woman met leadership criteria in more than one of these areas as well. In thissense, each woman participated as a citizen within school, educational, and real-worldcommunities.Ministry of Education documents also provided criteria by which to informally assess thewomen's leadership. They actively modelled the explicit social studies curricular goal of\"willingness and ability to use knowledge and understanding as a member of society\" (Ministryof Education, 1988, p.5) and the explicit goal of educated citizenship which underpins educationalreform in BC. Educated citizens are skilled and productive, able \"to contribute to societygenerally, including the world of work,\" and \"to gain satisfaction through achievement,\" and\"prepared to exercise the responsibilities of an individual within ... the community\" (Ministry ofEducation, 1992a, p.21). This active participation implies an integrated understanding of schoolsas \"communities of learners\" (p.123), of schooling as a \"real world' experience that contributesto the lifelong learning of all\" (p.137), and of their personal responsibilities as teachers to enact\"educated citizenship.\"The study does not include student perceptions of the women's teaching or \"leadership,\"nor does it include classroom observations. These would have provided different insights fromthe ones I sought in their stories. Such a project has the proportions of doctoral research andwould add much to the building of well-crafted cases of exemplary social studies teaching calledfor by Thornton (1991).- 47 -Friendship became another commonality. \"A feminist interviewing women is bydefinition both 'inside' the culture and participating in that which she is observing\" (Oakley,1986, p.253). For the most part, the six women and I all knew one another, though not allinitially as friends. The community of women geographers is a small one. IncorporatingLather's (1986a) concept of reciprocity, or what Woods (1986) calls \"the researcher as friend,\"great importance was placed on our conversations being a respectful and comfortable sharing ofideas and stories and on building an interactive and trusting relationship. The conversations andcollaborative communication process incorporated within the study forged links of friendshipacross difference and distance and place and time. Spender (1982) says that \"in a maledominated society it is essential that women do not make links with other women, that they donot pool their experience and make deductions and generalise from it\" (p.112). Women's storiesare a tradition of their friendships, yet women's storytelling is \"dangerous, even subversive ina patriarchal society\" (p.138). The implicit agenda we shared was transformative, though thereis an awareness that such transformation subverts and disturbs the status quo.Friendship is grounded in trust. The requirements for ethical research using humansubjects are that all participants sign an agreement to participate. The women agreed in writingto complete a questionnaire and undertake taped interviews which would be transcribed and seenonly by the researcher. The agreement ensured that the women participants understood that theywould be assigned a pseudonym and that they retained the right to review and negotiate both thedata and the construction of meaning, and to consent to its use. The participants were asked toprovide member checks by reviewing the accuracy of my accounts of their interviewtranscriptions and questionnaire summaries. Confidentiality and safety, primary criteria for trust,were guaranteed, as was the right to withdraw at any time. The project was thus constructed as- 48 -a collaborative one in which the women's voices would be attended to at any stage of theresearch process. Manicom's (1992) discussion of feminist pedagogy can be applied to feministmethodology and processes: \"Safety must be consciously constructed to allow women to speakof certain of their experiences\" (pp.378-379). Briskin and Coulter (1992) suggest that givingwomen the space in which their voices may be heard is \"fundamentally connected to respect forwomen's knowledge\" (p.256); acknowledging their differences as a contribution to knowledgeprovides the foundation for women's empowerment.Questionnaires are conventional tools for field research and can be useful as starters orbridges to further research; they give time for reflection (Woods, 1986). The six studyparticipants completed questionnaires (see Appendix II, Questionnaire) to provide backgrounddata on professional and academic qualifications and preferred curricular/instructional approaches.The questionnaires were adapted from a survey administered to teachers during the 1989 BCSocial Studies Provincial Assessment. The Assessment Report (Cassidy and Bognar, 1991)provided a baseline of descriptors of BC's social studies teachers against which the summarizeddata about six women's experience could be compared. In addition, the questions asked forpersonal information, academic background, professional qualifications, leadership roles, extra-curricular activities, teaching experience, including other subjects taught, details of their teachingpractice, and understandings of curriculum and curricular goals in social studies. Open-endedquestions which asked the women to reflect on issues of gender and social studies were addedto begin their processes of thinking critically about women and social studies. The questionnaireswere analyzed, the data summarized (again, see Appendix II) and used as a bridge to ourconversations.- 49 -Wise and Stanley (as cited in Bowles and Klein, 1983) believe \"that feminism shouldborrow, steal, change, modify and use for its own purposes any and everything from anywherethat looks of interest and of use to it, but that we must do this critically\" (p.18). However,quantitative research is not objective and ungendered. Statistics such as those that report on themale/female distribution of teachers in BC secondary schools (Ministry of Education, 1992b) andsurvey data which are generalized to present profiles of subject teachers (Cassidy and Bognar,1991; Goodlad, 1984; Rutter, 1986) do not tell the whole story and may obscure the reality ofwomen's lives as teachers, subsuming them, in the case of social studies, into male-skewed andunflattering portraits of traditional, text-focused, teacher-centred social studies instruction whichpurport to be universal. Although gender was not a factor in the provincial assessment of socialstudies, BC Ministry of Education statistics indicate that more than 75% of the respondents tothe teacher survey were male. The questionnaire used in this study was derived from theprovincial assessment teacher survey tool and so allowed for comparison of the women'sresponses to the universal profile. Though data derived from six women's responses could notpretend to be representative, they could suggest the ways in which traditional and scientificmethodological tools inscribe male attributes as human. As a challenge to the normalizedconstructions of teachers of social studies, the women's responses strongly suggested that genderbe accounted for and that their stories needed to be told in different ways. \"Women, it is argued,should be able to tell their own story\" (Eichler, 1987, p.32).Field studies often employ unstructured interviews which depend upon intersubjectiveagreement; both parties agree to an interactive process which is fair and comfortable (Burgess,1982; Woods, 1986). In the original project design, I had asked that the women agree toparticipate in two one-hour interviews of a loosely structured nature. The second interview- 50 -would allow for completion of discussion as well as clarification of the data of the first interview.I had compiled a list of questions which would guide these interviews (see Appendix III, SampleInterview Questions). During these interviews, I would seek an understanding of theirworldviews, the factors which have influenced these, and the ways in which these are lived outin their teaching of social studies and in their own lives. The first group of interview questionsfocused on the personal stories of childhood, schooling, years of university, family and adult life,and interests. The second group of questions looked at their experience as social studies teachers,including pedagogical and curricular processes and transformations, professional relationships,and political and social perspectives which informed their teaching and their working lives. Thefinal group of questions focused on their understandings of the gender issues of social studiescurriculum, teaching, and the contexts for their work.At the outset of each interview, I gave a copy of the guiding questions to the intervieweeand asked that she glance over the questions for a particular topic in advance of our discussion.I had highlighted some questions for discussion under each topic to give some consistency to thediscussions. In this way, the women had some control over the discussion and of the aspectswhich had most significance for them. New topics and discussion foci came in the natural andfluid ways of emergent conversation. The limitations became apparent, however, in a numberof areas. The time spent in conversation was never one hour. Not all topics were given equaltime or value in each conversation. Some new or emergent topics, such as those specific to theteaching of Geography 12, required that I re-contact other interviewees. I was always free to dothis, which I felt to be an indicator of the comfortable and supportive relationships we haddeveloped as project collaborators. Stories have an improvisational quality to them; the shape- 51 -of the creation is discovered along the way rather than pursued from the outset as a definedvision (Clandinin and Hogan, in press).One of the methodological consequences of adopting a narrativeorientation to the study of teaching is that the boundaries forinquiry are not defined in advance. Rather, the unfolding of atelling narrative leads where it will and researchers must follow orthe narrative assumes an artificially constrained character(Clandinin and Connelly, 1986, p. 381).This was to become as true of the research story as it was of the women's stories themselves.February, 1993: The truth of the matter is I have 24 hours of tape, all of which Ipersonally transcribed (at the rate of 4 hours transcribing to I hour of tape) to fill a binder withdata. I could tell you that this was to get the full nuance of meaning which comes fromemphasis, tone of voice, pauses, laughter, and so on, which would be part of the truth. Anotherpart is that, by late August of 1991, I had conducted three full interview cycles with Louise,Joan, and Alison, transcribed two fully, and put several tapes aside untranscribed, returning toteach in September. I interviewed Tammy, Ellen, and Amanda-Leigh more than a year later.When I finally got back to the first tapes, I needed to review and re-cover the conversations. Ineeded not only re-visit the information but also the interviewees themselves for up-dates. Thesize of the task I had set myself was beyond my capacities as a working mother; to complete itwould take more than summer holidays. There was another, more practical consideration intranscribing the tapes myself: completing the project had meant becoming a full-time graduatestudent, and I could not afford to have the tapes transcribed by someone else.The tapes are characterized sometimes not by questions but by single words which probedmore concrete detail, more example, more explanation, more description. They are punctuatedwith my thoughts, though I really did try to minimize these as leading rather than exploring.There are places where, knowing their stories, the questions are leading, getting them to retell- 52 -what I had already heard or understood to be their way of being. There are a lot of my \"yeahs\"as well. Quickly the interviews had become conversations. One story often lead to another. Icouldn't NOT tell my own stories at times and feel comfortable; real conversations needinvestment on both sides. In this way, we explored the tangents of our knowledge and experienceas women and as teachers of a common curriculum. It was the differences that I felt I neededto attend to the most, though the shared experiences provided the trust or the humour or thewarmth in our talking.Oakley (1986) contests the scientific conventions of interviewing. She says that\"interviewing is rather like a marriage: everybody knows what it is, an awful lot of people doit, and yet behind each closed front door there is a world of secrets\" (p.231). Methodologytextbooks carefully construct proper interviews as instruments of data collection, as pseudo-conversations in which the interviewer is \"socialized\" to ask \"unbiased\" questions and createrapport, and the interviewee, in an essentially passive role, is \"socialized\" to give answers(p.235). The conventional research protocol of interviewing, particularly as it pertains to \"afeminist interviewer interviewing women (who may or may not be feminists),\" she says, is a\"masculine paradigm\" or fiction (p.232). Proper interviews, in valuing objectivity, detachment,and hierarchy over the improper inclusion of subjectivity, involvement, and people's moreindividualized concerns, are classic representations of the gender stereotyping which occurs incountless scientific studies (p.237). \"Through the prism of our technological and rationalisticculture, we are led to perceive and feel emotions as some irrelevancy or impediment\" to thebusiness of real science-making (pp.238-9). Conventional interviewing techniques are constructedin terms contradictory to women's experience and are, in Oakley's view, morally indefensiblein their exploitation of women as sources of data. She reformulates the interview as an- 53 -opportunity for friendship grounded in trust and reciprocity and as \"a tool for making possiblethe articulated and recorded commentary of women on the very personal business of being femalein a patriarchal capitalist society\" (p.246).Women's stories, told in their own ways, expose \"the tension between the rigid arroganceof theory and the reflexive domesticity of practice\" (p.230). They pose ethical dilemmas forresearchers which are... greatest where there is least social distance between theinterviewer and interviewee. Where both share the same gendersocialization and critical life-experiences, social distance can beminimal. Where both interviewer and interviewee sharemembership of the same minority group, the basis for equality mayimpress itself even more urgently on the interviewer'sconsciousness (p.251).Witcher (1985) further exposes the feminist dilemma in research: there is a danger of akind of \"voyeurism\" in building in the trust and warmth of interactive research relationships andthen withdrawing \"to academic heights to impart those parts of the relationship which she deemsworthy of reporting\" (p.96). The dilemma was exposed in her relationship with one of her threestudy participants whose views she felt did not support and were discordant with the project-as-praxis goals of illuminating sexist practices in classrooms and of planning anti-sexist stategies.The dilemma, says Witcher, is personal and professional:What do I write about the third? This seems to be a crucialdilemma. I am torn between the personal -- that is, presenting thesexist teacher in as positive a way as possible out of respect for herfeelings and my anxiety not to exert status or power by taking theliberty of defining her for academic delectation -- and theprofessional, where I am dedicated to tackling as truthfully and aspositively as possible all the aspects of the teacher's responseswhich seem important for planning intervention strategies inschools (p.103).- 54 -Despite attempts to break down hierarchies and build in intimacy, trust, and personalcommitment, equality is only apparent. The ultimate responsibility is the researcher's. Feministresearch has a responsibility to acknowledge the inequality and to reflect upon and clearlyarticulate the \"messy and subjective\" process of \"combining the personal with the professionaland genuinely attempting to incorporate the perspectives of the researched and award them somestatus and 'right of reply\" (p.104). According to Witcher, it is in this way that the feministresearcher is personally and professionally honest and effective.March, 1993: Moira, said Louise, in an early morning long distance phone call, youdidn't ask about our bad days. We all sound so good. I realized that, despite my democraticintentions, I controlled the destiny of the project by virtue of the questions I asked, the answers1 chose to relate, the theory I chose to include in the discourse. I tried to attend to their voicesand their trust and their responses, in every nuance of meaning and inquiry. There are problemsin speaking for others.I kept a journal during the research period; it too is a conventional tool of field research(Woods, 1986; Anderson, 1989). Journals are an on-going record of the researcher's dialecticalprocess of practical decision-making and are especially important in resolving feminist researchdilemmas; they provide \"the best maps and sign-posts for the journey\" to search for feministtheory (Vickers, 1989, p.31). The practice of writing incorporates the reflective and on-goingdialectical process of integrating and negotiating the fragments of theory, methods, data, response,themes, metaphors, language, tensions, and insights which I have found abound in the complexmatrices of women's work as researchers. Feminist scholarship, says Miles (1989), is committedscholarship. It sees no separation between research, analysis, and practice; \"the goal of theprocess of discovery is transformation (self and societal) as much as understanding\" (p.18).- 55 -Vickers (1989) suggests that \"observation of the practical decisions which feminist researchersmake in their efforts to understand and explain the nature of female experience reveals a praxis\"which is part of the process of discarding the baggage of traditional or malestream research andof creating new tools and new norms for feminist research and action (p.45):The searcher's dilemma is clear. The weight of her own evidenceproduced by the methods 'proper' to her discipline as 'explained'by the dominant theories which express her discipline's rationalconsensus 'prove' either that she is a freak (not being passive,preoccupied with the approval of others, or nurturant); or her'intuitive' knowledge that women are not all alike, that they oughtnot to be passive, etc., calls into question both her own evidenceand the great weight of the disciplinary consensus (Vickers, 1989,p.33).Keeping a journal incorporates self-reflection and self-discipline into feminist research which, as\"disciplined rebellion, [follows the rules of] scholarly principles of reliability, consistency, logicalinference and honesty\" but also assigns priority to intuition and the authenticity of individualexperience and empathy as tests of subjective truth and relevance (p.36). \"Whatever I feel/knowis,\" says Christian (as cited in Ellsworth, 1992, p.94).February, 1993: I found the tape recorder a problematic tool for investigation, more ofa constraint and an annoyance which at times impaired and interrupted the talk as I worried thatit would not be working and that I would have no evidence of our conversations. I also tooknotes in the initial stages of interviewing, but that too proved cumbersome and constraining,disturbing eye contact and patterns in conversations as I tried to write things down. I used thisnote-taking strategy less and less, preferring to record only particular spellings and to recorddescriptions (as, for example, of the interview setting) immediately after the discussion. My firstinterview with Tammy was two hours long and was, in fact, never recorded but recalled frommemory the day after. Even technology conspires to confound and confine the research- 56 -enterprise, particularly when introduced to research grounded in subjectivity. I showed Tammythe transcripts-as-recalled and she commented upon my remarkable memory, which was in factpartially based on the notes I was thankful I had taken concurrent with and immediately afterthe interview that day. Contradictions abound.Increasingly, narrative is the starting point for sense-making of the personal and politicalcomplexities of teaching life. \"Stories,\" in Carter's (1993) view, \"capture, more than scores ormathematical formulae ever can, the richness and indeterminacy of our experiences as teachersand the complexity of our understandings of what teaching is\" (p.5). Teachers have a \"richstoried knowledge\" of classroom dynamics, curriculum content, student learning, and academictasks which they use to \"transform knowledge of content into a form that plays itself out in thetime and space of classrooms\" (p.7). Rather than reducing teaching to its discrete variables andindicators of effectiveness, stories give order and coherence to the multiple meanings and eventsof classrooms and teaching. In this way, stories detechnalize the discourse of education:The narrative study of schooling has potential for freeing educationfrom a language of the technical, for ensuring that understandingslink with fundamental qualities of human experience; and forestablishing bonds in method and meaning between education andother fields of human endeavor (Clandinin and Connelly, 1986,p.385).In addition to their \"storied\" knowledge of teaching, the women of the study brought quitedifferent personal stories and worldviews to the classroom. These, combined with theirknowledge of and experience in teaching, form what Clandinin and Connelly (1986) call\"personal practical knowledge\":Knowing a teaching and learning situation as an experiencedteacher is a matter of recollections from one's narrative called forthby the situation. These recollections are personal, for they arederived from a person's narrative, and they are practical for theyare aimed at meeting the demands of a particular situation. These- 57 -recollections are also theoretical, both in the sense of containingconceptual content and in the sense of typifying the particulars ofa situation; and they are cultural, in the sense that individualnarratives are embedded in cultural and historical narratives(p.383).Individual narratives are embedded in particular political and social contexts. Thestoryteller is aware of the conventions and consequences of storytelling and, as an agent of aconstruction process, is attuned to meaning and interpretation she conveys, referred to as thenarrator effect, as well as to the listener's process of constructing meaning and interpretation,referred to as the audience effect. The critical/feminist researcher, the one \"who has access tothe relevant literatures, who frames the study, who provides the interpretations, and whomodulates the teachers' voice\" also constructs meaning within the gendered traditions ofstorytelling (Carter, 1993, p.9). For women, the art of storytelling is a double problematic for,as Du Bois (1983) has pointed out, our language and conceptual framework are learned \"in theterms of our culture,\" not in the terms of our subjectivities. Our \"divided consciousness,\" saysPagano (1988), the result of always seeing ourselves in others' terms, has meant that \"either weare locked out or we are plagiarists. The stories we tell are not our own\" (p.339). Thus, evenreading and storytelling can be seen as gendered acts (p.335). In telling our own stories, we mustchallenge our assumptions, methods, and goals and seek narrative alternatives which are nottentative and which give authority to women's knowledge in the language and constructs ofwomen.Spender (1983) uses the present imperfect verb tense to describe the process of women'sconstruction of meaning as partial and progressive. The words are as true for personal narrativeas they are for feminist research:Developing a theoretical framework for this when the words aren'tthere and the concepts are shadows. Being brave ... deliberately- 58 -adopting positions that are legitimated as outrageous. Looking towomen for validation ... huge change when it is no longernecessary to seek male approval and confirmation.Recognising that life cannot be separated from knowledge ... thatwe are knowledge, nothing out there ... who we are means what weknow. My life, my biography inseparable from what I know ...dispensing with male approval: not an intellectual decision.Finding new ways of understanding not learnt through books.Finding myself involved in processes and then trying to describeand explain what happens.Pushing myself to the paradoxes: perceiving who put it on itspresent plane, recognising the needs it serves, knowing I will notsubscribe. Wanting to endorse theorising and wanting to insist thatit is open to all. The contradictions. The necessity of a new frameof reference. The reconceptualisation of theory in order to theorise(pp.30-31).Ellsworth (1992) suggests that \"any individual woman's politicized voice will be partial,multiple, and contradictory .... It is impossible to speak from all voices at once\" (pp.103-104) andthat what gets said and left unsaid is a highly complex and strategic process of negotiating \"thepolitics of knowing and being known\":What they/we say, to whom, in what context, depending on theenergy they/we have for the struggle on a particular day, is theresult of conscious and unconscious assessments of the powerrelations and safety of the situation (p.105).Hence, the task was one of building the narrative collection in which the women speak in theirown voices which are multiple, shifting, intersecting, contradictory, partial, imperfect, andunequal (p.109). The narratives are colourful stories told across the \"grey areas\" of differences.The analysis of the women's narratives sought the colour of patterns, discordancies,themes, refrains of figurative language, unities, commonalities, and differences; such narrativedevices provide coherence within complexity and the critical tension required to construct a goodstory. Many teacher biographies are not very memorable, says Carter (1993), and are inattentive- 59 -to the narrative conventions of characterization, plot, rising action, setting, and theme. Theydescribe \"stick figures\" without contexts (p.9). To describe each as a woman and a teacher, Iwanted the richness of detail that gives life and dimension to the characters of stories. Thetranscripts were indexed for key quotes and patterns and examples. I also tried to identify thepartialities and multiple subjectivities which are reflected in the stories each woman tells of herexperiences and her different identities.Ellsworth (1992) discusses narratives as partial, that is, unfinished, imperfect, and limited:They project the interests of \"one side\" over others. Because thosevoices are partial and partisan, they must be made problematic, butnot because they have broken the rules of thought of the idealrational person by grounding their knowledge in immediateemotional, social, and psychic experiences of oppression, or aresomehow lacking or too narrowly circumscribed. Rather, theymust be critiqued because they hold implications for other socialmovements and their struggles for self-definition (p.97).My own identities as researcher, as friend, and as colleague created a tension around thecontradictory asymmetry of power; I struggled with this throughout the research process. Respectfor their knowledge meant giving over space for that knowledge. Feminist projects contest thefact that \"men occupy all the conceptual space\" (Spender, 1982, p.30), relegating women's storiesto the status of sidebars which, as McIntosh (1983) has noted as phase two, are added on to themaster narratives of curriculum and teaching. But my voice must allow for their stories to beheard from the centre as they wished them to be told. In retelling their stories, I have includedextensive passages from the conversations, an attempt to fulfill these goals. Letting the dataspeak for themselves, however, made my own standpoint as the primary maker of meaning ashifting, multiple, partial, imperfect reality. I was moving personally within McIntosh's \"phase-three\" political analysis of women's absence or marginal presence to create a woman-centredproject. Again, I came to understand the process of feminist research as emergent.- 60 -March, 1993: As the project began, I was looking for women's ways of knowing, being,and teaching which reflected the themes of caring, nurturing, connection, collaboration, andcooperation of the earlier feminist theoretical constructions cited in the review of literature. ButI could not make all the women fit these descriptions with any degree of conviction, no matterhow hard I tried. Caring, I thought, could be demonstrated in a number of ways, such asconcern for one's students or concern for the environment or for world peace and other socialissues. And it can and it was, to varying degrees. But what if the primary characteristic of thatparticular woman's teaching and being is not caring, and what are the consequences of depictingall women as caring? The six women were far from the same as people or as teachers.The poststructural feminist perspective or standpoint (Luke and Gore, 1992) allowed meto illuminate the differential location and identity of each as a woman in teaching. In so doing,importance was given to the places or ecology of their experience as women who are teachersand leaders in social studies. Descriptions of their personal lives (Chapter 3) offered somepossibilities for generalizable characteristics, but for the most part, the lives of the women werequite different. Their teaching styles and standpoints were also all quite different, though therewere common themes and tensions in their curricular transformations and understandings(Chapter 4). They did not all conform to the feminist pedagogical model, and some who didwould have actively resisted this designation. Their experiences of the broader contexts of theirteaching, what can be viewed as their citizenship within their educational communities, were alsoquite different (Chapter 5). Yet, within these stories of difference, there were commonalitieswhich emerged as themes in some of the narratives. Themes which were missing in other storiescreated critical questions around differences of standpoint and understandings of place. Why was- 61 -the experience of some different than that of others? Why had some not talked about it? Whyhad I not included it?As collaborative, praxis-oriented research, the project incorporated the \"mutual negotiationof meaning and power\" (Lather, 1986a). The women were asked to read, reflect upon, andrespond to Chapter 1, \"The Review of Literature\" and on the emerging theory. Their responsescame in writing or in personal conversations. Some of the women phoned after reading a draftchapter; I took notes during our conversations. Others mailed responses with comments writtenin margins or letters with suggestions and encouragement. Occasionally, the concerns were withthe grammatical expression and the informal structures of the language of their conversation. Ihave tried to negotiate retention of some of these for the veracity or flavour of talking; thespoken language of stories is, after all, imperfect and fragmented. Several times, the problemswere of omission or of identity. Sometimes, there were questions or observations which causedme to critically reflect on the process and the theory. All changes, insights, and questions werediscussed and accounted for in the theory-building. While this collaborative process added timeat the writing stage, as Riddell (1992) notes, it was essential to addressing issues of validity andof women's authority over their own stories and knowledge.Two issues emerged significantly within the collaboration process. Both surround theproblems of identity and naming. I had some very political concerns about the consequences ofmaking some of the stories public. Although each had been assigned a pseudonym and somepersonal and identifying details were changed to protect identity, the community of \"geographywomen\" is so small (there are only 28 presently teaching in BC) that identification is stillpossible. Chapters 4 and 5 were read by several staff members of the BC Teachers' Federationwho, with a one-sentence deletion, felt that the stories met the ethical and professional guidelines- 62 -for teacher conduct. I find this fear itself an interesting response to the research, but then myown identity is visible; my name is clearly implicated as the primary story-teller.The other issue emerged from discussion with Tammy of the \"convention of anonymity\"in academic research. When I told her I needed to change real names to pseudonyms, Tammywas adamant: it's about time, she indicated, that we were able to name those whose support hasmade a difference. Naming, of course, has significance as a feminist strategy in identifying thosefactors of existence which women value as well as those which demean women (Vickers, 1989;Du Bois, 1983). Its limitations, admittedly, are in failing to name others whose presence hasmade a difference for women or in mis-naming. We resolved the issue by asking Wanda Cassidyof Simon Fraser University, who is named in the study, what she thought. She did not recognizethe convention and was delighted at being named. I made the authorial decision to seek thepermission of those women whose real names are used in the conversations because they arepositive role models and because they have, in their teaching lives, made a difference for otherwomen.Cornbleth (1986) makes the case for intellectual-scientific and social passion in socialstudies research, describing it as... an intense purposeful emotion of eagerness in pursuit ofsignificant goals ... disciplined, in part by the communities towhich we belong, to respond to challenges to our cherished valuesand to pursue our visions of the desirable future (p.2)In the critical paradigm, any emancipatory theory, including feminist research, seeks to \"buildtheory that possesses 'evocative power' [which] by resonating with people's lived concerns, fears,and aspirations, ... serves an energizing, catalytic role\" (Lather, 1986a, p.266). In this way,theory can express and describe \"politically progressive popular feelings rather than an abstract- 63 -framework imposed by intellectuals on the complexity of lived experience\" (p.267). Feministresearch, as passionate scholarship,... makes possible a common endeavour of science-making that canactually engage the conjunctions of values, purposes, methods andknowing -- that can begin to integrate subjectivity with objectivity,substance with process, passion with responsibility, and the knowerwith the known (Du Bois, 1983, p.113).Critical research, and by extension any research which involves the passion of ideologicalcommitment to a transformative agenda, must pay particular attention to questions about thetrustworthiness of data and issues of validity. It is important, says Lather (1986b), \"that effortsto produce social knowledge that is helpful in the struggle for a more equitable world pursuerigor as well as relevance\" (p.67).As passionate scholarship, feminist research projects do not, in methods or in purpose,recognize value-free science in which objectivity, expertise, neutrality, and separateness arereified and opposed to subjectivity, community, art, and complex understandings. They rejectdichotomy, duality, linearity, and fixity as \"not the properties of nature or of human life andexperiencing\" but of learned ways of thinking, seeing, and knowing that decontextualizes the realdimensions of life, placing them into \"rigid, oppositional, and hierarchical categories\" (Du Bois,1983, pp.110-1). Instead, feminist projects synthesize and integrate, seeing things in holistic andcomplex ways. Feminist projects are often \"charged with bias, advocacy, subjectivity [and]ideologizing\" (p.112). They threaten the established order. For these reasons, feministscholarship demands \"rigor, precision and responsibility to the highest degree\" (p.113); it mustbe acutely aware of its own theoretical constructions, design, and methods if it is to withstandthe charges.- 64 -In qualitative research, \"understanding is a more fundamental concept for qualitativeresearch than validity\" (Wolcott, 1990, as cited in Maxwell, 1992, p.281). Research accounts areassessed for their \"integrity, character, and quality\" in relation to our understanding of the thingsthey claim to be about and in relation to the community of inquirers on whose perspectives theaccount is based:Validity is relative in this sense because understanding is relative;... it is not possible for an account to be independent of anyparticular perspective. It is always possible to challenge an accountfrom outside that community and perspective, but a challengeamounts to expanding the community that is concerned with theaccount and may change the nature of the validity issues (Maxwell,p. 284).Qualitative research must concern itself with descriptive validity. Is the account factuallyaccurate? Is the researcher making up or distorting what was seen or heard? (Maxwell, p.285).On the primary level, this study addressed descriptive validity in its design by having the womenreview the data and their accounts. On a secondary level, the stories themselves were notobserved, though they could have been, as real events. What is real is the women'sunderstanding and ways of constructing meaning of those events; my recounting of those, as realevents told in their terms, was not problematic for the women who read each chapter in severaldraft stages. As stories, they correspond to the women's accounts and perceptions of what reallyhappened.A second concern is with a study's interpretive validity. Does the meaning assigned bythe research to the account correspond to the meaning intended by the people who gave them?Does the meaning correspond to the participants' perspective of their own accounts? Are theaccounts \"experience-near\" and substantially derived from their own language? (Maxwell, p. 288)Again, the women's perspectives were accounted for in the collaborative structuring of the- 65 -research process to provide time and opportunity for reading, reflection, and response to theaccuracy of draft chapters as the researcher's re-constructions of the meaning of their accounts.Their own words are used extensively in the analysis.A third consideration is the study's theoretical validity. Are the theoretical constructionsthe researcher brings to and develops during the study applied appropriately to the particularaccounts? Does the researcher connect theoretical constructs legitimately within the context ofthe study both to the data and to other theory? Of issues of construct validity in openlyideological research, Lather (1986a) says:The data must be allowed to generate propositions in a dialecticalmanner that permits use of a priori theoretical frameworks, butwhich keeps a particular framework from becoming the containerinto which the data must be poured. The search is for theorywhich grows out of context-embedded data, not in a way thatautomatically rejects a priori theory, but in a way that keepspreconceptions from distorting the logic of evidence (p.267).The study, as an exploration of women's experience in the male-dominated field of social studiesteaching, was grounded in critical, feminist, pedagogical, and social studies theory. Thecollaborative process of integrating the women's responses to draft chapters, including Chapter1, The Review of Literature, invited their understanding of the study's theoretical underpinnings.It gave them the opportunity to express their perspectives on my theoretical contribution to theresearch story of the voices of a priori theorists, to the building of meaning and of collectivenarrative.The study incorporated Anderson's (1989) notion of critical reflexivity as an explicit,systematized, and dialectical process for including the responses of both the researcher and theresearched to the theory and to the research effects. Negotiations of meaning, he says, shouldalso reflect on context, that is, the structural and historical forces that have shaped the- 66 -participants' lives and work. Intellectual rigour at the theory-building stage was addressed in thismanner within the study. Meaning was critically unveiled (Anderson, 1989) as the participantsdescribed, measured, and recorded the experience and perceptions of their lives and of teachingand of involvement with this project. The inclusion of participant responses and criticalreflections also addressed McCutcheon's (1981) concern for over- and under-representation inthe creation of meaning. \"Making data and analyses as public and as credible as possible isessential,\" says Lather (1986b, p.77).Lather (1986b), in arguing for more systematic approaches to issues of validity inideological research, suggests that a study should be measured for its catalytic validity. Whatpersonal and/or political impact has participation in the project had upon the researcher and theresearched? Given that critical research aims to transform and empower, how has involvementre-oriented, focused, or energized the participants themselves? What actions are attributable tothis transformation? The women were asked to reflect on the ways their being involved in theproject had in some way transformed their ways of seeing or knowing the experience of beinga woman and teaching social studies. Asking practicing teachers, particularly women withchildren, to find the opportunity to critically reflect upon chapters-in-progress was asking a lotand was a measure of their commitment to the collaborative nature of the project. Teachers havelittle time to reflect upon their accounts of teaching (Erickson, 1986; Carter, 1993; Pagano, 1988).The reflective dimension to this research-as-praxis allowed the women to come to know theirown stories, for some, in significant and unexpected ways.Another concern is with a study's generalizability. To what extent can the accounts beapplied to situations or people other than those directly studied? \"Qualitative studies are notusually designed to allow systematic generalizations to some wider population\" (Maxwell, p.293),- 67 -but they are concerned with developing a theory that makes sense of the people or the situationsstudied. Spender (1983) speaks of generalizability in women's terms, suggesting that womenhave different life experiences and that this gives rise to different interpretations, all equallyvalid:Trying to reduce the diversity of human experience and thecreativity of human meaning to one solitary sediment seems to menot only wasteful and time consuming, but unnecessarily stupid anddenotes enormous insecurity in being unable to accept anymeanings other than one's own (p. 29).The stories are not told to suggest general characteristics about women who teach socialstudies but to highlight the difference of which Spender speaks and the complexity of women'spersonal and professional lives. They are told to retrieve women from obscurity, what Martin(1985) calls the \"ontological basement,\" and to claim validity for their experience in andunderstandings of their multiple roles as women and as teachers and leaders in social studies.In contextualizing the women, this study also looks at the forces which shape and within whichthey shape their lives. Those who read or hear the stories make their own meanings of them.Yet generalizability is, to some extent, a factor for consideration in two aspects of thisstudy. While the questionnaire data do suggest the women's difference from male-dominatednormative descriptions of social studies teachers, the sample group is too small and notrepresentative of the experience of most women who teach social studies in its focus on thosewho have, to varying degrees, acquired specialist status in the field by their teaching of seniorcourses and their engaging in leadership activities. Additional and different research would allowfor building such generalizations. \"The value of a qualitative study may depend on its lack ofexternal generalizability in a statistical sense; it may provide an account of a setting or populationthat is illuminating as an extreme case or 'ideal type\" (Maxwell, 1992, p.294). More than- 68 -anything, the questionnaire analysis illuminates the interpretive limitations of quantitativemethodologies, such as external generalizing, which normalizes descriptions of women'sexperience and measures them against male standards. Generalizing the women's questionnaireresponses augments the case that Eichler (1987) makes for women telling their own stories.Another way in which generalizability is a factor of this study is in the thematic analysisof the women's stories. Carter (1993) argues that \"generalizations from stories are at bestprecarious\" (p.10). The relationship between story and reality is problematic. Stories areambiguous and complex constructions of reality, not reality itself. They are a way ofconstructing and expressing knowledge, of explaining and giving meaning and coherence tosomething. When teachers' stories include their biographies, \"the central themes are often moraland philosophical, having more to do with feelings, purposes, images, aspirations, and personalmeanings than with teaching method or curriculum structures in isolation from personalexperience\" (pp.7-8). Clandinin and Connelly's (1986) notion of teachers' personal practicalknowledge sees teachers' narratives as an integration of the private and public selves in a processof constructing both a theory and practice of teaching.Within each woman's stories, I looked for \"unities of experience,\" to use Clandinin andConnelly's term; these are the commonsense constructs which appeared in patterns throughouther dialogue and transcended the way she understood and created her multiple identities or roles.These unities allowed me to theoretically reconstruct the stories each women told of the practicalrealities of social studies and teaching. Identifying these constructs or unities led me to defineeach woman as having a distinct style of teaching, for example. Where these constructs appearedin recurring patterns across several (though not necessarily all) stories, they were identified asnarrative themes, that is, as as having a degree of generalizability within the bounds of the study- 69 -itself. There were common themes that echoed in varying tonalities throughout the women'scurriculum stories and experiences of other professional contexts. Presented as thematic analysisin the research account, these patterns across the differences of their stories are not highlyabstract generalizations or laws to which all women's experience of social studies conforms, but\"explanatory propositions with which we can make sense of the dilemmas and problematics ofteaching\" (Carter, 1993, p.10) from women's perspectives. Again, a different study of women'sperceptions of social studies teaching might seek to address generalizability where this study doesnot.Another issue of validity in qualitative research is with its evaluative validity (Maxwell,1992, p.295). Does the study evaluate the women as teachers or as leaders? While the studyseeks to reconstruct a theoretical and practical story of women's teaching as valid and to giveauthority to women's knowledge, the reconstruction is very much on mutually negotiated terms.Attentive to the importance of research conducted in friendship and to issues of safety forwomen, my own included, I chose not to offer evaluative analysis but to allow the stories tospeak for themselves and of themselves wherever possible. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are characterizedby very long quotations for precisely this reason. In addition, I recognized that no matter howdetailed the account, each story must be seen as partial and selective in its construction andambiguous in its interpretation. That is not to say that, in my reconstruction, I was unaware of\"audience effect\" whereby readers of the story as I have chosen to tell it will make their ownmeaning, having their own evaluative capacity.The study can be assessed for evaluative validity in another sense. Does it evaluate thewomen's stories in terms of some presence not announced in the account? The study consciouslydoes not speak in comparative terms, that is, depicting women's experiences as \"better than,\"- 70 -though \"different from\" in the language of the theorists and the women's stories may at timesovertly invite and be heard as evaluative comparison. Their experiences and perceptions are asdifferent from each other's as they are from men's.The stories in this study could only be women's stories, though they are not all storiesdepicting women as \"caring\" and \"thinking as mothers.\" Such essentialist notions serve only toconfine and limit the different and various strengths by which both women's ways of beingwomen and men's ways of being men can be inscribed. Either/Or thinking within and acrossgender lines, however, can only be transcended when women's experiences are not marginalizedor cast as deficient but as valid and worthy of inclusion in the discourse of teaching. They arethe personally reflective stories of women thinking politically about very political curricula andteaching contexts and social realities. This project has moved women's stories from the sidebarsof the master narratives of the practice and curriculum of social studies and teaching, claiminga place as a new narrative about valued citizens at the centre of an educational community, atleast for the duration of the telling. There are other stories for which space needs to be claimed.The practices of patriarchy are not the practices of all men. Yet when patriarchal practice andmaster narratives in education continue to exclude some, teaching for maximizing humanpossibilities and educated citizenship can only be limited.Moving beyond requires renaming the characteristics of women,not in terms of deviations from or negations of a masculine norm,but as patterns of human responses to particular situations. In thisview, masculinity and femininity are simply different humanpossibilities that have emerged historically. This understanding hadled feminist scholarship to rethink the concept of the person toinclude traditionally female characteristics (Westkott, 1979, p. 324).In its feminist research design, the project was undertaken as a democratized inquiry inthe spirit of open and empowering collaboration. The methodology sought consistency with the- 71 -ideology. The project was undertaken with passionate commitment to listen to the voices ofwomen and to pursue answers in integrative, holistic, and reflective ways to the question as to:... how [we] can help create a space for the mutual engagement oflived difference that is not framed in oppositional terms, requiringthe silencing of a multiplicity of voices by a single dominantdiscourse (Lewis and Simon, 1986, p.216).- 72 -CHAPTER 3: THE WOMEN AS INDIVIDUALSI met Amanda-Leigh, Ellen, Joan, Alison, and Louise at Geography 12 Provincial Exammarking committee sessions held in Victoria, BC, in February and again in July every year. Aswomen, we were members of a visible minority in a gathering of some of the province's best-known geography teachers; women constituted up to 25% of geography marking teams of 30 or35 people. I met Tammy, a geography teacher who has also been a member of markingcommittees, at a summer institute for social studies teachers at Simon Fraser University. Womenwere also underrepresented in this context.The women in this study are all white and middle class by profession, though one canclaim working-class roots. One has French-Canadian heritage; two grew up abroad; the othersare Anglo-Canadian by birth. They range in ages, marital status, teaching experience, andexperience of the education system. All have been involved in Ministry-level social studiescommittees, amongst other \"leadership\" roles. All are strong, self-confident, well-travelled,dynamic women committed to education and learning. All have excellent academic credentialsfrom which they derive pride and self-esteem. They come to the field of social studies teachingwith an extraordinary love of geography, though their paths into, and in several cases, out of, thefield are all quite different.Like history textbook sidebars which tell the stories of visible minority experiences, thesestories represent narratives marginal not only to a master narrative of men's experience but, inmany ways, to the experience of most women in social studies teaching. The following are theirpersonal stories, shared with me over several conversational interviews which richly describe theparticular personal perspectives and experiences they bring to their teaching lives.- 73 -The Life Story of Amanda-Leigh:Amanda-Leigh is the youngest of the group. She and I became good friends over severalshared marking sessions. The daughter of a well-known government bureaucrat and hisprofessional wife, Amanda-Leigh is 30, single, the oldest of three children. She has a livelysense of humour and our conversations are interspersed with her ready laughter.We talk in the living room of her one-bedroom apartment centrally located in the affluentcommunity where she grew up and now teaches. Given her sense of the importance ofcommunity, it was no surprise that she should live where she works and where she feelsintegrally connected. The apartment reflects her relative youthfulness and her active lifestyle:there are family photographs, a collage of photos prepared by students, stuffed animals, runningshoes by the door. It was difficult to catch her at home as she's usually away at the family's skicabin on the weekends or busy on weeknights with friends, workouts, and other activities. Thedining area is her den, containing a desk and books -- prominent in her bookshelves are theprovincial government geography manuals.It does not take long to identify her strength of character, the very strongly-held principleswhich underpin her existence both as a woman and as a teacher and which were inculcated inchildhood lessons. Amanda-Leigh is very clear about these. Canadian to the core, Amanda-Leigh is fiercely proud of her family. Her growing up she describes as...extraordinarily stable. [There was] a phenomenal sense offamily. I'm one of three children, the eldest daughter. My sisteris 27; my brother is 21. I have the same parents I started with;[they] have an amazing sense of family, a strong sense of values,right or wrong, religious values, upbringing, citizenship,community.- 74 -As a family, they attended church and participated in the neighbourhood and community groups;Amanda-Leigh was a Canada Cord Guide, her mother and father both actively involved at seniorlevels with Guides and Scouts. The children all played on school and community teams.Amanda-Leigh has no trouble identifying the most significant influence of such anupbringing in her life: the inherent sense of self-worth. Strong family values of honesty, loyalty,Canadian-ness, and commitment to whatever one undertakes transcend her personal andprofessional life. She speaks of \"giving back what you have received, be it from a friendship ora family member or the community or the school.\" She talks about the phenomenal sense ofwork ethic, of fireworks and \"Happy Birthday, Canada\" cakes, of the privilege of carrying aCanadian passport, of the importance of becoming bilingual, of trips to Canadian historical sitesand to a French cemetery on the anniversary of D-Day, of mother's lessons on Nellie McClungand the suffragettes. She was instilled with the sense of responsibility,...to [our] government, to the world, the democratic process. Youcannot just accept what happens, you have to figure out why it'shappening. When you cast a vote, it better be an informed one andyou better make sure you vote every time you have thatopportunity .... How could you live with yourself when you don'tcast a vote when you have that opportunity?Amanda-Leigh has travelled everywhere with her family, she said. The children bore halfthe costs of the trips, though most people find that hard to believe:If you asked my parents what the intended learning outcomes werefor travelling, [they were] to broaden their kids' horizons, to instillin their children that they were not better than anyone else, thatthey were to never presume that because they were white and ...spoke English, that made them better than anyone else. Theyworked so hard to make their kids understand that it doesn't matterwho you are, what colour you are, what religion you are, thateverybody is important.- 75 -Amanda-Leigh's elementary and secondary schooling saw her emerge, not unexpectedly,as a high-profile, involved, and committed citizen of the school community. She playedvolleyball, got involved with students' council and grad committee; she was \"more of a doer,making it work as opposed to going against it.\" She was, for the most part, a \"Pollyanna.\" Sheremembers only once challenging a teacher over an assignment he said she hadn't handed in.Her favourite teachers were those \"who knew me as a person first and a student second.\"Amanda-Leigh wrote to her History 12 and Geography 12 teachers when she became one\"because they were interested in me as a person.\" The woman who taught geography broughtit to life for Amanda-Leigh; she was not a \"sit in the row and lecture\" kind of teacher but onewho took students out to see and study the community. The man who taught history providedthe model of classroom desk arrangement, in two U's, that Amanda-Leigh uses herself.I think that the thing that I respected most were the teachers [who]did not presume that they were better than we were. They lookedat us and thought, what can we do to help these kids learn? Nowmaybe that's an educator reflecting back and putting terms andwords onto a situation but teachers that really cared about theirkids and the content came second. They're the ones I cared aboutthe most.Though science was an all-female department at her high school, the teachers were, in Amanda-Leigh's view, \"females who believed in the 'content at the expense of the learning' idea.\" Shewas unquestionably a Humanities graduate.Nothing is particularly remarkable, in Amanda-Leigh's opinion, about her time as a post-secondary student; nothing had a \"passionate impact on [her] development.\" She thought brieflyabout taking a year out, but her parents would have none of it. \"In your next life!\" they said.Working part-time for a trust company, she was offered a management training program; herparents counselled her to continue her academic program. Amanda-Leigh had wanted to be a- 76 -teacher. She briefly considered a career with External Affairs but came to see it as a \"systemthat was ... controlling, ... bureaucratic, ... ladder-oriented.\" It wasn't what she wanted. Shecompleted her B.A. with a double major in history and geography at SFU.Amanda-Leigh spent a year at Laval studying French. \"As soon as I got to Laval, I knewI wanted to be a teacher.\" Ottawa University had a great Teachers' College; she graduated B.Ed.,magna cum laude. \"My parents thought,\" she said, \"that the more universities you [went] to indifferent provinces, the better off you [were]. [You had] a better understanding of the nation.\"She returned from three years of teaching in eastern Canada to work in the affluent school districtfrom which she graduated. This is her fourth year of teaching in BC.As a single woman, Amanda-Leigh skis, swims, reads, enjoys meeting new people, andcontinues to travel in her summer holidays. As personal accomplishments, those things aboutherself in which she takes particular pride, Amanda-Leigh lists, \"Department Coordinator at 28.Schooled in three provinces. Travelled extensively.\" \"Pollyanna,\" however, is adept atpretending sometimes:Everything's okay. Everything's going well. Let's just have fun.Let's [look for the positive] ... it's almost a negative connotationbecause, instead of clearly identifying the factors that are problems,you're willing to gloss them over for the sake of everythinglooking wonderful ... sometimes trying to make sure that everythingis going well for everyone, at the expense of what your own needsare.Amanda-Leigh presently shares her life with close friends, male and female, and family. Shetalks of bouts of being lonely, finding that married friends reinforce her singleness. Teachinghas, at times, made her feel as though her life is closing in, not branching out. Often late homefrom school, she has coached volleyball, supervised dances, and assisted with musicals,graduation, and awards. She is very committed to developing as a professional and often attends- 77 -conferences on innovative directions in education. \"It's easy to substitute work for a social life,\"she said.The Life Story of Tammy:Although Tammy has marked provincial exams, she finds it difficult to conceive of howshe could go away to Victoria, given the responsibilities of single parenting. We are, however,old acquaintances from the 1988 Social Studies Provincial Assessment Team where we workedtogether creating the assessment tool. I have not been to her home before but I feel welcomeimmediately; Tammy has a vivaciousness and an openness that made the prospect of ourconversation fun.Tammy is 39, divorced, and the mother of a 10-year old son, David. She enjoys reading,writing, swimming, music, and activities with her son. She volunteers at the local shelter forbattered women. Her home is in a rapidly growing area near Vancouver. She commutes dailyto a nearby community with her son who attends school there; she had not been happy with theneighbourhood school. Tammy's home is five years old, immaculate, bright, and ordered. Ourinterview was conducted under the gaze of a very large champagne poodle.My first questions about her childhood brought tears. Tammy was the third child in atraditional French-Canadian family where her mother stayed home to raise the children, first ason, then two daughters. Her brother had been born severely physically and mentally challenged;this had been her mother's greatest sorrow. Tammy and her older sister Crystal are bothextremely successful in their careers, but there is a very strong awareness in both of them of theirmother's disappointment that such a handicap should have been visited upon her only son. Muchof the family's energy was spent in meeting the needs of the oldest child. Tammy described thefamily as not one that demonstrated affection or that had avenues for expressing love.- 78 -The girls did much to fend for themselves and developed a kind of intellectual/emotionalinterdependence which still characterizes their relationship. \"We get along really well,\" saidTammy. \"We never fight and never have.\" Crystal, five years older than Tammy, would teachthe younger one, assigning her reading beyond her high school level, books such as Plato'sRepublic which had been assigned in Crys's first-year Political Science class, so that she couldhave someone to talk with about it. The older sister guided and mentored the intellectualdevelopment of the younger. Crystal is now a partner in a law firm in Vancouver. Both girlsshared a love of music and learned to play the piano; Tammy has taught piano as well.Tammy noted periods of strain in her relationship with her mother during her growing up,though these feelings belong to the past. As a traditional French-Canadian wife and mother,Tammy's mother had never been able to consider life options such as those pursued by herdaughters. Tammy had not lived out the lot of married women in leaving her husband; thoughthe family is \"lapsed\" in its Catholicism, Tammy spoke of the sense that, for her mother, the dutyof women in life is to endure. The family socialized mostly with relatives.Tammy spoke lovingly of her father; he was always quietly there for his daughters. Hecalled them his \"penguins.\" Though Tammy was not sure of the derivation of this term, they doshare a love of their pets which she speculates is the only way he has of showing affection.There was no doubt that she and her sister are the two most-loved people in his world. WhenTammy's marriage was in trouble, he took her on a trip to China and Thailand; when it brokedown, he found a house for her and David and became her mortgagor. He arrived with a smallmoving van and other members of the family to move a few possessions to the new house theday after Tammy called.- 79 -Tammy's father was, she said, a \"natural geographer.\" Her love of geography came insharing his natural curiosity about places and people, about landscapes and rocks. He helped herwith her rock collection. She and her sister have travelled all around the world with their father,enjoying his amazing capacity to gather and store data about the differences and similarities ofcultures and lifestyles.Asked from where she derived her self-esteem, Tammy very readily acknowledged thatit came from her schooling, her academic success. She knew she shone at school and wasfiercely competitive in the academic context. Tammy found her voice as a student. Her friendswere the \"odd\" ones, the wounded ones who needed her strength and her support. She talked ofthe sense of social justice which became readily apparent in an incident in grade 8 where shespoke loudly on behalf of another student who had been physically and mentally mistreated bya teacher. There were no women social studies teachers at all, \"just very boring men.\"When Tammy finished high school, there was no money for her to continue her education.Tammy could not see anything in the area where she grew up that she wanted to do, so she leftfor the Northwest Territories. It was there that she became a member of a minority, one of thefew whites in an aboriginal community, and there that she derived her commitment to issues ofsocial justice and equity. She earned enough money to carry on her education.The same voice that she had found in high school and which called for social justicecharacterized Tammy's days at SFU. She spoke of her challenge to a history professor whoseideas on women she found unacceptable; he had started his course with statements that highereducation was really the domain of men and that women's presence on campus denied men theirrightful place. Other lessons, such as the one on Hitler and masturbation, had been equallyoffensive to her; she had made a point of being visible in leaving the lecture hall that day. When- 80 -she had submitted her final paper, the professor told her that her mark had already beendetermined, that he wouldn't need to mark her paper. If she chose to challenge the mark, hesaid, he also sat on the committee and would see that the mark stood. She received a D. Shehad gone to the head of the History department who read her paper and changed her mark to aB; she was sure the professor was never informed. He had continued to cause problems for anumber of years thereafter, Tammy said, \"before the department got rid of him.\"Tammy enjoyed university and was excited by academic life. Her love of the challengeof ideas and of the dialectic and discourse which surrounded the Simon Fraser Universityacademic world of the early 1970s came, she thought, from her French Canadian roots. Sherecalled her sister's bringing home the SFU intellectual elite of the rebellious '60s and thedynamic discussions which took place in their living room. French Canadians, she explained,loved to discuss ideas, loved the passionate exchange which was somehow removed from thepersonal and emotional.Her love of geography was confirmed in a first-year course in physical geography, thesame course and professor that I too had loved. Though I was a contemporary of her older sister,we were able to share other stories of professors we'd had in common and enjoyed and in whoseclasses we had expanded that love of geography. We were made to feel our importance as brightyoung women. Neither of us remembers any women faculty in the department; there were veryfew women students.At 20, Tammy married; her husband was 15 years older than she was, a widower withthree children ranging in ages from 10 to 14. At 20 she was mother, housekeeper, and wife, aswell as a full-time student on campus. The excitement and challenge of her academic worldcounterbalanced a marriage she knew almost immediately was wrong and the duties of her roles- 81 -in their home. The duality of this existence stole her twenties. At 30, she said, she looked morelike 40. Her husband had expected that she would stay young and slim and energetic; she hadgained weight and been drained of her youth and her energy. Hers was not a supportivemarriage; her husband's personal problems with alcohol and his abusiveness strained the seamsof the family. Besides, she embarrassed him, she said. He had been president of a businessmanagement association which held its Christmas function at a prestigious professional men'sclub. She had refused to enter by the side door as was customary for women. They had spentthat formal evening in mutual rage.When Tammy left her husband 15 years later, her own and her son's lives threatened, thedisharmony between her personal and by then professional life was unbearable. Her teachingabout equity and justice and women's issues played discordantly against the way she lived herlife when she went home. It has been five years since she left and she is just now recoveringa sense of herself living one life, not two; her social life is not a priority. She is content withher work, her writing, and her relationship with her son David.Tammy began a program of graduate studies at SFU after her marriage ended but gaveit up in order to be more of a mother for her son. She is not sure she will ever return to it. Inher fourteen years of teaching, she has given workshops on topics ranging from \"New Trends inGeography Education\" to \"Children and the Law\"; she worked on the Geography 12 CurriculumRevision Committee, as well as the most recent Social Studies Provincial Assessment. At school,she was the Yearbook Advisor, sponsored the school swim team, and ran the Debating Club.\"Her girls\" won the Law Cup for public speaking. In addition, she has written resource materialsfor the Legal Services Society and currently writes under contract for a textbook publishingcompany. Under doctor's orders during the period of her marriage breakdown, Tammy gave up- 82 -sponsorship of many of the school's extracurricular programs, though she continues hercommitment to Amnesty International. She has, she says, a tremendous sense of herresponsibility to help people in other countries who are legally and socially disadvantaged, forwhom existence is writ in terms of \"life and death.\" By comparison, she said, the other schoolactivities seemed frivolous.The Life Story of Joan:Since the outset of this study, Joan has given up teaching social studies and geography;she is currently a vice-principal at a high school in the rural environs of south Vancouver Island.She has held the position for seven years, teaching Geography 12 part-time until this year. At41, she is married, the mother of boys who are 11 and 13. Our first conversations took place ather home, child-focused, functional, spacious, and abounding in evidence of an active family thatreally enjoys the outdoors: the camper, motorbikes, golf clubs. The house, which overlooks theGeorgia Strait, sits on an acreage, a hobby farm with a horse, dogs, a turkey, and some chickens;like Joan, the house is bright, open, efficient, unpretentious, and full of life. Joan is economicin her use of words. Nothing is stretched beyond the answer. When our interview was over,Joan took the boys out for a round of golf.She is the middle child; there is an older brother and a younger sister. Though all threewere born in Canada, her parents were post-war British emigrants. Her father served in theBritish Army in World War II, finding work thereafter with the federal government and then withthe provincial Attorney-General's department in Victoria.My brother and I fought all the time because there was a lot ofcompetition. My sister and I are very good friends now. Myfather's dead .... I wouldn't define my relationship to my parentsas really close because they were reserved people .... My motherfinds outward shows of affection hard. It wasn't part of her familybackground at all. If you hugged mother, you rumpled her dress.- 83 -Aspects of Joan's growing up were quite traditional and British: English riding, the ponyclub, family meals of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on Sundays. There are inherited familyheirlooms in her house. But there were non-traditional aspects to her growing up as well. Joan'smother had received a scholarship to university; though the family would pay for the brothers'education, \"they didn't think a girl needed one ... you weren't supposed to aspire to university.\"Joan's mother put money away for her children to go; \"she wasn't expecting you were supposedto just marry and have children.\" There were no female children in the farming neighbourhood,so Joan played with the boys all the time. The themes of her childhood were themes of farmingand outdoor activities. \"I wasn't an inside person. I wasn't interested in cooking, in cleaning.My room was a perpetual mess. [And I was involved in] music.\" Joan ultimately completed hergrade 12 in both piano and woodwind instruments. There were no restrictions, and Joan had nosense that there were things she couldn't do.Elementary school was incredibly easy for Joan. She was accelerated, finishing grades1 to 6 in four years; she was 10 when she entered high school in grade 7.I found junior high really hard. If I had not been in sports andband, I probably would have found things harder because, sociallyand emotionally, I was not at the same level as the other kids ... Igot picked on quite a bit. I wasn't tall. I was late to grow. I amtall now.She came to loathe the phrases \"immature\" and \"not working to potential\": \"Whose idea ofpotential and for what goals?\" she said.Her interest in social studies did not come from her junior high teachers. \"God, we hadsome awful teachers.\" She spoke of doing well \"for revenge. There's got to be something betterthan these guys.\" Joan was interested in travelling and in finding out more about the world.And I found history -- people -- interesting. I used to read MaryStewart novels. Travel books. It was more of a self-motivated- 84 -thing than an externally motivated thing. Certainly not from juniorhigh.Senior high she found to be both enjoyable and easy. She didn't do homework. Shecontinued her piano, played with the school band and the University of Victoria orchestra, playedFirst United basketball, was on the Junior Olympic Track and Field team, played for all theschool teams, and had her own horse as well. She wrote for scholarships in grade 12 (100% inMath 12) and received a full scholarship to university which paid for all of her undergraduateeducation. Of her teachers, she says:I wouldn't say they were the most inspiring teachers, in some casesvery traditional, but they were very caring people, and that's onething I've thought is really important.Of her social studies teacher, she noted that, while he did not know how to present the contentwell, he was really nice and he obviously enjoyed the material. She thought there must thereforebe something to it.Her undergraduate university years were a \"write-off.\" Joan travelled, played sports; shestarted out in Math and Physical Education. At age 19, Joan had completed a B.Ed. in SocialStudies, consisting of 12 units of Math, 15 units of geography, and 18 units of history, and herteacher training program.At 21, Joan got married. Her husband, supervisor of facilities for a nearby school district,does not hold traditional views of women and has always been encouraging and supportive,believing that people should do what makes them happy. They travelled extensively when shewasn't playing sports. Joan has competed nationally and internationally in three different sports,including riding. After seven years of marriage, Joan took some time off to have children.Returning to teach part-time was made easier by the day care available at a neighbouring farm.The children still spend time there; they were there the day I interviewed Joan, hauling hay.- 85 -She returned to complete her Master's degree while the children were young. Her degreework, not surprisingly, focused on Gifted Education.I had a cast on my leg while coaching and everything else at thesame time. I enjoyed it. I really liked the people in the program,taking the courses as a mature person, finally not being immature.I didn't find it difficult. I found it easy.Her Senior Girls' Basketball team went to the provincials that year; her lowest mark was an A-.She remembers putting the children to bed at 8 p.m. and working until one or two in themorning. Yes, she got tired but, once in a while, she could spend a whole day sleeping and getcaught up to go again.When Joan decided to go into administration, her husband downscaled his stressful job.It was \"her turn\"; he would be more available for their two sons. They are encouraging theirchildren... to do the best they can so that they have as many options openas possible. But I also think it's important for them that theychoose a career that makes them happy, that fits what they want,not what I want. We stress that you've got to learn to cooperate,to be tolerant, to do those things that you have to do whetherthey're boring or you think they're silly. There are certain thingsin life that you have to do. Like the house, it's everybody'sresponsibility ... and most of the time, they get along.The boys do the laundry. They have no sense that there's anything men or women cannot orshould not do. As parents, they had wanted to be young enough and have time to play with theirchildren.Now we go out and play golf together during the day and I coachthe older boy's basketball team which is lots of fun. I just reallyenjoy doing things with them. I don't regret it at all, and I thinkthat if I had it to do all over again, that that time frame is suitedto what I was doing.- 86 -While she is no longer teaching Geography 12, she acts as a consultant for the young manwho replaced her. She is the school's computer expert. She referees and continues to coach herson's team and another school basketball team. Joan's educational leadership and creative inputare directed in such innovative programs within the school as the computer technology andenrichment programs.The Life Story of Ellen:When I first got to know Ellen, I was struck by the fact that, though she seemedextremely quiet and reserved, she spoke with a firm authority on environmental issues that gainedher great respect amongst other members of the marking committee. Beneath the reserve, therewas a good sense of humour, a keen mind, and a pragmatic approach to life. I realized later thatit was Ellen whose name I had been given several years earlier at a Social Studies SummerConference as the chairperson of an environmental advocacy group which actively lobbied forprotection of wetland areas. Ellen is no longer teaching social studies and geography, though shefinds ways to incorporate her strongly environmental perspective into her current teaching ofScience, Science and Technology, and English.A New Zealander by birth, Ellen is 44 and has lived with her SFU professor husband inCanada for 12 years. They have no children. They are avid outdoorspeople. Ellen told meabout their Christmas holidays; they had helicoptered into a remote valley near Nelson in theKootenay region of BC with friends and a portable cabin, spending every day skiing the pristineslopes and working as a group on preparation of festive meals. The walls of their suburban homeare adorned with photographs that Peter, her husband, has taken of the mountain peaks they haveclimbed. The peaks are in BC, the Himalayas, New Zealand, and Tasmania. The bungalow isclean and uncluttered, practical, decorated without pretentiousness; it is located on a large- 87 -wooded lot. They are keen gardeners. The gardens in the summer produce vegetables andberries; Ellen had gone home from Victoria on our day off in the summer marking to pick thered currants which would be lost otherwise, as Peter was out of town. A recent home renovationproject saw the addition of a small arboretum off the living room, which is full of the fragrantrare plants of their native New Zealand.We had tea in the dining room in the late afternoon of a work day. Peter would be homein two and a half hours. There was a roast in the oven and rhubarb cake, which I enjoyed beforeI left. We chatted about our lives since we'd last seen each other nearly two years ago. Irecalled how fascinated we'd been by her stories of trips to wilderness locations, the places wetaught about that she had seen or kayaked or climbed. She had promised us postcards from herplanned fall trip to Asia. My card came from the Great Wall of China.She was born in the tiny remote country town of Greymouth on the South Island, the firstof three children in her father's second family. He was a bank manager, a conservative andreserved man who loved to take his family on drives through the New Zealand countryside.Ellen had three older stepbrothers, though one has since passed away; they were, after her fatherdied, like surrogate fathers. She was 21 when her father died. Ellen felt that her relationshipwith her mother became close only after her father's death and is angry sometimes that she wasdeprived of the potential of their relationship when her mother died suddenly in a car accidentthree years later.She had more living to do. It deprived me of a relationship. It'ssad for me. She had wanted more out of life. It's part of thereason I postponed having a family and ended up not having one.I felt she'd given everything and had nothing.Ellen gets along well with her younger sister and brother and was present at the birth ofher sister's daughter in whom she takes a special interest. They all love the New Zealand- 88 -countryside; on her recent trip home, she and her sister took a nostalgic journey to the Kaikoras,mountains \"beautiful and dear to me. It was the highlight of my holiday to be there with mysister. Hiking up the gorges and looking at the flowers and the whole ecology.\" She and herbrother had gone whale watching.Ellen's childhood memories are of summers spent outdoors, on rivers and in themountains, roaming the countryside near Greymouth. She played the piano. She was supportedin her development as a student by parents who took her to compete in track and field or to situniversity entrance exams. She said that the education available was not as good as that in largertowns, and her parents had wanted to pay for extra tutoring to close the educational gap. Theyhadn't had a good science tradition at her school, for example, which had begun the limiting ofchoices for her before she attended university. Ellen finished top in her school at age 16.Ellen remembers four good teachers. One was the head mistress, a stern figure with greyhair kept in a bun. In her algebra class, \"God, we got in her class and we shut up and we didour algebra. But I liked her. She was very no-nonsense.\" Ellen also spoke of enjoying herEnglish Lit teacher, an Englishman whom all the girls swooned over.They all liked him so I wasn't going to. Anyway, I really did wellin his courses. He realized we didn't have much of a schoollibrary and there wasn't a library in the town. He would just say,here, I think you should read this. So he would take my schoolbag at the end of the school year and fill it up with books for meto read over the holidays. I loved his class. He wrote textbooks.He stimulated our ideas.Ellen credited two good geography teachers, both men with really genial personalities, for herwinding up in geography. She had enjoyed studying other countries and was fascinated by thehistory and politics of other places. She wanted to travel.- 89 -The New Zealand government paid for Ellen's teacher training: her fees, travel expenses,and a living-away-from-home allowance.You had all your pocket money and you had a job at the end. Youhad to work off your bond, so if you got married and were a girl,you had a year to work off. If you were single or were male, youhad three years to work off. You graduated from university andyou walked straight into a job. That's pretty unreal.Restricted in her choices by the weak science background and by Wellington University'sprogram requirements of two teachable majors, Ellen was channelled into the Humanities. Sheloved Biology and Psychology and probably would have left geography after her second year.Geography was predominantly male ... all elderly men, some witha marked whiskey indulgence! There were some good scholars,some quite recognized, but it wasn't a terribly dynamicenvironment, except for Dr. Bird.Dr. Bird introduced Ellen to Biogeography. Ellen read Rachel Carson and was inspired by otherbooks about environmental issues. She started a Master's program part-time in theEnvironmental Sciences at Christchurch University while in her sixth year of teaching.While at Wellington, Ellen's athletic abilities particularly in high jump qualified her tocompete at the Commonwealth Games. However, that came to an abrupt end after a number ofserious injuries. She and a friend began bushwalking, extended outdoor hiking excursions thattook them to Tasmania and Australia. She took a mountain leadership training program,including intense orienteering, navigation, map reading, search and rescue techniques, climbingskills, party management, group psychology, and geography. She pointed to the mountain peakson the walls of the dining room. \"Spectacular,\" she says. \"Kayaking and mountain climbing area special force in my life.\" In New Zealand, she ran a school outdoors camp; now, moreconscious of legal liability and more bound by time in teaching, she restricts herself to leading- 90 -trips for a local Mountaineering Club. It was on one such excursion to the top of the Minaretsthat she met Peter, at the time a geologist in his first posting at Wellington University.With a B.A. in English and Geography and a teaching diploma, she taught geography,science, and English for four years in a country town. Deciding to improve her teachingqualifications, she completed a B.Ed. in Urban Education. In her fifth year of teaching, shemoved to a special project inner city school with a high migrant population and many inter-ethnicproblems. Here, almost immediately, she was offered the additional positions of Senior Mistressand Geography Department Head concurrently, as well as teacher. She declined the SeniorMistress position, the most senior woman in the school responsible for counselling andeducational leadership, preferring to lead the Geography department and pursue her environmentalstudies. Ellen and Peter were married during the five years she taught here. She applied for andbecame the Senior Mistress as well as Geography Department Head at an all-girls' school.Peter's commitment to wilderness issues cost him his job; his tenure was not renewed.Geologists did not get involved in conservation or wilderness issuesthen. The area that we loved most of all in the New Zealand Alpswas under threat of development and he questioned a lot of these.... [He was] one of a number of academics who got themselves introuble with the mining establishment.When Peter accepted a post-doctoral opportunity at Simon Fraser University, Ellen gave up herteaching career and her incomplete Master's program to join him in Canada and to start again.\"Marriage,\" she says, \"has had quite a profound effect on me and where I'm going.\" Inthe early 1980s, teaching was a \"closed shop,\" though she substitute taught in several districtsfor a while. \"Back in New Zealand, I had had hopes I'd wind up a principal, getting into theupper levels of my career.\" In Canada, her career path in the public school system did notresume for five years. She began the Master's program over again, this time in Environmental- 91 -Management at UBC. She worked for environmental advocacy groups. \"I wanted to feel thatI was making a contribution.\" She worked for two years in the planning department of theMinistry of Lands before provincial government layoffs cut her position. She taught nightschool. Peter was supportive of her new directions.In 1985, Ellen was hired to teach social studies and geography in a Fraser Valley schooldistrict. She transferred schools within the district to teach social studies and geography but nowteaches Science, English, and Science and Technology; she has also taught junior high math. Inher questionnaire, she writes, \"School staffing changes made it necessary for 'flexible' people tobe 'placed' into English Department.\" Ellen coaches basketball and is involved in publicspeaking. Being practical, she said that she likes the school and will stay. She has taken somecourses at UBC in Counselling Psychology with a view to becoming a counsellor:One of the best courses I've taken at UBC was the Role of Teacherin Guidance with Diane Pollard; she's just great. That's aninterest. It gives me another option. Some of my friends havetaught English at my school for 27 years. They may be happy butI couldn't be happy. I like to have those extra strings to my bow.I feel I've got too many scattered strings.The Life Story of Alison:Alison lives in neat, bright apartment in an upscale Vancouver suburb. The apartmentis full of items collected in her many travels. The carefully tended geraniums abound on herpatio. There is a sense of quiet and order in her life. She is 52, single, and a long-time teacherin a large urban district. We have tea. Alison has a strong presence; she is bright and crisp andindependent and outspoken. She is also, it turns out, quite a wonderful storyteller with a knackfor the re-creation of the colourful in the stories of her life.I know from her questionnaire that she is interested in classical music, theatre, reading,walking, gardening, and current events. She had been teaching for over 30 years; she taught- 92 -three years in the UK, four in Winnipeg, two in Germany with the Department of NationalDefence, and eighteen in her present district. In Winnipeg she held the position of departmenthead for three years; two years ago she became department head of social studies at the largeacademic high school where she has taught for a number of years.Alison is English, the first of four daughters in a family of five children. Her childhoodyears were spent in a coal-mining town in the north of England. Describing her mother as\"larger than life,\" Alison spent much of her early life reacting to her mother and mother's lot inlife. \"In order to find yourself, you have to be away from her ... to put some distance[between].\" It was one of the reasons Alison came to Canada.Perhaps the strongest influence in her life was her grandmother. \"We are a family ofwomen ... the men don't seem to live long. In my memory, it is a female dominated family withvery strong, capable, educated women.\" Women provide the continuity in a family bereft ofmales. Her grandmother had three daughters, the oldest of whom was 4, the youngest 11 months,when she was widowed in World War I; it was fortunate that she had been educated and couldturn to teaching. When, in the late '20s, the daughters needed educating, her grandmother soldher property and moved into rented housing. Alison's mother became a nurse; another sister, ateacher; the youngest, a pharmacist. With the capital from the sale of her property, her warwidow's pension, and her teaching income, grandmother was the only family member with anymoney during the Depression. When others in the family were out of work and experiencinghard times, Alison's grandmother helped support them too. Women in the area had to becomethe mainstays of the family, with the men out of work in the mines.Alison developed the theme of \"strong family women\" in a brief history of her mother'sside of the family. Descended from a prominent family in the area, Alison can trace her ancestry- 93 -back for several hundred years. The family lost its financial prominence during the Jacobiterebellions, when one unfortunate fellow was the last to be beheaded in the Tower of London asa traitor in 1746. That side of the family had fled to France in the early 1700s, returning toEngland during the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Their property had been takenand distributed by the government. \"The males were not particularly sensible even three hundredyears ago,\" she says wryly. They survived through the female side.Because the women had been left with the responsibility of the family, she says, \"one ofthe values I grew up with was a tremendous responsibility for those who were less fortunate, forthose in need -- you help them.\" Alison's mother and grandmother were both highly respectedfor the care they gave to others.We lived in a very poor part of the village. There were no houses,no building [going on] after the War. For the first three years welived with my grandmother in her home. Then my father got aterraced house in an area where people all left school at 14 to workin the coals mines, before the National Health. My mother, withtraining as a nurse -- she'd never worked as a nurse -- was the firststop in the village if the children were sick with TB or diptheria.My childhood memories are of going to the door to requests formother to come and see the sick ones in the village. She's stilldoing it, even though she's crippled with arthritis and in awheelchair. She organizes everybody and everything by telephone.... The value I grew up with is that one has an obligation wheneverit's needed to help people if you can .... it's something you learnto live up to, a family thing.Alison was ten when her father died; her mother miscarried the child she was carrying. Sheremarried shortly thereafter but was often sick.She took to her bed. That's what they did in those days.Somebody else had to look after everybody else, and that was me.I looked after the family; only, of course, she kept me away fromschool. One day, I remember my grandmother came -- we'dmoved to this very old stone house and grandmother lived in thenext village, two fields away. Grandmother, retired by now,walked along. I was at the grammar school. She had words with- 94 -mother, told her not to keep me away from school. When sheretired she had had to give up her girl in service. Instead of justgoing there for weekends, I just stayed there. I always found itrather nice that I didn't have to get up and make everybody'sbreakfast -- I wasn't Cinderella -- grandmother made my breakfastand my lunch.After Alison went on the college, her younger sisters moved in, not so much by design as byoverflow.Memories of schooling at the fee-paying Auburn Wood are of the perils of being knownby her mother and her grandmother. \"There were occasional unpleasant times when my mothertook exception to something a friend (one of the teachers) had done and would haul herself upto school to give the benefit of her opinion. Normally it was fine.\" When the family moved toanother village, Alison was nine.I hated that school. I didn't do any homework. At one point Irefused to go to school. My grandmother wouldn't let me donothing. My mother finally sorted the problem out. The teacherbacked off. We used to have tests every week and were seated byhow we ranked. The 'bad' ones were seated at the back of theroom. We were told we were bad. I was always at the back. Ijust absolutely hated it. I wouldn't do any work. Fortunately,there was the old 11+. In the area, the only chance out was the11+. I acknowledge that it had problems, but I won't speak againstit: for the poor kids of the area, it was the means out of the areaand the kind of lives that their fathers and grandfathers had livedand, believe me, they didn't go back. Of 70 kids, 9 passed. Thegreat disgrace of the whole school was that I passed, whereas Ihadn't been anywhere near the kids who had done their homeworkand who were seated at the front. If it had been teacher-recommendation, which it later was, I don't think anyone wouldhave recognized that I had any intelligence.Her love of history? \"If you live in the area and have a family which is a victim ofhistory, you are aware of it.\" Of geography? There was curiosity about what lay outside of thearea. There were trips to visit family in London.- 95 -We travelled by coal boat out of the Tyne, up the Thames.Grandmother would take the family and the dog; she would take acabin on one of the boats. That was not the customary thing in thevillage. Many had never been further than Durham or Newcastle.And the family were avid readers, even her father. His ninth birthday present to her was a tripto the library. The world outside, she thought, always seemed so exciting.Alison won a scholarship to a college at Cambridge where she studied to become ateacher; it was not a degree-granting college, offering instead a certificate of education. TheCounty scholarship paid her tuition and 100 pounds a year to live on. It was the only way shecould have gone; she had had to qualify for the living allowance on the basis of need. When theA-level results were released, the girls had done much better than the boys; all but two of thegirls were channelled into colleges of education. \"The boys who had achieved less than we hadwere encouraged to go to university.\" It was, she said, \"a mindset that prevailed\" in the late'50s. Her family was happy that she would follow the tradition of teaching.Of the program of study, Alison remembered with visible excitement a historicalgeography assignment where she studied the rise and decline of mining in the area in which shelived from the Enclosure Act of 1750 to 1950.It was interesting because one of my professors was ProfessorSmails from Sidney Sussex [College, Cambridge], the authority onresource industries within the Industrial Revolution. He was verygood. I had the opportunity to go into the reading room of theBritish Museum to study original documents -- census data, theactual Enclosure Act. I found that exciting.She also remembers the women scholars. She recalled the experience of attending a lecturewhere, not until the very end, did she understand what the woman was talking about. \"I realizedthere were large gaps in my education and, if I wanted to be knowledgeable, I had better goabout filling them in myself.\"- 96 -She started teaching immediately in the village where she'd grown up, thanks largely tothe connections of her paternal grandmother who had known someone important on the schoolboard. Her father's family was well connected to the socialist political structure of the village;it was a simple case of who knew whom.To be elected to the Council, you had to be socialist. I got myfirst job, not because I was a brilliant student at college, which Iwasn't particularly, but because one of my grandmother's friendswas on the school board. It was in a very convenient location inthe 'best' school in the area.Though her other grandmother had been the teacher, she was an \"old-fashioned Conservative\"who didn't like that kind of politics; neither does Alison and cites this as the reason she does notespouse particular party politics. She is a political independent, making her own informeddecisions on relevant issues.Alison moved to Canada, choosing Winnipeg because it was \"in the middle,\" though sheadmits she didn't know what it was in the middle of. Life in Winnipeg was wonderful. Alisonloved the culture and the people; it was the first time she'd lived in a community with non-Anglo-Saxons. She was fascinated by the many cultural groups: \"they were so interesting, andI had so much to learn, and they were so kind.\" Here Alison began to complete her B.A. inGeography on a part-time basis while working. She chose it because it is a \"European subject.\"She was nominated by the Winnipeg School Board for a two-year appointment to theDepartment of National Defence in Baden Baden. She lived in a small German village in theBlack Forest, learned to speak German, and travelled to Africa and the Soviet Union, as well asother parts of Germany. \"I had to [learn German] for survival, and that has given me aperspective on how difficult it is for immigrant children who come to our classes.\"- 97 -Alison came to BC to teach in 1975. Having completed her master's thesis in socialstudies curriculum in 1982, she has lots to offer me of her knowledge of teaching social studiesand the teaching experience in BC as it differs from other places she has taught. Currently, inaddition to being head of a large social studies department and teaching social studies andgeography to both regular program and International Baccalaureate students, Alison is a teacherrepresentative to the Canadian Geographic Society and has recently been asked to do somewriting for a publishing company. She has, for eight years, been a director of a Canadian Studiesproject with the national Ministry of Education, and she serves on the education board of aprovincial utility company. Additionally, Alison has held various executive positions with theBC Social Studies provincial specialist association.I recognize in Alison a very British reserve, a boundary that I do not feel comfortable incrossing to probe the more personal side of her life. Asked what she felt passionately about, shedid not hesitate: social justice, she said.The Life Story of Louise:No study of B.C. women social studies educators with a geography specialty could havebeen complete without Louise. More than once, I was asked if Louise would be included in myresearch. Louise is the closest thing to \"Mrs. Geography\" in the province. There is no question:she commands respect and love from men and women in teaching. There is much about her thatis special.Our interviews were conducted in her quiet and comfortable home which overlooks theGulf Islands and the fields and gardens which are at the heart of her view of life. I had beenhere before; every summer, the geography markers look forward to Louise's barbecue, her home-made breads and pies made with the summer's berry crop. For years she lived at the lower end- 98 -of the property and dreamed of a house at the top; this is an old house we sat in, one that washauled in from the nearby gravel pit as it was developed sixteen years ago. Louise did theroofing herself. Nothing about the house and its gardens suggests it has been relocated. Wedrank tea. Louise put on classical music. Her baby grand piano filled that part of the front roomthat would be a dining room; a room to the side of the kitchen now serves that function. Thegazebo, with its stained glass windows, was another of Louise's dreams, fulfilled with thecooperative efforts of friends; it sits at the grassy edge of the garden and overlooks the vegetablegarden and berry patch.Louise is 53, a widow with three children ranging in ages from late twenties to midthirties. Under personal accomplishments on the questionnaire, she listed raising three children,each of whom has completed university. Louise was widowed when she was 28, her husbandkilled in a racing car accident. She was left with the farm, three very young children, and anincomplete university education. In recent years, Louise has entered into a \"partnership\" withBob, a retired law enforcement officer; their life together has given her the contentment ofrelationship missing for so many years as she met her other life challenges with her quietlyunflinching sense of the rightness of things. Everything, it seems, will happen in its own wayin its own time; there is a flow to life which Louise respects.Louise was an only child until she started school. Born at the start of the war, she hadlots of her mother's attention while her father was away with the Navy.I was always close to my mom and we cooperated. My motherand I have never had an argument. She's taught me everythingimportant -- making bread and growing a garden and [other things]I like. They encouraged me -- bought a piano when they couldhardly afford it so I could take piano lessons. They were alwaysproud of what I did.- 99 -Her father's being away then and through much of her growing up has had a profound effect onher later life, she speculated. His returns in uniform were always happy times; she noted thatBob may be part of her positive association with men in uniform.Louise was good at school and loved it. After the war, her parents had bought a smallfarm. The two-room country school put the students of grades 4, 5, and 6 together; Louise wasadvanced from grade 4 to grade 6.Socially that was not a good thing for me because I wasn't ... verygrown up, just intellectually quick .... Then for quite a few yearsin school, I hit the average more than the top of the class becauseI had missed some crucial things. I didn't really apply myself andlearn study habits and work properly until about grade 12. ThenI found I could do well in school.She was happy when the family grew to include her younger brother and sister. Today,they are a closer family than average, all living within twenty minutes drive of each other andseeing each other often. Louise's children are close to their grandparents too.Finishing high school before she turned 17, Louise was \"chronologically way ahead ofmyself.\" The nearby college was offering a one-year training program to address the shortageof teachers in BC, so she went straight into teacher training. She intended to marry her boyfriendwho came from a farming family.I think I looked for the attention of an older man. What I likedabout my boyfriend was that he was from a dairy farm family.Everybody was there for every meal. The father was never away,and I really liked that because I missed my father a lot.Pregnant before the year was finished, Louise completed the training and practica,married, and jumped into motherhood and farming life. Two years later, she had another child;she worked really hard on the farm but accepted a former principal's invitation to try somesubstitute teaching to supplement the family's income. Mostly she found herself in high schools- 100 -and discovered with joy that this was no problem, despite the limited nature of her training toteach elementary school. She was bright enough to handle everything -- Home Economics, shop,French -- but she really enjoyed history.It was really good for my feeling of what I could do. There wasnothing I couldn't do. It was really neat. I didn't really have anyexposure to geography until later, but this principal had been mygeography 12 teacher in the old curriculum, the 'capes and bays'program. I still see him. We're still friends. He's also a gardener.He's retired now .... I guess I'd have to attribute my teaching tohim.The farming life was precarious. Louise had discovered that a basic teaching certificatewas available with two additional years of university. She challenged the first-year history examand received an allowable credit, based on her success. She proceeded to register for academiccourses to begin in September at the University of Victoria but discovered that summer that shewas pregnant for the third time. She inquired as to whether this might be a problem.Well, old Ferguson was Dean of Education at that time, and thelady put in this little note to him, and out came his response.\"Well, of course not. You can't be a student. We can't have apregnant woman as a student.\" I said, well, I beg your pardon.You know, I'm not sure why you're concerned. \"Well, it's just notpolicy.\" Well, I'm taking a list of academic courses, and I don'tknow why you'd object, and I'm not going to be in a classroom,so if I want to work hard ... \"Well, no, absolutely not.\" So Iinsisted on an interview with him, and he really had no actualreason to refuse me, so he reluctantly signed my admission .... Hesaid, \"You'll never make it, you know. You're just being stupid,and I was just going to save you some time and money\" .... Thenhe made some comment about getting lots of exercise on the newcampus, so I just left him. I've never thought about the man since.But in a way, it made me decide to work hard ... I got really highmarks. And I loved it, just being able to study. It was just lovely.Her husband saw her education as only an insurance policy for the family. If somethinghappened to him, she could teach. Pregnant, she prepared all the meals, worked around the farm,looked after two small children, and studied. \"It just became a challenge for me .... I quickly- 101 -learned I could do anything I set my sights on, which was a nice feeling.\" In the late summerof 1967, the same principal who had asked her to substitute phoned to ask her to teach Home Echalf-time. The family decided that Louise could handle the extra work. When she arrived inSeptember, the job had grown to full-time: Child Care 12, Textiles, Socials 11, Algebra 11,Modified Math 11. She had lots of help from others in the school. She never went to bed atnight without the next day's lessons planned.I thrived .... I certainly didn't know anything about learning theory,how kids learned. I handled each class as a large group of verynice young people. But when we were farming here on thisproperty, we would have acres and acres of strawberries andloganberries, and we would have up to 40 pickers a day, most ofwhom were teenagers, and I managed them. I'd look after thewages, bookkeeping, their day from dawn to dark, and I could getalong with them. I kept them really disciplined. They were hereto work and they worked and they liked it and they liked us. Wewere young people and I didn't think handling a class was anydifferent than handling a field full of berry pickers. I.. .taught themthe way the better teachers had taught me and learned by the seatof my pants.She was asked to stay on another year; though her contract was temporary, there was still ashortage of teachers.Two weeks into the second year of teaching, with children then 3, 8, and 11, Louise'shusband was killed. Her family and friends rallied to her support. One friend, seeing the needfor the security of a degree, got her special permission to enroll late in a geography course atUVic. Her mother assumed childcare responsibilities while Louise worked and attended eveningclasses. During that year, someone was with her every evening until the children went to bed.Louise learned to compartmentalize her life.I was so full of grief and things were hard at home. But I went toschool and thought school, and I went to university and thoughtuniversity, and I came home and thought kids. The kids went tobed and the family friend or whoever was over went home, I did- 102 -school work, went to bed at midnight or 1 a.m. and slept. Someof my friends ... thought I was quite robotlike .... My mother-in-lawalways thought of me as like the female Canada goose that wouldnever re-mate. I wasn't really thinking like that. I was just beingpragmatic like my mother. This is what I can handle. I used tocry between school and university, going to class.Louise recalled the sympathy, something that really only made her sad. She rankled atthe injustice of society's treatment of divorced women who, she thinks, are treated cruelly bycomparison. \"I saw a lot of that and it's really unfair. I was treated so gently. I guess it's justthe way life doles things out to you.\"With teaching certificate in hand, two years of academic work completed, and two yearsteaching experience, Louise switched to an Arts program with a major in geography. Herprincipal adjusted her timetable to allow her to take daytime courses. She held on to the land.My sense was not to sell the land, not to do anything quickly, tolet the kids have animals, be farm kids and we did all that .... Theysay they had a great childhood. They were allowed horses andbeef cows and sheep and chickens and dogs, and they lovedsummers, and I had quite a lot of time with them in the summers.I think the other good influence on them was the whole familylearning together.In the last year of her degree, she did nine units while working half-time. She never got lessthan an A-. She and the children studied at home together. \"They found learning easy, and wealways helped each other with projects. That continued right until the girls finished university.\"How rich the experience was to have them both return home whilethey completed their degrees at UVic. We became three adultwomen, best friends, scholars together ... and we grew much moreunderstanding of each other.Both of Louise's daughters read a lot about spiritual and personal development. Both haverecently taken courses in Women's Studies. They love to share their readings and their learningwith their mother. She loves it too. She is also very proud of her son, a geophysicist, and his- 103 -wife, a geologist, whom Louise welcomed to the family. Their daughter has brought anotherjoyful dimension to Louise's life. All of her children are accomplished musicians, as is Louiseherself; she had hoped that one of them would pursue a career with a professional orchestra.Louise was a member of the geography curriculum revision committee. With its heavyenvironmental emphasis, the course allows for \"passionate\" teaching about the natural world, verymuch aligned with Louise's worldview. She has marked exams for 14 years. She has workedfor years on school and district committees. She has been the Pac Rim coordinator for her schooldistrict. She has organized student travel programs and run student clubs. Twice she has beenon the Accreditation Steering Committee for her school. She was a department head for threeyears.Louise spoke warmly about important relationships in her life. She was first attracted tothe study of geography when she took a course in cultural geography. It was a study ofgeography through novels, one a week for 13 weeks. The professor from Berkeley became reallyspecial for her. She took as many courses as she could from him. Though he didn't stay atUVic, he and his wife and family have kept in touch through the years. Another really specialman was the principal who had first invited her to teach and whose support enabled her to finishher studies. She spoke of her respect for her colleagues. The men with whom she taughtprovided her with the repartee and company that filled the void in her social life for many years.She continues to value these relationships and those with her women friends; creating space inher life for friends is important to Louise. And she has created space in her life to enjoy herpartner, taking a semester off last year and a whole year off now. She is too young to retire justyet, but there is time and space and the personal resources now to celebrate truly loving someonewhere that had not been possible for so many years. They travel and spend weeks on his boat- 104 -during the summer. She has recently added a greenhouse to the farm and hopes one day to teachothers about organic gardening.There is a serenity and a clarity about Louise, an overriding awareness of her deep innerneed for harmony which has guided her through some very tough times. She backs away fromconflict. She is guided by a worldview grounded in caring both for other people and the naturalworld. She refers to herself as an \"original Earth Mother.\"ConclusionsThese are six stories of women's lives. All are quite different, yet the stories weave afabric marked by integrated patterns and threads of commitment to teaching and learning, ofbrightness and the desire to be recognized for that, of resourcefulness in dealing with complexity,of leadership in the field of social studies education, of the love of geography and the naturalworld, of the formation of gendered and political perspectives, and of a sense of the importanceof understanding teaching as a reflection of one's life experience as a kind of praxis.Amanda-Leigh came into teaching with a strong conviction that she had something to giveback to teaching and to schools. She lives what she teaches, a basic respect for our own andothers' cultures and for democratic and inclusive visions of society. She has had reason tobecome, through her experiences as a social studies teacher and educator, increasingly sensitiveto the gendered, politically exclusive, and contradictory nature of these concepts in schools.Tammy, as a teacher, is perhaps the most conscious of and passionate about buildinggender-sensitivity into her teaching. Underpinning her teaching are the ideologies of criticalcitizenship which constantly seek to challenge the status quo and thereby transform it to tell astory more inclusive of women's understandings and experiences. Her own personal historyconsists of stories of fighting for equity and recognition. Challenging the status quo, however,- 105 -is not without problems for women and can harshly restrict the ways in which they are able toparticipate in the educational community.As a teacher of social studies, Joan articulated her initial understandings of curriculumand teaching as gender-free; such an approach is grounded in the traditions of individualism andprogressiveness which sees gender as irrelevant and subordinate to the uniqueness of eachindividual (Morgan, 1992). She is mindful of the culture within which she has been encouragedto develop her multiple talents and within which she has taught and administered successfully.She has had cause to reflect on and reconsider these understandings during the course of thisstudy.In teaching, Ellen works very much as she did in her capacity as an environmentaladvocate, always mindful of the social constraints, particularly as these are applied to individuals.Challenges must always be attentive to the traditions and rules of the dominant social order,though these may not be in the best interests of all participants within society. As a woman, sheis isolated and located as subordinate to those whose stories of the culture predominate; as anindividual, she has accepted that she can make small personal and classroom changes whichreflect her political understandings of the social value accorded women's work in society.Alison's teaching is about educated citizenship and takes place in terms of articulatednotions of social studies curriculum and pedagogy as gender blind (Morgan, 1992). Youngpeople are empowered through knowledge. That knowledge can take the form of multipleperspectives, one of which may be a woman's perspective, but it is not her business to impartparticular gendered or political perceptions to students. Gender imperils the individuality whichone is taught to value and is an impediment to the conduct of one's life as an educated citizen.Though, in her words, in teaching, gender ought not to be a factor -- and in terms of her- 106 -classroom, is probably not -- Alison has nevertheless encountered contradictions in herunderstandings of the traditions of citizenship which would suggest that the models she uses arecast in masculine images and do not work for women.Louise consciously includes the principles of women's culture in her stories of teachingsocial studies. As a woman, she models the maternal, nurturing, and intellectual capacitieswhich, translated into a social vision, depict the world in kinder, gentler terms. Her classroompractices and her presence in social studies teaching offer hope for building more gender-inclusive curriculum and pedagogy. Yet she understands that she is very much a product of rigidsocialized gender role expectations that women, to be accorded the privileges of citizenship, arenice and do not speak against inequity and the dominant order. Though her teaching is informedby women's political understandings, she avoids the politics of teaching.In these ways, teaching for each woman is a political process informed by a politicalcurriculum. This study, in examining the politics of women's teaching, seeks to move, borrowingfrom McIntosh's (1983) phase analysis of curriculum, from phase two where a handful of womenare added on to the master narrative of social studies teaching as sidebars to phase three whichexplores the gaps and biases and political implications for women of teaching and leadership insocial studies. Of course, the goal is to negotiate inclusive terms for women's equal participationin social studies and social re-visionings.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 107 \u00E2\u0080\u0094CHAPTER 4: NEGOTIATING THE CLASSROOMThe women of the study each bring quite different personal perspectives and worldviewsor ideologies to the classroom. These, combined with their knowledge of and experience inteaching, form what Clandinin and Connelly (1986) have termed \"personal practical knowledge.\"Coming from social studies educators, these women's narratives, embedded as they arein different cultural and professional contexts, incorporate diverse and particular notions ofcitizenship. They negotiate a social studies curriculum and pedagogy which explicitly intend to\"enable the learner to play a productive role in Canadian society and act with some sense of abroader, global perspective\" (Ministry of Education, 1993b, p.13). For each, the personal ispolitical, forming an ideological frame of reference or worldview which underpins theirsocialization of students and strongly influences their own construction of meaning in the variousarenas of their school experience. In this study, an important aspect of this worldview orideological frame of reference is its gendered nature, particularly as it shapes and is shaped bycurriculum and pedagogy. This chapter will examine the particular personal practical andpolitical knowledge and understandings that each brings to her pedagogical and curriculartransformations.PEDAGOGICAL PERSPECTIVESFeminist pedagogy, in Briskin's (1990, as cited in Manicom, 1992) view, is not a set ofinstructional techniques but a political standpoint by which to connect the classroom to theoutside world by \"[informing/reforming] teachers' and students' ways of acting in and on theworld\" (p.365). It is teaching with the political intent to transform the world. In practice, it ismanifested as transformed classroom practices, as re-visionings of the social world, and as gender\u00E2\u0080\u0094 108 \u00E2\u0080\u0094initiatives or projects within educational contexts. Manicom (1992) identifies several themeswhich permeate the discourse of feminist pedagogy.The collaborative or maternal/nurturing theme runs through much of the literature offeminist theory and research. Noddings (1984) argues for the incorporation of an ethic of caring:\"It is time for the voice of the mother to be heard in education\" (p.200). Belenky, Clinchy,Goldberger, and Tarule (1986) describe connected teaching as knowledge which is assisted in itsemergence by midwife-teachers. Ruddick (1980) differentiates maternal from scientific thinkingin its primary focus on the preservation of the vulnerable child. Drawing on psychoanalytictheory, Gilligan (1982) incorporates the themes of separation and attachment that characterizemen's and women's patterns of individuation and of their moral development. The relational-as-feminine theme is woven heavily into the literature of feminist pedagogy. Women, saysShrewsbury (1987), seek to build connections. Schneidewind (1987) identifies feminist processesas the skills of effective communication, cooperation, conflict resolution, the integration of theoryand practice, networking and organizing which have the potential to provide for criticallyconscious women significant personal and collective power. Noddings (1992) calls for anextension of the notion of citizenship \"to absorb much of what is now considered private life intopublic life\" (p.235); the study of self in its physical, spiritual, occupational, and recreationaldimensions would surely be social studies and the heart of the curriculum. \"Education forresponsible and caring community participation should be a fundamental goal of schooling\"(Stanley, 1992, as cited in Bernard-Powers, in press). Women's identity, such discourse suggests,is defined in relationship. This work suggests that women seek connection; women providenurturance.Maher (1987b) warns, however, that gender models of pedagogy run the risk of\"[subsuming] all differences into a male/female dichotomy\" (p.98). They minimize the reality\u00E2\u0080\u0094 109 \u00E2\u0080\u0094of women's oppression and have little to say about power relations in classrooms and in schools,nor do they speak of differences among women. Martin (1985) documents the historicalseparation of education for productive and reproductive processes in her argument for theinclusion of women in the educational realm and in the definition of an educated person. Briskinand Coulter (1992) point to contradictory feminist perspectives and diversity of voices; maternalmetaphors \"romanticize\" women's teaching, creating a \"reactionary profamily ideology\" (p.254)which denies the real experience of family and teaching for many. They describe insteadmultiple feminist pedagogies. Martindale (1992) interrupts the maternal theme in women'steaching, reminding us that the classroom is a workplace where women's work can becomeinvisible and devalued.The paradox of teaching as \"the female authority figure\" is discussed by Culley, Diamond,Edwards, Lennox, and Portuges (1985) in terms of the academy. Citing de Beauvoir in TheSecond Sex, they illuminate the nature of the conflicting roles where ideas of feminine andmaternal images in teaching work against women's capacity and aspirations for achievement.In our culture, the role of nurturer and intellectual have beenseparated not just by gender, but by function; to try to recombinethem is to create confusion. Our psychoanalytic models areprimarily useful when talking about feelings as distinct fromabstract ideas or information .... It is hard to know, in the finiteworld of the classroom, how to fulfill both functions. Some of usare more drawn to one role -- mother or professor -- than the other.Nevertheless, we would not be teachers now if we had not, at onepoint in our lives, had a powerful commitment to the idea of beingintellectuals. As a result of our successes in the system, we aremore deeply and passionately ambivalent about the intellectual lifethan our students can be. The mutual enterprise of the classroom,the kind of openness, freedom, and flexibility it demands, is thusmade more difficult by the realities of what we have become inorder to achieve our educational goals -- and even by those goalsthemselves .... Thus, the context in which we teach tends to limitand corrupt our ability to deal with the issues ... especially if wethink of ourselves as isolated nurturant or therapeutic figures (p.13).\u00E2\u0080\u0094 110 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Another theme in the discourse of feminist pedagogy is women's place in relation toauthority. In classrooms and in schools, women negotiate ways to express themselves as andwith authority. Much of this literature has focused on democratization of classroom processesand issues of voice in respect to women's claiming authority. Gilligan points out that womenspeak \"in a different voice.\" Spender (1982) advocates that women find every opportunity \"toarticulate their own experience, to describe and explain the world in the way it impinges onwomen ... that women demand some control\"(p.96). Explains Maher (1985), \"a pedagogyappropriate for voicing and exploring the hitherto unexpressed perspectives of women and othersmust be collaborative, cooperative, and interactive\" (p.30). Lewis and Simon (1986) examineways of overcoming the silencing of women to find a common language. They argue for \"apedagogical project that allows a polyphony of voices\" (p.218). Ellsworth (1992) talks about the\"defiant speech\" of survival for those oppositional groups who cannot interrupt or be heard abovethe dominant language of schools (p.102). Ellsworth links issues of voice withincritical/democratic classrooms to notions of citizenship and to the public sphere by identifyingthe assumptions for classroom interactions:All members have equal opportunity to speak, all members respectother members' rights to speak and feel safe to speak, and all ideasare tolerated and subjected to rational critical assessment againstfundamental judgements and moral principles (p.106)Bernard-Powers (in press) argues for citizenship education that she defines as a \"partnership inthe vast system of beliefs and understandings about gender, social class, ethnicity, race, sexualidentity, and levels of enabling that influence students' experience in schools.\" Such aconception of citizenship merges the public and the private, the personal and the political, addingpowerful and transformative dimensions to social studies teaching. It also suggests that women'snotions of citizenship might redefine the goals of democratic citizenship formally inscribed in\u00E2\u0080\u0094 1 1 1 \u00E2\u0080\u0094traditional social studies curriculum and teaching as the creation and enactment of national orpublic identities and political processes for individuals within the state to include the personaland collective responsibility for building caring communities.PEDAGOGY: THE QUESTIONNAIRE RESPONSESIn beginning this look at the women's instructional negotiations and styles, it is importantto identify commonalities as well as differences by which to link and also to distinguish theirexperiences in teaching. The questionnaire responses (see Appendix II) provided a starting pointfor analysis of their practice of teaching as well as for our conversations. As noted earlier in thisstudy, very few women teaching social studies in BC have acquired the specialist status ofteaching senior social studies courses, in this case, geography. Most women teaching secondarysocial studies teach junior social studies and so may be unfamiliar, by virtue of unequal accessand different academic background, with the geographic view of social studies and with theparticular and holistic understandings of curriculum and pedagogy that are expressed and enactedby the women of this study.Although the 1989 BC Social Studies Provincial Assessment Report describes a patternof \"inadequate academic background in the disciplines comprising social studies\" (Cassidy andBognar, 1991, p.69), the questionnaire responses showed that, by comparison to the Assessmentprofile of BC's social studies teachers, the women of this study have more than averageexperience in and academic preparation for social studies teaching. They have greater experiencein teaching senior social studies courses. Some have experience in teaching more than one seniorsocial studies elective course; one has taught all four senior courses. Their teaching profilesindicate that they have not been bound by \"subject loyalty\" or the singular identity as socialstudies teachers (Bernstein, 1977), each having experience teaching other disciplines, includingScience, English, Math, Physical Education, Home Economics, counselling, and outdoor\u00E2\u0080\u0094 112 \u00E2\u0080\u0094education. Like many women in the work force, they have all experienced career interruptionsdue to pregnancies, trans-continental moves, educational, travel, and personal leaves, in-districttransfers, and periods of alternate employment. They have all had leadership experience inworking with Ministry of Education curriculum and/or assessment committees; all but one haveheld department head positions. While it is difficult within the scope of this study to determinehow representative this characteristic of teaching flexibility and leadership is for women in seniorsecondary social studies teaching, the data suggest that flexibility and multidimensionality arecharacteristic of women who assume leadership roles in social studies teaching.The questionnaires indicated that, in their practice of teaching, the women of the studyused a wide variety of learning activities. Students learned a great deal from group discussions,film or video, labs, library research, guest speakers, and field studies. Students, they felt,particularly enjoyed group work and field excursions, though they were uncertain how muchstudents enjoyed doing library research. They felt that debate, simulations, role play, andcooperative games had value for student learning; they attributed some value to textbookactivities for student learning. Rated as having little value for student learning were worksheets,lectures, and giving notes. Very unenjoyable activities for students were worksheets and text-based learning. Computer programs were not used often, probably as there are problems withaccess to hardware, with finding software suitable to the curriculum, and with limited teacherexpertise/interest. Their use of learning activities was dependent upon professional decision-making which considered class size, student variables, classroom dynamics, and, with particularreference to Geography 12 and its extensive examinable curriculum, the pressure to cover thecontent.The provincial assessment found that \"many teachers do not use classroom strategies tofoster critical thinking, particularly at the secondary level\" (p.13). In answers to questions aimed\u00E2\u0080\u0094 113 \u00E2\u0080\u0094at determining the role of critical thinking in teaching and evaluating social studies students, thewomen of this study indicated in their written responses that they incorporate strategies to fostercritical thinking by developing student self-esteem, giving them the space and the confidence toexpress themselves in an informed way, by offering a variety of points of view and resources,by challenging their ideas and support for these, by focusing on current issues, and by creatingopen-ended questions which emphasize the process and reasoning students employ more than theright answer. For the most part, critical thinking is evaluated in students' written and oral work,though professional judgement was also included as a response.Nor, in terms of their teaching practice, are the women of the study representative of theteachers described by the Provincial Assessment Report:[The] most commonly used classroom strategies in Grade 10encourage passivity on the part of secondary students. Teachersmost often rely on the textbook as the basis for classroom activity.Textbook use is followed by full class discussion, films or videos,worksheets, and lectures. These activities are teacher directed anddominated. It is difficult to imagine how critical thinking can becultivated in this environment (p.76).The women of the study exhibited both in their questionnaires and in their conversations amarkedly strong resistance to the traditional transmission model of teaching social studies (thoughit might be suggested that no one admits to it!). Their teaching narratives do suggest that theyare exceptions to the \"resilient conservatism in the face of potential change\" by whichBernard-Powers (in press) characterizes social studies teaching; they suggest alignment with thegoals of current educational reform in BC, particularly in its learner focus, as these are articulatedin Year 2000 documents, and with educational reform in the broader contexts described byGoodlad (1984) and Jenness (1990). Their pedagogies as described in our conversations wouldsuggest a world transformed by personal political means but in quite different ways.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 114 \u00E2\u0080\u0094PEDAGOGY: THE CONVERSATIONSThe following pedagogical narratives have been articulated by six different voices andprovide six quite different models of teaching social studies for women. Though there arecommonalities which can be heard throughout, the differences are most clearly evident in thepersonal political agenda through which each creates and enacts the classroom experience. SaysOsborne (1991):Pedagogy is not politically neutral. It carries its own messages. Itputs teachers and students into certain roles. It embodies particularconceptions of power and authority .... Pedagogy ... is a powerfulform of political education (p.13).The pedagogical models that follow can be viewed not only as different but powerful ways ofteaching powerful knowledge but as describing different social models which reflect theunderstandings each has of personal and political power.Democratic Pedagogy: Amanda-LeighAmanda-Leigh is very clear in stating her objectives as a teacher. Content in socialstudies, she said, is secondary to the processes, skills, and attitudes requisite for good citizenship.Citizenship is defined in terms of the classroom, the school, the community, the nation, and theworld. The teacher and students together create a classroom community of equals, a microcosmof the democratic world that Amanda-Leigh believes works best, a world built on the respect,self-esteem, tolerance, and personal integrity which Amanda-Leigh was taught to value in herown life. With these qualities, she encourages students to grow, to think critically, and to actcooperatively. She stated that she always tries to have a minimum of three different teaching orlearning strategies in a class hour; she likes to use cooperative learning activities. She puts thehour's learning outcomes on the board for students to see as they arrive.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 115 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Amanda-Leigh described the ways in which she personalizes the learning for her students.She makes a point of greeting each one individually as they come in and consciously tries toaddress each one personally during the hour. Taking attendance is not a priority; she often findsherself filling that in at the end of the day. The first five minutes are for discussion, \"getting asense of where they are in their day.\" Social studies is, for her, probably one of the few subjectsthat students have in an eight-block timetable that validate their opinions and provide them withan opportunity to get comfortable with stating an opinion and supporting it. At the same time,Amanda-Leigh works hard to create a challenging environment where students can feel confidentin taking risks while learning to enjoy learning.Amanda-Leigh consciously incorporates critical thinking as a learning objective: \"Thereisn't a subject or an idea or a value that I'm uncomfortable teaching. I love challenging them.\"Students learn to substantiate their opinions:I have always asked for explanations of people's statements. I amnot very accepting of somebody making a comment without beingable to justify that. And that translates into my classroom. 'Itsucks,' is not an acceptable answer to what did you think ofwhatever we're talking about.Underpinning Amanda-Leigh's teaching are the principles of the Year 2000 educationalreform document which focus on the learner as a whole person.I don't think I can begin to teach unless the students in theclassroom feel they belong, so that's my number one goal, thatthey have to feel that they're a member ... Without that, they won'tbe there. They will just be warm bodies in the classroom .... Italmost seems you have to let go. It seems to come intuitively tome, letting go of the content. It should not be the driver of yourexperience in the classroom. The community comes first and thenthe learning will come on the heels of that.She makes evident in her approach to teaching the principles of democratic education.Everybody is important in her classroom, she said. She models and expects respect for self and\u00E2\u0080\u0094 116 \u00E2\u0080\u0094for one another. Mutuality of respect, community processes, personal integrity, and participationare reflected in her statement, \"It's the learner first and that aspect of the community for me iswho the learner is. That transcends the entire curriculum.\" She wants her students to go awayfrom her class with the ability to participate as informed citizens in a democratic society,knowing what their responsibilities are to fit into it. She hopes they will not be passive butactive contributors. They will resolve conflict through peaceful means: \"Because my parentsbrought us up to believe that what we had to say was worth hearing, you should endeavour togive that respect to the other person.\" Students will, she hopes, cast informed votes, be tolerant,carry with them a lifelong love of learning, and understand their responsibilities within theenvironment. The closing statement of her principal's report, written at the end of her first yearof teaching, captures the ways in which Amanda-Leigh embodies the personal and the politicalin her practice of teaching; he wrote, \"The students will learn a great deal from [her] modellingof her attitudes towards people and cooperative society.\"Osborne (1991) looks at the political nature of pedagogy as it embodies particular notionsof power and authority. Teachers' worldviews shape their social and political conceptions ofgood teaching and their instructional practice. He links the practice of teaching for democraticcitizenship to a conceptual framework rooted in inquiry learning and in critical and feministpedagogies. All, he suggests, emphasize critical thinking and reflection and, at the same time,address the participatory agenda which underpins democratic citizenship and its ideals of freedomand justice for all. Amanda-Leigh's description of her teaching reflects the intersection of thesepedagogical approaches; her pedagogical practice incorporates the liberal notions developed inher childhood of democratic citizenship; citizens have a responsibility to be informed and toactively participate in the community which sustains them. In her stories of the classroom ascommunity, Amanda-Leigh lives out the family expectation that, as a responsible citizen, she give\u00E2\u0080\u0094 117 \u00E2\u0080\u0094back what she has received and live out the strongly-held values of commitment, honesty, loyalty,and respect in her work.Critical Feminist Pedagogy: TammyIn many ways, Tammy's style of teaching reflects similar principles to those incorporatedby Amanda-Leigh. When I asked her what I would see if I came to her classroom, she said Iwould see kids who loved the opportunity to challenge ideas, who came in the door looking forthat challenge they knew they would find with her. She said other teachers often drop in to hearthe discussions and to contribute. Student teachers and those new to the school are encouragedto come to see her classes in action; colleagues drop in to hear the discussions. \"They come inand feel quite free to contribute to the flow of ideas and information.\" Usually they come to seethe interaction between students in what Tammy describes as an informal, yet a respectful,environment where students feel safe and confident in expressing their views on all kinds ofissues. She places topics relating to social justice high on her teaching agenda.She described her classroom as having large tables; it was designed specifically as ageography lab. Students sit around the tables wherever they want; she has no seating plans.Tammy encourages them to move around and meet the other students in the classroom as theschool year progresses. While she allows lots of room for class discussions, she also givesstudents a lot of choice.Do you want to do this independently? do you want to do this insmall groups? do you want to do this in large groups? do you wantto have a whole class discussion? I find at the beginning of theyear, they want to work independently and in small groups. By theend of the year, they will almost invariably want a whole classdiscussion. I'm not sure why that happens, but it seems to be adynamic for students to get involved. Those who just want to sitback and listen can; those that want to be very verbal can do thattoo.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 118 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Tammy talked about using the debating model with students in social studies, geography,and law to analyze social issues. Students, she said, learn from their participation in thedevelopment of argument, the give-and-take of debate, and the achievement of some kind ofresolution. \"I try and really encourage that model to come through in virtually everything thatI teach, whether it is regular social studies curriculum or law.\" It is the same critical model thatTammy herself used in her life as a student and that she internalized with the passionate yetimpersonal French-Canadian exchange of ideas and with the radical living room debates ofintellectuals she had remembered from the sixties and seventies. It is the same model thatexposed the contradictions in her own married life and which has served to empower her to dealwith her personal issues of inequity, some of which are discussed in the next chapter.Tammy talked about beginning the school year in each class with the cooperativedevelopment of classroom rules.I live by them and I tell the students immediately that they can callme on anything that I'm not doing and that in their minds is notdone democratically .... Secondly, I give avenues for thosechallenges. The avenues can entirely circumvent me or the system.I tell them that there are counsellors available, that there are otherpeople in the department that are available, that their vice-principals and principal are available, or the Board Office. And Itell them what the avenues of challenge are. It seems fairlyimportant that they know that (a) they can challenge, and (b) thereare avenues to challenge something if they feel something is unfair.Within the context of a cooperative, democratic, and challenging classroom learningenvironment, Tammy described making herself available to students. \"I don't think it should bea mystery who I am or what I am. I think I should be a whole person.\" Attentive to the socialinequities of schooling, Tammy also takes a special interest, as she did in her own high schooldays, in the \"odd\" children in her classes. The counsellors often place them there, knowing theywill have a good chance of survival in her care. Tammy does not see their problems as anything\u00E2\u0080\u0094 119 \u00E2\u0080\u0094but her challenge to overcome. She is familiar with the social services available to disturbedadolescents or those with problems with the law. She accesses the resources required to help herdeal with their classroom problems. She works hard to find a common ground, a space that iscomfortable for the individual and the whole group. She prefers the challenging ones to the \"wetlumps of Kleenex.\"I try not to be abrasive with children who are unhappy in asituation. I really try to give them room to try their wings, toflutter against me sometimes, and that's okay. They need theopportunity to flex. I try to give them space and let them feel thatthey can come out with the Big Picture. It doesn't matter in termsof day-to-day stuff. It seems to matter sometimes to some childrenthat they get that chance at succeeding in a power relationship andthey succeed in challenging.Weiler (1988) examines the complexities of negotiating structural forces in teaching fromthe perspective of a feminist teacher. Within the classroom, critical feminists \"seek to redefinecurriculum and social relationships [but] ... find themselves in conflict with existing partriarchalideology and hierarchical relationships\"(p.101). Feminist teachers like Tammy create classroomdiscussion where \"it's okay to be human\" (p.122) in terms of relationships; the focus is on theissues of human existence.For these teachers, the goal of teaching is grounded in a respect forthe human value and cultural worlds of their students, and what isencouraged is the development of both criticism and self-criticism.... Feminist teachers share a commitment to a more just society foreveryone, but they also have a particular sense of themselves aswomen teachers and are conscious of their actions as role modelsfor students. They define themselves as gendered subjects and areconscious that their actions in the classroom have particularmeanings precisely because they are women. This consciousnessmakes them consider both the content of their teaching and theirown actions and appearance (p.115).\u00E2\u0080\u0094 120 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Tammy's classroom agenda is driven by a powerful personal political commitment to theincorporation of social critique and analysis in working for a more just society. Criticaleducators, says Bernard-Powers (1993), share the belief that:... critical questioning of the content and process of classroomcurricula is a linch pin in a democratic classroom. It is the meansby which multiple lenses and layers of complexity can beilluminated, including the opaque assumptions of classroomrelations and norms (p.9).Inquiry Teaching: JoanJoan, the vice-principal, does not translate her experience of teaching in feminist terms;she has not been conscious of gender as a factor of her personal life or her teaching career. Hersis a practical pedagogy, borrowed from models of, as she says, \"what works\" for her. Joan'sstories about teaching depict a personal worldview and perspective which accommodatesdifference in seeking to create enriching and dynamic learning situations where students havedifferent opportunities to be \"the best that they can be.\" Joan, who was gifted at academicsubjects, athletics, and music as a student, knows the importance of success for motivatingstudent achievement and interest.She described a practice of teaching that is very interactive and learner-focused, wherethere is always recognition of individual learning styles and program modifications required toaccommodate the range of learning abilities. She recalled the last time she taught grade 9 socialstudies. Students were involved in cooperative learning, journal writing, role play, drama, andreading novels. Because of her expertise with computer technology, Joan has developedindividualized and enriched learning materials for students to use on the computer.The thing you have to remember is that not all kids learn incooperative situations, not all kids learn from lectures, not all kidsare visual learners, so [you have to] tie a variety [of strategies]together to help as many kids as possible.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 121 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Joan resisted the notion of gender as a factor in the relationship she has with students.\"I've always thought it had more to do with my particular personality,\" she said. She was notconscious of being a role model for young women in teaching, though it was apparent that shehad had a powerful impact on several.I don't remember consciously [being a role model for girls]. Iremember it being pointed out at different times. I can alsoremember different students coming back ... I apparentlyunconsciously said to them, you can do anything you want to. Ithink that's a favourite phrase of mine. You can do anything youwant to. You're only limited by your own fears. It was never aconscious thing. I guess at that time it wasn't so publicized. Itwasn't something I thought consciously of when I decided to takewhatever I felt was the next step I wanted to take in my life. Thatwas the parameter I lived by: if I wanted to do it, I could do it.That's the one thing that girls have come back with. I've writtenletters of recommendation for two girls who have become vets,three girls who have become doctors, and one who's become anengineer. The reason they've asked me to write the letters isbecause [they say] I wouldn't have done this if you hadn't saidthat. I never consciously intended to have that effect on them.Joan also resisted my attempts to typify her in the emergent tradition of feminist teachingand leadership, preferring a more eclectic description. There was little in her pedagogicalnarrative that could be claimed as maternal. She described her teaching in oppositional terms,depicting two models that don't \"work for her.\"One is called Captain Video. That's self-explanatory. We havethe video, we have the worksheet, we have the test. The other isjust a very boring, textbook, question-and-answer, all knowledgelevel, and we expect the regurgitation. The kids sit in the rows and[it's all] very traditional. I think you and I grew up in an era thatshould have been traditional, but I think people even then had alittle more variety in it than that. It's almost a lazy style ... theeasy way out. You don't have to prepare much if you do that. Sowe'll read chapter 7 and answer the questions at the end. I don'tlike that at all. I think that does more to kill kids' interest in[learning] than anything. It's the same as showing a video for thesake of keeping them quiet for 15 minutes. I don't think I evershow a video in its entirety. I certainly never show them withoutstopping them. Most of the time, I'm showing excerpts.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 122 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Joan's description of how her love of literature and her interest in people were integratedinto the teaching of social studies revealed a lot about her pedagogical style. While British andEuropean history can be really exciting, she said, Canadian history is not \"that overwhelminglyinteresting.\"Somehow guys like John A. Macdonald and Sir Wilfrid Laurierand some of the others don't come across as very interesting.They're certainly not written up as interesting in the texts, but thereare ways of presenting it. One of the things that we did is role-playing and the other is to take novel material, rather than thetextbook material, and use excerpts from novels as the readingmaterial for the course. And all of a sudden, that person has a lifeinstead of a date and a time in which they were involved in writingthe Constitution, being a Father of Confederation. So they becomethree-dimensional, instead of two-dimensional. Kids get a lot moreinterested in the person. The other thing we'll have them do ispicture what the person was like. What do you think the person islike? A discussion of people is what history is all about. Peopleprecipitate the events. People are what history is all about. So wehave to find out what the people are like to know what's going tohappen. [And I like] comparing too. What were the qualities ofthis person? do you see those qualities in any people that arearound right now? I like to do that with Hitler. Do you see thosequalities in any person who's a world leader right now? how canpeople know those qualities and avoid what happened happeningagain? [I like to make] it relevant to what's happening right now.Joan's stories depicted a woman who negotiates the world of teaching with ease. In thesame way that, as a child, she saw few barriers to developing her potential, as an educator, therehave been few bathers to her advancement or growth. Being a woman has in very few waysrestricted her opportunities to excel. Though she is aware of ways in which the experience ofschooling can be limiting for women and girls, her pedagogy embodies an egalitarian vision ofeducation and of society. Students are empowered by the self-esteem which comes from successin learning. Good teaching, in Joan's terms, is providing opportunities for success. Classroomsshould encourage all to pursue opportunities for both individual and multidimensional growth andmovement; students are encouraged to grow through inquiries which address differential learning\u00E2\u0080\u0094 1 2 3 \u00E2\u0080\u0094abilities and styles. Each has the opportunity, to the best of his or her ability, to grow byexploring many different possibilities for learning.Despite Joan's resistance to the concept of a feminist pedagogical style, her teaching styleconforms to the feminist model of inquiry teaching as defined by Maher (1987a). The model forinquiry, says Maher, offers tools for problem-solving but, in seeking one best solution, is limited.Feminist pedagogy reframes experience in women's terms; it recognizes differences. As a wayof extending the inquiry learning, the feminist perspective incorporates a focus on \"people,\" menand women, both as learners and as subjects for study.In this way, students are involved in the classroom as whole people.... We live in a society whose problems are exacerbated bydivisions of race, gender, and class, to name three of the mostsalient ones. The personal problems that plague us are those ofunderstanding and reconciling different perspectives on theimportant issues of love and work and challenging those whoprofess impartiality and objectivity as they undertake to speak foreveryone. We need classroom exercises in feminist pedagogy tohelp students and ourselves listen to and come to terms with ourdifferences and multiple capacities and social responsibilities withinourselves (p.192).Through an understanding of classroom multiplicities and differences, Joan works out indeliberate and self-conscious practice the goal of empowering students through knowledge andprocesses of inquiry. In so doing, she re-creates the notion of human possibility which underpinsMaher's model of inquiry teaching.Connected Pedagogy: LouisePerhaps the most conscious inclusion of the feminist pedagogical principles defined byNoddings (1992), Shrewsbury (1987), Schneidewind (1987), Kristeva (1986), and others is foundin the teaching stories of Louise. She, like the others, is a strong, knowledgeable woman whohas infused her teaching with her own love of learning. What underlies Louise's teachingperspective, however, that differentiates her from the others is the strength of her personal\u00E2\u0080\u0094 124 \u00E2\u0080\u0094conviction that life and schooling need harmony, a rhythmic coexistence in schools andclassrooms to be created and preserved as much there as in her own life. Louise readily admitsshe avoids confrontation. She believes that her approach to life, essentially a pragmatic one, ofjust setting your sights on something and managing it in your own time and in your own wayis the important message she gives to students. \"I really respect the power of the human mindfor that.\" In her own time and in her own way, Louise has managed a lot, completing hereducation, raising three children on her own, and managing a farm while she carried on herteaching career. She is always attuned to the contributions of others, friends, family, andcolleagues, in the rhythm of her life. There are spiritual and maternal elements which are woveninto her stories of creating harmony, a gentle but consistent threading through the concrete andparticular challenges she has encountered.We discussed teaching styles. Asked what she would define as a good social studiesteacher, Louise emphasized humanness. The men and women she has known in social studiesteaching whom she respects for their teaching have all been humanists:You have to have a real curiosity about people, about why they'redifferent, and a real ability not to be judgemental, not to jump toconclusions but to live a real tolerance for differences andvariations and be a really healthy person [yourself] in relationshipswith other people and with young people and with the world. Thecuriosity and the tolerance and a desire to know more aboutsomething, to ask questions and know that there isn't a finiteanswer but just to keep looking for more answers ... that's whywe're social studies teachers and not math and physics teachers.For her, the difference is a worldview of the infiniteness of human possibility. The world is notblack and white. She prefers the open-ended inquiry-directed nature of social studies teachingtoday. She translates this into her own experience:In social studies we've changed quite a lot. My learning in highschool was that things happened and the English were always rightand nobody else could challenge that. It was the feeling of\u00E2\u0080\u0094 125 \u00E2\u0080\u0094superiority, the European way was the correct way -- let mecolonize the world. Only later, through university, were my eyesopened to just how biased and prejudiced that was. I startedreading a few things by French-Canadian authors. It opened myown eyes ... my high school, although I enjoyed it, was really quiteshortchanged in what I was allowed to learn about that curriculum.Today's [curriculum] is wonderful. I was lucky to work withpeople who were also curious and well read. To be well read isreally essential. If you can't be a well-read person, even justjournals, if you haven't time to read books, you shouldn't really bea teacher. A person who is using [his or her] notes from 15 yearsago, I don't think, is being a good teacher. And I've had very fewof those that I've had to work with .... There are not very many Iknow who do it that way mostly because it's no fun for theteacher. But we're all good at lecturing -- I often give a lecturelesson because it's an efficient way to do something, introduce it.I used to do it more than I do with the new social studiescurriculum. I used to do it quite a bit and figured I was fairlygood at it. Kids found it really interesting but that was a teacherstyle. I can do that any time I need to. Trying to keep the kidsinvolved all the time in active learning is harder work for theteacher. The other was easier.She descibed her style of teaching which has evolved from her early days of seeing groups ofstudents as \"a field full of berry-pickers\":I think that variety is important. Keeping kids' interest is veryimportant .... Teaching is much harder than it was twenty yearsago. More is expected from the teacher in terms of the individualstudent's needs. We used to teach a class as a group and now Ifind the pressures on the teacher harder .... I'm a friendlyauthoritarian. I tell them I maintain a matriarchalnot-quite-dictatorship. I'm maternal but I have the authority. I likeorganization, so I have a plan for the month and the students willknow where our overall plans are. I do involve them quite a bit inmaking decisions. When would they like a test, or when wouldthey like to do some group work, or how does it fit with their otherschool life? What might we do this week ... we could do this orthat, so how do they feel? And I build in a lot of variety. I willsometimes have them take notes for 15 or 20 minutes while Iexplain things or do things as a base partly because so many ofthem are going on to university and it's a useful technique andpartly to increase their listening skills .... A typical lesson will havethree or four things unless it's been decided that it's research dayor it's a group project day. I like to put up my plan for the next\u00E2\u0080\u0094 126 \u00E2\u0080\u0094few weeks on the board and say ... here are our objectives ... Iconsult a lot with the kids.In Louise's teaching there is powerful evidence of the negotiative and integrativecapacities of feminist pedagogy. As Miles (1989) says:The female characteristics, concerns, and abilities marginalized inindustrial society are necessarily central to the building of a new,more fully human society. The holistic, collective, intuitive,co-operative, emotional, nurturing, democratic, integrated, internal,and natural are affirmed against the over-valuation of thecompetitive, analytical, rational, hierarchical, fragmented, external,and artificial (man-made). Long-subordinated reproduction-relatedvalues and activities are affirmed as the organizing principle of anintegrated non-alienated society in which the current deep dualitiesof life in our fragmented society are overcome (p.21).Louise, in her teaching, tries to integrate the dualities defined by Miles: the public and private,production and reproduction, personal and political, means and end, man and nature, theory andpractice, commitment and objectivity, mental and manual, emotion and logic, intuition andreason. We talked about the transformative agenda of feminist pedagogy, though many of theissues of feminism, she said, are quite removed from her own life. She talked about beingattuned to an instinct and socialized as a woman for compassion and humanism:These are difficult things to teach in a fragmented timetable. Youalso have to be the model. Your presence must speak all of thesethings. It's an intrinsic kind of thing. [With my students], I listenand try not to hinder their curiosity or their intellect or theirfeelings of worth. I think I did that by instinct until the vocabularywas there. As a child, I always felt heartsick at the underdog'ssituation. We're raised that way as women. I think I instill thatin my students.These goals of teaching for compassion and humanism are reinforced as a caring agenda in herteaching. Describing herself as a social democrat, she talked about working to build a societywhere good will prevail, where human energies are tapped to potential, where greed, exploitation,and the pursuit of profit no longer wreak havoc in the environment, and where people are looked\u00E2\u0080\u0094 127 \u00E2\u0080\u0094after. She knows that she is an important role model for students and that she has an importanttask as an educator in fulfilling her social vision; so she seeks:... to empower students with knowledge that they can make adifference, that an individual can make a difference, that manyindividuals together make a collective difference, [that there is] afeeling of power in knowing that you have information andknowing how to get more information, and then going out anddoing something good with it.Shrewsbury (1987) defines the liberatory classroom as one where people connected inrelationship care about each other's learning, respect differences, utilize and develop talents,develop excellence that is not limited to a few, and practice integrity as the norm for thatrelationship. Fundamental to this perspective, which she terms the \"feminist perspective,\" is \"acommitment to growth, to renewal, to life. The vision itself must continue to evolve\" (p.6-7).In such classrooms, students engage in critical and reflective thinking rooted in the everyday toseek ways of enhancing \"the integrity and wholeness of the person and the person's connectionswith others.\" Where there is disharmony, says Miller (1986), teachers \"confront thefragmentations and move into new spaces, which provide room for the expansion that comeswhen we are able to take actions that nurture as well as challenge\" (p.119). Miller envisionsconversations between men and women as educators where the softer tones of women's voiceswill be recognized and released: \"The spaces in which we talk create our connections and weare touched -- by one another and by the making of our faces and giving of flower bouquets\"(p.121).For Louise, educating young people is a holistic and integrated process. Her classroomis as much a psychic space as a context for intellectual and social growth. Students \"learn to flytheir own wings\" in a non-competitive, encouraging atmosphere. The classroom is a place wherethey can feel comfortable and where they have \"half a chance.\" She uses a lot of cooperative\u00E2\u0080\u0094 128 \u00E2\u0080\u0094learning strategies. Attuned as she is to her own feelings in particular spaces, she knows thatcomputer labs and science labs and discos and downtown urban cores make her feeluncomfortable. She brings the natural world to her working space:I really work hard at maintaining an environmentally happyclassroom, with plants and always flowers from my garden. Theybring me flowers too. [It has] interesting displays and their workon display. [It is] a fun place to come into .... I am really anon-threatening teacher to students. I have very big classes and awide range of abilities, kids that in some schools wouldn't havestayed. I have encouraged that because I feel that the more peopleknow about the world, the better place it would be because of that.Social Science Pedagogy: AlisonAlison's teaching style is informed by her graduate work in social studies curriculum andby her sense of herself as a strong, knowledgeable, independent person. Academic strengthmeans a lot to her and it means a lot to the very academic students of her school and programs.As an intellectual guide for her students, she draws on her knowledge of the world which is bothacademic and experiential. She has travelled to a lot of places and lived in many differentcultural environments. The broad scope of the curriculum requires, in her opinion, the breadthof personal practical knowledge she has acquired. The content is, in her view, a means toachieving the goal of intellectual strength. The new curriculum which came in after 1982 hasmeant, she said, a refocused curriculum and the introduction of new teaching methods.There are fewer people handing out worksheets every day or whoare lecturing constantly or dictating notes or having kids writenotes, but that's almost an accident, not by design. It's just thatmany of the older teachers who followed those procedures haveretired and the new people coming into the profession ... belong toa different group of people [whose training at the university isdifferent}.In her own teaching, Alison likes to incorporate themes and connections between thesocial science disciplines which underpin her view of current social studies curriculum goals.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 129 \u00E2\u0080\u0094When she teaches geography, for example, she is able to integrate her understandings of history,economics, and political science, her experience of 30 years of teaching, and the knowledge shehas gained from her extensive travels. She discussed how she teaches grade 9 social studies, afragmented curriculum she connects and transforms by focusing on revolutions. Teachingrevolutions, she said, requires an understanding of the interconnections of geography, history,economics, systems of power and class, the distribution of resources, politics, cultures, education,and the spread of ideas and technology. It also requires the practical knowledge of how studentslearn.I teach grade 9 as the year of revolutions. We start of with theIndustrial Revolution which, in fact, has created the revolutions thatare going on, violent or otherwise, throughout the world .... [ThenI] go through the democratic revolution and the civil war inEngland. Then I can do the American Revolution and then I dothe French Revolution .... When we start off with the IndustrialRevolution, I start off with the geography of Europe, and we cando geography as we do the revolutions. Then, all of a sudden, halfway through the year, the curriculum demands that I change and goto Canada. But I'm not talking about the Industrial Revolution inCanada. I have to go back to the beginning. So somehow or otherI have to find a connection and I do it through economics andthrough the discoveries: what were the native people like when theEuropean explorers came here? And I look at the economicdevelopment of Canada .... There's so much to do and so you haveto be very selective .... To know what you are doing demands ahigh degree of knowledge of an enormous number of things, but atthe grade 9 level, you have to be very sure that you direct theminto areas where they're going to find these answers or at least tofind sufficient material that they are going to be able to think attheir level.Alison, unlike her mother and her grandmother, does not portray a maternal role in hercommunity, the school; though she is concerned and approachable, she is most comfortable withthe role of the scholar, providing students with interesting and challenging learning opportunitiesand the benefits of her expertise. In her English way, she maintains her personal distance.Students see her as a knowledgeable person, she says; in teaching, \"gender ought not to be a\u00E2\u0080\u0094 130 \u00E2\u0080\u0094factor.\" Alison is outspoken on the issue: she is not a feminist, though she brings a woman'sperspective to the classroom. I can find little that represents themes of mothering and caring inher perceptions of teaching, though one could make the case that she incorporates the caringtheme in more abstract ways, in caring for students' intellectual growth and for issues of socialjustice in the global sense. But to do so is to overclaim the case. She is the traditional scholar.It is her job as a teacher, she believes, to bring all perspectives to students and to have them seemen and women as persons, as equals. She is adamant about the essential sameness of men andwomen as teachers. Underlying this, I have the sense, is the view that being different as awoman means being inferior.I think if you allow students to treat you as something less, you getthe treatment you expect. I think [it's the] treatment of students[that] causes the problems. I honestly find it very difficult toanswer those questions because I don't have discipline problems.My classes are full. I never expect to have discipline problems.I would treat the students as I would have them treat me; it justdoesn't happen. I don't let them come in and keep their hats on inclass. They may argue, but they take them off. They just do itbecause they want to be there .... I don't think that, in any teachingthat I have done, there has been any difference between successfulmale social studies teachers and successful female social studiesteachers .... They are respected as scholars and teachers, notbecause they are men or women. There is no difference. Theymay have a different point of view, but I don't think it isnecessarily gender-derived. It has to do with one's experience ....They are respected because the students perceive they can learnfrom [them].In her classroom, in my study, and in her own life, Alison is a political independent;feminism, like the other \"-isms\" of the political sphere, has no place in her perception ofpedagogy and the classroom experience. She chooses her own ground on any issue afterexamining the evidence of her own personal knowledge. She is not afraid to express herself; toher it is a matter of equity: \"I'm an equal to anybody.\" The social studies classroom should notcause problems for women such as herself who teach social studies from the perspective of being\u00E2\u0080\u0094 131 \u00E2\u0080\u0094a strong, knowledgeable, independent woman with the capacity to think critically about issuespertaining to curriculum and to the teaching of young people.Alison draws on her understanding of other cultures in adapting the learning to classroomswith very high numbers of ESL students. She integrates their multicultural perspectives into hercreation of curriculum, designing inquiries which allow students to build on their uniqueknowledge and experiences of the world. As well, she believes we should have common goalsas citizens. Underpinning her concept of citizenship is the image of the students at the centreof ever widening and interconnecting circles which represent the community, the province, thenation, and the world. Students are given the knowledge and skills to make informed andindependent decisions about their places in these public and interconnected communities asCanadian citizens. In discussing how she teaches for social change, she also framed her notionsof citizenship as a woman's perspective on its traditional assumptions of the rights andresponsibilities of individuals in relation to the state:What we're doing now is allowing people to keep their culturesseparate and some of those cultural ideas are an antithesis to whatCanadian laws stress .... That's what I mean by constructive socialchange. It's not my idea to tell someone their cultural practices areall wrong, but sometimes the traditions that have developed in thelight of a specific history and geography and spatial context are notapplicable to Vancouver, and one of those things is the treatmentof women.Our discussion has been grounded in her theoretical and abstract understanding of socialstudies curriculum development, an essentially political process with which she is uncomfortable.She explained that the curriculum mandate of the Ministry of Education is often not reflected incurriculum as it is developed by teachers. In her graduate thesis research, she had examined thethree traditional definitions of social studies, as citizenship transmission, as social science, andas reflective inquiry:\u00E2\u0080\u0094 132 \u00E2\u0080\u0094I think basically social studies has to be [about] citizenship.Whatever tradition you take, the ultimate goal is citizenship,however you interpret it. But that's also a problem I have withsocial studies. I'm not sure that we should be in the business ofcitizenship education ... it changes with the general politicalconsensus of the times ... it represents the mainstream of thoughtwithin the province .... As I told you before, I am not comfortablewith politics in education. My interpretation of the curriculumguide is that it has tried to move to the third tradition, the criticalinquiry. I certainly support that and I try to teach that. At thesame time, you cannot have critical inquiry unless you have askeleton of structure in order to make a critical inquiry ... some sortof combination of the second (social science) and third (reflectiveinquiry), in that you're showing students where to find theknowledge that they need in order to be able to do [reflectiveinquiry].Alison's practice of social studies teaching is a negotiation of the three traditions withgreatest emphasis on the social science tradition. Barr, Barth, and Shermis (1977) describe thesocial science tradition as one which \"incorporates the inquiry techniques of anthropologists,sociologists, archeologists, historians, geographers, economists, psychologists, political scientists,and others\" (p.62). The concepts of given social science disciplines equip young people asscholars to gain new knowledge by which to make sense of a complex public world and toparticipate as informed Canadian citizens. Her practice is also perhaps a somewhat problematicnegotiation of the traditional tenet of social studies teaching that the political should not be seento be political and nor should those who teach it.Disconnected Pedagogy: EllenLittle in the literature of feminist pedagogy describes Ellen's experience of teaching, thesense of disconnection that comes from career interruptions and frequent changes of curriculum.This disconnection, which Ellen defines as a kind of isolation and disquiet, is heightened by herpersonal practical knowledge in which is reflected the difficulty of her cultural transition and theloss of confidence and lack of support she has felt in her teaching experience in BC. Ellen is\u00E2\u0080\u0094 133 \u00E2\u0080\u0094quietly reflective about her teaching experience in social studies. Since the start of this project,she has been reassigned to teaching Science and English. She is uncomfortable with the morechallenging and critical approaches to teaching that characterize Tammy's and Amanda-Leigh'sstyles but holds strongly the conviction that individuals as citizens can work within the status quoin reasoned and systematic ways to bring about change. Like Louise, she does not findconfrontation easy. Like Louise, she loves the quiet, harmonious spaces in life. Her teachingstyle reflects this:What I'd want to be modelling [for students] might be intellectualcuriosity, but also compassion. Compassion for each other and forhumanity in general, to overcome closed minds and prejudice. Anda caring for the environment and a willingness not to sink intoapathy, to have some feelings for the personal, to be willing to putsome effort into making a small personal change. When I showmy ... videos [of an environmental clean-up project I was involvedwith], I say, look, we won some court cases. We did this clean-upby the river, and you can make a difference.Reflecting the amount of change in her teaching assignments over the years, she talkedabout needing time to develop confidence in the curriculum knowledge. Once she has developed\"curriculum confidence,\" she could feel comfortable enough to do a whole range of activities inthe classroom from debating to labs to field trips. Debating lessons work really well for her.She measures student involvement and participation as evidence of success. In her understatedstyle, she says of her creative writing program in English,I don't think I'm doing anything special with this particular Englishclass but they all love creative writing. They feel reallyencouraged. I can generate a lot of enthusiasm. By the sametoken, I've got the same level class where nothing seems to getthem going. It depends on the situation.Ellen attends in her teaching practice to the dynamics of the groups she is working with.A particularly interactive strategy may work well with one group and not another. Her bestlessons, she thinks, are those that allow her to bring her experience of the real and natural world- 134 -to the learning. She also likes to bring in guest speakers, friends and contacts from her workwith environmental advocacy organizations. Ellen most enjoys field trips, like the one she tookwith students to Still Creek to give students an understanding of the relationship between pH andtemperature and water quality issues and the raising of the salmon.That is to me a really high point in teaching. One time I gave aslide show, when I was teaching the geology part, of my trip downthe Grand Canyon. It's through outdoor visual focus that [myteaching] works best.She was sorry that, due to her reassignment, she could not share her slides and her experienceswith students in grade eight social studies when she returned from her three-month leave to travelin Asia recently. The most important thing in her teaching, in Ellen's opinion, is that studentslearn to think critically:The questioning/critical thinking angle [is most important]. In theend, I push an environmental line. I try not to [be too strong] ....Keeping a thinking mind about what they're listening to andinquiring about: that's probably the most important thing in thelong run.When asked what most suits her to working with students, she responded,Love of learning is number one. I'll learn as much as the studentswill. A real commitment to learning and when I see young peoplelearning, I really enjoy it. For example, I gave my grade lOs rawdata and they could analyze some fairly detailed statistics withE-coli tests for water quality. I was teaching them good sciencewriting (she shows me the reports she has home to mark). [I getexcited as] it's not just the really bright kids, wanting A's.Her background in English, her love of the environment, her understandings of complex issueanalysis, her knowledge foundations, and her lifelong pursuit of learning are integrated in herstories of her teaching practice.There is a tension in Ellen's discussion of her relationships with students, a tentativenessand discomfort that pushes her to explore both gender and cultural dynamics in teaching. She\u00E2\u0080\u0094 135 \u00E2\u0080\u0094described herself as fairly conservative in her approach to teaching. She likes discipline andstructure, she said; she likes students to be on time to class.There wasn't a lot of discipline in one of the schools I wasworking in. I ran afoul of a group of parents and they basicallyworked for getting me a forced transfer. One of the kids walkedinto my class and hit the nearest student. His parents wanted himremoved because I was being too tough, questioning him for this.His parents said he couldn't take my discipline, so he was removedfrom my class. That forced transfer is a black mark on my recordand, for that reason, even if I wanted to do something, I wouldn'tbe considered. I have to be realistic .... The kids saw me as anasty old biddy and they were really resentful of basic discipline.Some see me as a nasty old disciplinarian.Her relationships with students also reflect Ellen's personality and experience. Ellen'spersonal reservedness makes it most comfortable for her to maintain a personal distance.I don't think the kids see me as a mother figure or necessarilywarm or empathetic .... I'm just a person but a bit more aggressivebecause of this New Zealand background. It's caused realproblems .... In order to assert myself, I don't smile as much. Ilook stern. I don't tolerate as much. Over there, a lot of it wasbased on physical stuff -- hitting. But that was not my style.She doesn't like to \"fuss over\" kids, as some parents do, she said; she doesn't like being fussedover herself. \"I just gradually get to know and trust adults. I let the students come to me.\" Andsome do come to her because they know that, underneath the apparently stern exterior, she caresand she will listen. In her own words, she has been a \"listening post\" in students' lives.Ellen talked about her involvement with an ESL student who had come to Canada withouthis family and whose experience of loneliness and overbearing cultural expectations had broughthim to her on the verge of a breakdown. She talked about another boy who gave a really\"whacky\" speech in the public speaking contest one year who returned the next to help hersponsor the contest. She has consciously tried not to get overly involved with students' lives andtheir issues. She had been very involved in her earliest years of teaching in New Zealand. One\u00E2\u0080\u0094 136 \u00E2\u0080\u0094boy who had been quite reclusive and who was experiencing severe emotional problems wenton to take the national title in orienteering after Ellen had involved him in her outdoororienteering program. Her sincere interest in students' emotional development is reflected in hercontinuing to take counselling courses at UBC. Her present role is primarily their intellectualand experiential development, though she is available for listening if they choose to approach.The models for Ellen's teaching are found in her images of the very traditional \"belovedold math teacher,\" the male teachers of her high school years, and the male models for teachingwho had dominated her early career years in New Zealand.[The school in New Zealand] was very sexist. At lunch time, themen used to sit around the table and tell filthy jokes. If you wentto the men's staffroom, if you were young, you got your bumpinched. If you were old like the head mistress, you got the mostfoul joke told in front of you so that you would cry and get out.They did not want to have the staffroom integrated. We had thisalmighty fight to have a male/female staffroom .... Just disgusting,to survive these very macho men. Their way of teaching wasthrough sheer toughness. So if you could intimidate the kids, thenyou were strong and a good teacher. Unfortunately, that was themodel where I started off. Somewhere in the back of my mind,it's been softened by some of these Canadian courses in empathy.It's a different style. I think that, [in spite of] my being a woman,I did model myself on these quite strong male aggressive models.More naturally comfortable with the role of intellectual guide and with keeping a personaldistance, Ellen now works on allowing warmth in her teaching. \"You just don't feel connected.That's why I liked Diane Pollard and her course [in Counselling Psychology] at UBC. She's avery warm, empathetic person. I'd really like to be like her.\" Jungian psychology has taughther that some \"feeling\" types of students require attention in the affective domain; others, the\"knowing\" types, are happier in the cognitive domain she had previously focused on.I can see what some of their psychological critiques are, thevalidity of that, and I believe that there's some essence in that. Icertainly know when I go into a classroom, I'm not really intocomplimenting the student in the front desk wearing a fabulous\u00E2\u0080\u0094 137 \u00E2\u0080\u0094new shirt, but now I actually try to do things like that. I'll walkaround the room and look at each kid's work and make somepositive comment whereas in the past I probably didn't because Ialways felt that if someone wants to tell you something they will.Though not an uncaring person, Ellen has had to learn to broaden her personal teaching style toincorporate the more maternal, caring, connecting aspects which would seem, based on herexperience, to be more politically expedient for women in Canadian classrooms than thetraditional style of the authoritarian transmission model with which she was culturally andprofessionally more familiar. She has worked hard to learn how to incorporate and be morecomfortable with a pedagogical style not naturally her own.Lacking strong gender models for teaching and professionally isolated from other womenin her teaching, Ellen is caught in the tensions and contradictions of gendered professional andcultural expectations of women teachers. These identities do not allow for her different way ofestablishing and expressing authority for knowledge. For Ellen, the difficult and complex processof negotiating cultural and gender expectations in the practice of teaching has made her acutelyaware of structural and social constraints in identity-formation. She is left feeling disconnectedand uncomfortable in the tensions created by the female maternal/nurturing and maleintellectual/authority models which frame women's teaching (Culley et al, 1985).Conclusion: Women's Different PedagogiesNo one style of teaching social studies emerges from these women; diversity of style andmethods, a focus on students' and their own intellectual growth, an explicit intention to conveythe love and challenge of learning in classrooms, and a stated preference for non-traditionalmethods of teaching seem the predominant characteristics of their pedagogical approaches insocial studies. Some tell stories of classroom processes which are more democratic than others.The maternal/nurturing theme which so characterizes the literature of feminist pedagogy cannot\u00E2\u0080\u0094 138 \u00E2\u0080\u0094be imposed as a generalized characteristic of their styles. Though it appears as a strong themein some of their teaching stories, it is non-existent or faint in others. And to see their capacitiesonly in the reductive roles of nurturers is to devalue their contributions as strong, intellectual, andknowledgeable women to the teaching of social studies and geography. Rather, in varyingdegrees and complex ways, they integrate and negotiate traditional, innovative, academic,political, social, critical, feminist, and maternal pedagogical perspectives that provide differentkinds of challenging learning environments for students in social studies. That each has a notionof teaching social studies as citizenship education is apparent, but equally as apparent is thatcitizenship means quite different and personal things to each. To generalize is to neutralize therichness of these stories as models of teaching. To deny the validity of each woman'scontribution to social studies teaching is to limit the transformative possibilities of understandingthe diversity of the social world.The women of the study have all had leadership roles in social studies teaching. In everystory we have heard strong, knowledgeable women discuss their personal practical knowledgeswhich they engage in enacting their teaching of social studies. Each story has something of valueto add to what we know about social studies teaching. Wilson's (1993) research on teacherleaders, those perceived by their peers to be hard-working and highly involved with curricularand instructional innovation, showed that they work in creative ways with students of wide-ranging abilities and backgrounds, are outgoing and available to other teachers as a resource, andare active participants within school communities. She found that teacher leaders soughtchallenge and growth in their teaching, are risk-oriented and collaborative, and are committed andcompetent. They do what they do in schools both for students and for themselves. Yet, Wilsonhints at the politics of teaching, suggesting that, within teacher culture, there are tensions whichsurround these very characteristics, both with colleagues and administrators. Those whose\u00E2\u0080\u0094 139 \u00E2\u0080\u0094teaching could model the way and \"encourage the heart\" of schools are not likely to do so,preferring a live-and-let-live attitude. Yet in describing the feminine or transformationalleadership style, she expresses the hope that:... the school of the future will be a formal but nonhierarchicalsystem that nourishes informal arteries of influence, a place wherethe pulse and rhythm of good teaching and learning are driven bythe capabilities of teacher leaders. It seems to me that only thenwill the potential contribution of these teachers to their schools berealized. Only then will we genuinely begin the work offashioning school environments within which it is possible forevery student to achieve (p.27).A BC Ministry of Education newsletter Ministry News (April, 1993) cites research(Leithwood and Dart, 1992) showing that women as transformational leaders are generally morepositive in response than men to the implementation initiatives of the Year 2000 reform programin BC. Formal inclusion of women's ways of teaching social studies has implications for thesuccess of proposed new directions in social studies. As role models, these women's pedagogiesprovide alternatives to the dominant traditional models which have described social studiesteaching for decades. The stories of those who have leadership roles should be encouraged fortheir transformative capacity.CURRICULAR PERSPECTIVESCritical educators are concerned with the politics of curriculum. They see that curriculum,like pedagogy, is not neutral. They ask whose knowledge is it, and for whom is it intended?They challenge the concept of curriculum as something linear and bounded which is conveyed,covered, measured, taught in boxes of time, and assessed (Miller, 1990). They resist curriculummandates which \"administer only one set treatment\" (Wood, 1990, p.100) and which cast teachersas curriculum workers, calling instead for more inclusive and visionary educational objectives\u00E2\u0080\u0094 140 \u00E2\u0080\u0094where teachers and students share in the democratic creation and enactment of curriculumpossibilities (Miller, 1990; Greene, 1990; Apple, 1990; Erdman, 1990).Feminist concerns with curriculum are critical, but they also see the mandated curriculumas gendered. The \"one set treatment\" as it is developed by curriculum frameworks, textbooks,content, and classroom processes is neither gender fair nor culturally inclusive (Bernard-Powers,in press). Curriculum, feminists say, reinforces cultural reproduction of gender stereotypes (Luke,1992; Riddell, 1989, 1992) and constructs what is worth knowing and how it should be knownin male terms (Gaskell, McLaren, and Novogrodsky, 1989). Women's knowledge, concerns,experiences, and ways of knowing become marginalia (Luke, 1992).The literature suggests that women understand curriculum as a construction which can betransformed in women's terms to reflect diverse human possibilities. Themes of connection,integration, holism, negotiation, collaboration, nurturance, and collegiality which permeate thediscourse of women's pedagogy suggest that women are not comfortable with the view ofcurriculum as finite, bounded, fragmented, immutable, and isolated from real-world and learningcommunities. Rather, they approach curriculum in inclusive and synthetic ways, \"as a sharedprocess .... in which teachers and students engage to order and make sense of the world\" (Wood,1990, p.107; Erdman, 1990) and as a form of human praxis which is personal (Greene, 1990),reflective, active, connecting, interpretive, and shifting (Miller, 1990). Curriculum, for Aoki(1990), reveals for good teachers a tensionality marked by the differences and difficulties\"between the world that is and the world yet to be ... between the mandated curriculum andstudents' own vision of curriculum\" (p.112). In facing such tensions, teachers \"indwellauthentically in the life of difficulty, [they do not] betray it with easier technical solutions\"(p.113). Women may also experience tensions surrounding the constraints of technical and\u00E2\u0080\u0094 141 \u00E2\u0080\u0094rationalizing aspects of curriculum (Tetreault, 1987b; Casey and Apple, 1989; McLeod, 1988;Wilson, 1993; Weiler, 1988).The literature also suggests that women have much to offer by creating a social studiescurriculum which has transformative capacity in making \"education for responsible and caringcommunity participation ... a fundamental goal of schooling\" (Stanley, 1992, as cited in Bernard-Powers, in press).If women's culture were taken more seriously in educationalplanning, social studies and history might have a very differentemphasis. Instead of moving from war to war, ruler to ruler, onepolitical campaign to the next, we would give far more attention tosocial issues (Noddings, 1992b, p.68).Women's culture and values place private concerns with social and family welfare, child care,domestic violence, and sexual harassment, for example, and particular concerns with peaceactivities, the environment, and community organizations on the public agenda for citizenshipeducation (Bernard-Powers, in press; Kilgour, 1992; Martin, 1982, 1985; Noddings, 1984, 1992a,1992b).While there were significant differences in teaching styles, more commonalities amongstthese women could be found in their transformations of and responses to curriculum. Thissection begins with an analysis of the women's responses to curriculum questions within thequestionnaire. The commonalities emerged as four major narrative themes across the differentconversations; each added new dimensions to the questionnaire data on women's curriculumperspectives. Three of these themes suggest the ways in which women enact curriculum-as-possibility. The fourth theme, discussed separately for its focus on tensions, looks at women'sdiscomfort with the \"business\" of social studies teaching, in particular, the teaching of seniorcourses which are subject to provincial assessment. Here, the conversations began to explore the\u00E2\u0080\u0094 142 \u00E2\u0080\u0094tensions of difference and difficulties faced by the women as they create and enact social studiescurriculum within varying degrees of constraint.CURRICULUM: QUESTIONNAIRE RESPONSESI began the study of the women's curriculum understandings and perspectives by lookingat the questionnaire responses (see Appendix II) which focused on the present BC social studiescurriculum. One question sought their responses to a list which asked them to rank aspects ofthe present curriculum as being most important, moderately important, or least important. Thewomen showed their understanding of present curriculum foci as follows:Level of Perceived Importance in Current Social Studies CurriculumMost^ Moderately^LeastHistory Global Awareness^Report WritingCanadian Studies^Political Science CommunityCitizenship^Problem Solving^ParticipationRights and Social/Cultural AttitudeResponsibilities^Diversity^DevelopmentCurrent Events International EconomicsDecision Making^Relations LawResearch Skills Inquiry Learning^(Humanities)Critical Thinking^Media LiteracyCommunicationGeographyTable 2: The Teachers' Curriculum UnderstandingsHowever, open-ended questionnaire responses indicated what aspects of curriculum they feltshould receive more emphasis. Five of six listed Geography. Three listed Global Awareness.Also mentioned were Community Participation, Inquiry Learning, and Law. Humanities wasadded to the list, reflecting the Year 2000 reform for social studies education in BC. Lessemphasis was suggested on Canadian Studies, History, and content.In understanding this response, it should be noted that, within the field, there is someagreement that history and social studies are often synonymous in the practical curriculum. With\u00E2\u0080\u0094 143 \u00E2\u0080\u0094many more social studies teachers being prepared in history than in geography and with apreponderance of history in the junior curricula in particular, many students do not receive eventhe allocated time suggested in the BC curriculum guides in acquiring geographic skills andunderstandings. The women's questionnaire responses reflected this concern for the lack ofgeographic emphasis. Further, the embeddedness of history and Canadian Studies, linked totraditional pedagogical strategies of transmission such as text- and content-focused lessons,seemed problematic for these women in social studies teaching. Their concerns with the presentcurriculum and its implementation included poor texts, the lack of curriculum integration, theamount of content and emphasis of content over process learning, the over-emphasis of historyat the expense of other curriculum foci, the lack of geographic background of some teachers ofsocial studies, and the lack of geography in the junior grades which shortchanges some studentsentering Geography 12. These responses were further developed in our conversations.The concern with lack of geographic focus is perhaps predictable, given the academicorientation of the study group, but it is matched in the results of the Provincial AssessmentReport:Teachers at all three [assessed] levels would like to see anincreased emphasis on current events, global awareness, andenvironmental issues. Grade 10 panel members and teachers wouldalso like to see more emphasis on geography and geographic skills(Cassidy and Bognar, p.13).Global and environmental emphases are encompassed in geographic learnings; environmentalawareness was not included in the list of questionnaire choices for present curriculum foci butshould have been, given its geographic implications. Current events also often focus on worldevents which lend themselves to geographic understandings.The women responded positively to questionnaire inquiries about current educationalreform goals in BC of integrating social studies with other curriculum areas. Given the\u00E2\u0080\u0094 144 \u00E2\u0080\u0094multidimensionality and flexibility of their teaching careers in terms of other courses anddisciplines taught, this response suggests that it is easier to think about integration when one isfamiliar with other curricula.The summarized picture of women's understandings of the broad goals of social studiesshowed the following: most important, they felt, were the notions of teaching social studies toencourage inquiry and critical thinking and to facilitate understanding of global concerns; ofsecondary importance was teaching to promote attitudes of tolerance and understanding; next wasto prepare students for participation in society; then, to facilitate positive and constructive socialchange. Clearly, the least significant factor in teaching social studies for these women was thetransmission of a nation's cultural legacy. One added the goal of respecting and understandingthe natural world and its importance.CURRICULUM: THE CONVERSATIONSIn analyzing the interview data, I have focused on ways these women negotiate thecurriculum and the intentions of the curriculum guides to overcome perceived emphases andomissions. The conversations illuminate these women's ways of thinking critically about theexplicit curriculum of social studies in BC.Theme: Curriculum AutonomyPerhaps the most striking aspect of their curriculum creation and enactment is the senseof autonomy each has within the classroom in teaching social studies. There is very little senseof their being constrained by the mandated curriculum for teaching social studies, grades 8 to 11.With critical inquiry as the curriculum goal, which Alison views as the \"framework,\" shecan decide how she will sort through the content, \"translate it, transform it, in one way oranother,\" to achieve the knowledge and skills objectives articulated in the curriculum. Hercomments reflect her sense of independence:\u00E2\u0080\u0094 145 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Because there is so much material, I select what I think isimportant to achieve the goals that the curriculum wants. Butsomeone in the next room who has a different [base] of knowledgechooses something else. Now we all do it according to ourexperience. So what my students get is the result of myexperience. What the students of the person across the hall gets isthe result of that person's experience.Inevitably, Amanda-Leigh said, you have to \"streamline\" curriculum, bypassing someevents and highlighting others to incorporate creative or process approaches: \"I don't lecture.The transmission of content is instantaneously reduced because, unless you're lecturing, you arenever going to get through all that content.\"Amanda-Leigh discussed the collaborative way in which her department transformed thegrade 10 curriculum for social studies the year they decided to create a UN General Assembly:We basically streamlined [the BC Economy] unit which is 30%,almost 40 or 50 when you add the Pacific Rim. We taught it butwe really streamlined it into primary, secondary, and tertiaryindustries and the big industries in BC. We probably didn'tprovide the kids an excellent understanding of forestry and miningand tourism in BC, but partially that comes from the fact that thetextbook is inadequate at the grade 10 level. We didn't have theresources and didn't create the resources to teach the unit. So wewent on to the General Assembly and the UN which fits better intothe grade 11 curriculum, but that curriculum is absolutely packedfull. We really focused on the 15% curriculum [allocated to]current events in social studies 10. We translated that into aGeneral Assembly at the year end so the kids actually put forthresolutions on current events facing the world, be it literacy orsexism or driftnet fishing or clearcutting .... sometimes I wonderedif we were operating within the curriculum guidelines ... and Ididn't have any problem with that because what we were doingwas just so valid .... My feeling is that the curriculum guideline isa recommendation. It is not carved in stone. The reason thecurriculum is designed as it is is so that kids are given certainskills and processes and content to move to the next level. I seethat as a continuum. I don't think you stop learning in June. SoI don't think the kids who left grade 10 going into grade 11 wereshortchanged at all. The grade 11 teacher will be able to go fromwhere they are.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 1 4 6 \u00E2\u0080\u0094To Amanda-Leigh and her department, the content was the vehicle by which the learning tookplace. They facilitated that learning.In terms of curriculum enactment, Joan used examples from her teaching of grade 9social studies and History 12 to demonstrate her resistance to both the mandated curriculum andtraditional pedagogy. There is further evidence of her focus on involving the learner and herunderstanding of learning theory. Her curriculum enactment represents an integrated, holistic,humanities approach, very reflective of the practical aims of Year 2000 reform:I just think [the grade 9 curriculum] presents a very narrow pointof view and I would want to have them bring in two or threedifferent points of view. I also find the text extremely unreadablefor most grade 9 students; it's about five years beyond some ofthem. And [the course] seems to be such a hodgepodge. We haveselected three things you should know about. It'scompartmentalized. We're going to have geography. Okay, nowwe've done geography, now we do the Industrial Revolution.Okay, now we've done the Industrial Revolution, now if we haveany time left, we're going to do socialism, democracy, andexploration .... When I find omissions, I try and find some othermaterial. It doesn't have to be text reference material. I taughtHistory 12 for a while and one of the things I used to like doingwas to give the kids a list of novels that were related to that andhave them read any two of them. That's the whole business of thetwo-dimensional text figure versus the three-dimensional liveperson that [I've] talked about. I'd like to see more of that in allthe history courses.Joan also discussed her implementation of the curricular goal of critical thinking and herfocus on multiple perspectives. She has taught with Louise, whom she describes as a greatinfluence on her teaching:I think Louise and I have very similar values. We certainly don'tagree necessarily on worldviews or politics ... but both of us arewilling to allow the students to disagree with us too. Our viewisn't the only view. It's just one view. I don't have any problemat all with my students [disagreeing] -- in fact, I'm more thanhappy if they'll disagree and stand up for why.Joan illustrates this process with an example of curriculum negotiation in Geography 12:\u00E2\u0080\u0094 147 \u00E2\u0080\u0094So much has been made of the greenhouse and carbon dioxideeffect. I'm not totally convinced that it's happening. I'm totallyconvinced that we could do things that would be better for ourenvironment than what we're doing. Certainly, burning down theBrazilian jungle is not the best thing ... so I provide them with amodel that disputes [the greenhouse effect] and shows thatthroughout periods of geologic history this atmosphere has gonefrom methane to having carbon dioxide to an oxygen-carbondioxide balance. In fact, the ocean's ability to increase itsabsorption of carbon dioxide is relative to the amount of carbondioxide in the atmosphere at different times. That's a verylegitimate model, too. So the kids start arguing with you becauseof what they've read, but at least then they're thinking about it, andthey're also thinking about the fact that every time something likethis is done, it's one person's interpretation of a study and data cando anything you want them to.She is concerned in the present curriculum with the de-emphasis of geography in thejunior curricula of social studies which creates weak geographic understandings for studentsentering the senior elective. The base of geographic knowledge also provides students with anunderstanding of current events. \"Maybe when they pick up a newspaper and they read aboutthe confusion in the Middle East, they'll be able to find the Middle East on a map!\" We laughedabout my experience of students entering Geography 12 whose exposure to geographic conceptsseemed to be \"the place where history happens, the annual review of longitude and latitude, theannual map of Canada ... one teacher added wind and currents because he was a sailor!\" Sheresponded, \"And don't forget time zones because somebody took a holiday!\" One of her rolesas a social studies educator, she felt, had been to share her knowledge of geography withcolleagues.It is important for Joan that students see connections in their learning. She \"hammers in\"the theme of interconnectedness in her approach to social studies and geographic understandings:nothing happens in isolation; everything is related to something else, is influenced by andinfluences something else. The \"gifted\" nature of her own eclectic experience of schooling is\u00E2\u0080\u0094 148 \u00E2\u0080\u0094reflected in her teaching perspective and practice.^Her literary, technical, scientific,mathematical, historical, and geographic skills are strands she weaves in dynamic ways into thefabric of her transformed social studies.The curriculum also allows Louise to \"fly her own wings.\" Though the curriculum isweighted towards history, Louise sees herself as autonomous in transforming the body ofknowledge. \"We've got such autonomy in our district that I could teach [geography] for 50%of the course and no one would challenge me.\" Her love of geography is the basis of her re-created curriculum.I love geography so much that I really emphasize it at every gradelevel. I could bring geography into every lesson. I think those ofus with the geography training do, and I find the kids like that a lotbecause it makes the real world have meaning. I think we have anadvantage over those who have only history training.In her department, all the teachers have incorporated as much geography as they can. One focusis historical geography. Students look at the flow and impact of people and of historic eventson landscapes.I like seeing the impact of history on the land itself ... the culturalgeography and the way the people place themselves on the landand what they do with it. That leads me into how do they managethe land? What is their feeling of harmony with the land? NowI think it's almost brought me full circle with today'senvironmental problems because where there's disharmony, thereare problems .... Any future developments have to be in harmonywith nature. You've got to understand ecology which brings usback to the course. I'm so lucky to teach Geography 12 wherekids can get exposed to that .... I've never really had to teachanything I couldn't get excited about, so I'm lucky.Louise teaches current events from both geographic and political perspectives. Studentslearn where things happen as well as what is going on.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 149 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Theme: Environmental AwarenessThe themes of environmental protection and understanding of the natural world permeatedall the discussions of ways in which curriculum is crafted according to personal knowledge.Ellen, the most committed environmentalist in the personal/political sense, \"pushes anenvironmental line,\" though she acknowledges the constraints imposed by the political contextof schooling in giving voice to her passion for the natural world. She says one must be equallyas careful not to be seen to be indoctrinating students in the environmental as the fundamentalistreligious view of the world, for example. As a social studies teacher, she emphasized wildernessand its value to humanity. She is happy that teaching science courses has given her a curriculumin which she can share her understandings of the ecological, economic, legal, and socialconsiderations in protecting the environment.Alison uses her social science perspective to analyze the interconnections of the humanand physical worlds, incorporating economic, social, and environmental understandings inexamining such issues as mining and forestry. Amanda-Leigh, the democratic educator,incorporates awareness of the importance of the environment in a notion of environmentalcitizenship. Joan generates inquiries which examine multiple perspectives and understandingsof the physical world and of environmental issues. Tammy provides the classroom context inwhich current challenges to the environment may be debated and critiqued, seeking to developstudent understandings and awarenesses of the natural world as life skills.Louise's love of the natural world infuses her approach to curriculum. As the EarthMother, she brings it in in informal ways, sharing with her students a respect for the Earth\"which is our foundation.\" She talks of feeling comfortable with that approach. Studyingresource management or history, she will focus on how people looked at the earth and resourcesand their relationship to the whole. She reads them the wisdom of other cultures in relation to\u00E2\u0080\u0094 150 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Nature and considers the meaning of the word \"recreation\" which, to Louise, is \"to re-create, findyour real self, your inner self, a different kind of harmony.\" She attributed these holisticunderstandings to her geography professor at the University of Victoria.Theme: Inclusion of WomenAnother recurrent theme is that of the curricular omission of women, their perspectives,and their issues. The discussions which follow and those which I have previously included inlooking at their instructional styles suggest other ways in which the curriculum is perceived ofas exclusive and single-voiced. Though only one of the women had actually taken a course inWomen's History, most others, aware of the absence of women in the social studies curriculum,had strategies for addressing gender asymmetry in their creation of curriculum. The questionnaireresponses had suggested I would find a concern for the lack of women's stories and issues withinthe curriculum.Louise talked about integrating a focus on women in holistic ways. She recalled a reallybright young girl in grade ten for whom she created an individualized enrichment project to studyCanadian history and geography and the roles of women as they are portrayed in the works ofSusannah Moodie, Margaret Atwood, Gabrielle Roy, and others. In the end, when the studenthad finished, she gave Louise a copy of Never Done, a book about women's work. After grade11, the student was accepted directly to Simon Fraser University. Now, with a career in writingfor television, the student stays in touch with Louise.She touched me as a teacher, thinking about people who haveinfluenced me [in teaching] .... She made me explore far beyondwhat was there in the grade 10 [curriculum]. How could I keepthis girl learning? I'd keep giving her more things and she wouldcome back with what she'd found.The theme of women's roles is also woven into Louise's curriculum fabric. In thepopulation studies of the grade 11 curriculum, Louise looks at issues of the education of women.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 151 \u00E2\u0080\u0094She personalizes the learning for students, having them explore the histories of the women intheir own families. She examines the changing roles of women in the world and the impact thathas had on society and the working world. In keeping with her personal commitment to anon-violent existence, she does not glorify war. Hers is the gentle voice of a mother.As a critical feminist educator, Tammy's curricular transformations are underpinned bythe particular political worldview which sees the world as a less-than-perfect place and whichseeks to challenge the status quo in search of a better way. There is passionate commitment toaddressing the imbalances of power experienced as much by women as by others who aredisenfranchised by the master narratives of societies. Hers is the strongest creation of thefeminist curriculum, the strongest \"voice\" for women and for other issues of social justice.Aware of the inadequacies of many texts in providing multiple perspectives on global andsocial issues, Tammy finds resources which encourage students to think critically and to engagein very personal and meaningful ways with the curriculum. Poorly-written courses, particularlyat the grades 8, 9, and 10 levels say nothing to women at all.They're fact-based, they're theoretical, they're abstract, and thatwould be fine if they were done in the context of some humanitybut they aren't. There is very little connection between learningabout ancient history in order to learn more about themselves. Tome, it's profoundly feminine. The issues don't seem to arise forthe men in my department. I need to see the context of studyingthis material as being related to who we are, where the childrenare, where they can define more of who they are, and how they'regoing to interact for the rest of their lives. It's the only reason Ican think of for teaching social studies. It doesn't exist at thegrades 8, 9, and 10 levels. You have to make it up. You have tobring in auxiliary materials. At the grade 11 level, the geographysection does [women's issues] very well. The history andgovernment [units] don't, but you can bring it in. You just needadditional materials. There's nothing for women. To be frank, [Ithink] that's one of the reasons that students who are good at rotelearning do very well in grades 8, 9, and 10 and then often havedifficulty in grade 11.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 152 \u00E2\u0080\u0094The subject of Women and the Law is now associated in her school with Tammy; she isinvited into the grade 10 Humanities program to introduce students to the issues in four hourswhile the other teachers cover her classes. Her discussions with them start with a video segmentwhich depicts the legal realities for women in a Latin American country. A professor isexonerated in the murder of his wife. His impassioned act is culturally and legally accepted; she,after all, did not have dinner on the table when he was ready. The example provides the contextfor discussing women's restricted and limited ability to act in society.In another example, Tammy talked about how she has students in Law 12 look at foursummaries of the Murdoch and Murdoch case. The case provides students an opportunity toexamine issues of property settlement for women. Three of the summaries are written by men.Students have no trouble picking out the summary written by a woman. It tells the woman'sstory, focusing on the details of the husband's abuse and drinking and on the non-traditionalaspects of the woman's role in her marriage and day-to-day participation in the running of aranch worth several million dollars. The wife who spent years running a household, raisingchildren, keeping books, and actively engaging in other strenuous chores required in the operationof a ranch received $200 a month in a divorce settlement. She died in poverty.Tammy told the story of a class discussion of conditions for women in Third Worldcountries. A colleague had been present and had been moved to tell a story of his experiencein the merchant marines. He told the class about the Asian women hired for very little pay, theonly ones who would take the job of cleaning the ship's bilges when the ship was docked in anAsian harbour. The women did an impeccable job, returning the stinking bilges to pristinecondition, even waxing them afterwards. Then, as the ship left the harbour and the engines firedup, he had noticed all these little wrapped bundles floating in the water. These, it was explainedto him, were the bodies of the girl babies which were thrown into the water and disturbed by the\u00E2\u0080\u0094 153 \u00E2\u0080\u0094undercurrents created by departing ship engines. Tammy's teaching style and issue-basedapproach to curriculum gave room and invitation for this kind of sharing; she had created thespace for the telling of a story to enhance students' understanding of the devaluing of women'swork and lives in Third World countries as no text or formal lecture could have done.Amanda-Leigh's curricular transformations are mediations which reflect a woman'sconcern with creating for students' the picture of a world which is more democraticallyreasonable, balanced, and inclusive.One of [my other objectives] would be playing down war, asopposed to highlighting it. If you were to articulate a differencebetween the male teachers in the department and me, it would bethat I don't work hard at making sure those kids understand themilitary strategies. The Schlieffen plan just doesn't really cut it forme. I'm more concerned with why it all came about ... to playdown war as an alternative to conflict. I try to role model and getthose kids to think about talking through a problem rather thanfighting it out.Her mediated curriculum focuses on social justice issues such as the discrimination thatindigenous peoples feel with regard to the legal system. She spends time developing theperspectives of cultural groups, of Asian Canadians, for example, in the building of BritishColumbia: \"Who the hell cares about Onderdonk! We should look at who made the railway.\"And she attends to curricular omissions, including the women in history, families, values, andthe environment.Ellen gave two examples of the curricular inclusion of women: she had includedwomen's issues as part of a fabric of social history. In studying Canada's historical development,she included a look at women's changing roles during particular periods, such as the wars or theopening of the west. She also had her student read the stories of the lives of the women whohad political impact in Canada, including the wives of the prime ministers.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 154 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Though not a \"feminist,\" Alison consciously looks at women's topics in her teachingwhen she considers it appropriate. In social studies 11, when students look at developmentissues, they may examine the allocation of aid money to \"male\" projects like big dams, machines,factories, and other big edifices. She notes that research shows that a smaller amount of moneygiven to women and to education will have greater fallout for the community. She teaches warsif the curriculum encompasses these but tends not to focus on battles and specific weapons. Sheconcentrates on what happened to people during the wars, the reasons for and the consequencesof the war. When talking about aboriginal peoples in the grade 9 social studies, Alison willexamine the role played by the Indian wives of the explorers. She thinks it was Mrs. Thompsonwho actually found the right river for David to follow. In current events -- she mentioned severalrecent news items as examples -- she tries to encourage students to consider other perspectives,including women's. Men, though well-intended, she said, do not see the limited nature of themedia presentations of events: \"It's never been pointed out to them that there are other pointsof view and that theirs is not the only one.\"Prior to this research project, Joan had not noticed the absence of women in social studiesteaching and curriculum. She alone had not consciously incorporated a woman's perspective inher teaching, though her curriculum transformations were extremely attentive to the diversity ofhuman experience. She and her department, for example, had undertaken a collaborative socialstudies curriculum development project to meet the particular needs of the large population ofFirst Nations students in the school by incorporating a unit of study from their heritageperspective into all students' social studies programs.Nothing in these teachers' conversations about curriculum shared to this point reflects theconceptions which Miller (1990) presents:\u00E2\u0080\u0094 155 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Most teachers initially speak of curriculum as \"content that wemust cover or squeeze into\" predetermined structures of time,measurement, assessment, or knowledge. One teacher spoke of ...\"galloping across the curriculum\" to reach the objectives that the\"learning specialists\" had specified. Other images that emerge inteachers' definitions of curriculum include those of entrapment orenclosure: They feel \"boxed-in\" or \"confined\" by the curriculum;some describe their work as looking for ways \"out of' or \"around\"or \"beyond\" the mandated texts and performance objectives (p.87).All view themselves as participants in a process of curriculum creation and enactment,embodying what Greene (1990) calls \"curriculum as project, curriculum as possibility.\" Herpost-modernist perspective describes such projects as ones \"which ... enable students to find theirvoices, to think about their own thinking, to open themselves to others, to perceive continuitiesin their experience, to deal with disequilibrium and dissonance and chaos\" (p.75).Theme: The Business of Teaching Geography 12The discussion of teaching Geography 12, however, brought to light the tensions andrestrictions which create curricular and pedagogical dissonance for many of these women. Wherethey had freely discussed the autonomous nature of their approach to other social studies courses,discussion of teaching a course which requires students to write a provincial examinationilluminates the contested terrain for women's teaching within the competitive context ofstandardized assessment. Explicit curricular and pedagogical objectives of cooperative learning,meaningful inquiry, and environmental citizenship are challenged by the need to cover contentand to provide students with the academic knowledge and confidence to succeed in an examworth 40% of their final standing for the course. Much of the exam focuses on students' higherlevel thinking skills grounded in the factual aspects of physical, cultural, and environmentalgeography. Teachers are extremely aware of the importance of exam results, used to measurein both formal and informal ways their effectiveness as well as to provide students with academicoptions on leaving the secondary school system. Of course, these tensions exist for many men\u00E2\u0080\u0094 156 \u00E2\u0080\u0094as well as women teaching senior examinable courses, but they may be particularly acute forwomen, given the holistic, integrative, and relational ways many experience classrooms and theprocesses of schooling.A resource-rich and eclectic course, the content is massive: nine Ministry of Educationbinders (called modules) including videos, a physical geography textbook, and a supplementaryglobal issues text provide the base of information. In addition, there is pressure to exposestudents to current environmental issues in both local and global contexts as some of thematerials have become dated. The course is inquiry-directed and places heavy emphasis on fieldstudies and field research which can create problems in the broader school arena as seniorstudents are required to miss other heavy academic classes. Such activities must always beconsidered in terms of numbers of students and classes missed and planning time required toundertake excursions. Teachers make decisions about opportunities to include speakers or tohave students attend environmental conferences or to take time away from content coverage toundertake research projects for competitions. There are critical tensions around students whoselanguage or learning abilities restrict their chances of success. There is constant juggling ofobjectives of process, content, skills, achievement, and enjoyment of the discipline.Yet this course allows for the passionate teaching of environmental issues and love of thenatural world where teachers can \"fly their own wings.\" Even the three within the study whono longer teach it return to teach mini-units or coach students for writing exams. Some strugglewith the scope or nature of the curriculum but others feel bound by the ecological and socialfactors in which their teaching is contextualized.Amanda-Leigh wants her students to leave Geography 12 with a love of learning. Shenoted that students and counsellors who timetable students perceive the course and her classroomas \"a positive experience,\" an alternative for students for whom the rigour of some\u00E2\u0080\u0094 157 \u00E2\u0080\u0094provincially-examinable courses is unappealing. Her program, she is quick to point out, alsoattracts strong academic students. Her comments suggest, as others will as well, the broad rangeof learning abilities that teachers of Geography 12 must account for in their teaching of thecourse. The perceptions that the program, along with Law 12 and Western Civilization 12, iseasier than the senior sciences and mathematics courses and that it requires less reading thanhistory, for example, are commonly acknowledged ones within the secondary school system.For Amanda-Leigh, the most important curricular learning outcome for students ofGeography 12 is an understanding of their responsibilities within the environment; students areprepared to accept a role as environmental citizens. She described the contested nature, however,of living out that objective by taking students on a field trip which would necessitate theirmissing a math class. The math department, she said,... [has problems] with our pulling their kids out of classes. Wehave an exclusively male staff in math, very old-school in theirapproach. The fact is they have 100 hours of curriculum and theywant every hour. If you're pulling their kids out for somethingelse, they will not accept that.A math teacher complained to the principal when Amanda-Leigh took students out to study theHowe Sound watershed, questioning how she could possibly have the time in her curriculum todo that. Ministry guidelines for the teaching of social studies and Geography 12 place high valueon such experiential learning. \"A member of the social studies department questioned this mathteacher's understanding of the democratic process .... You have your humanitarians going againstyour math teachers.\" Reflective of her preference for mediating conflict, she said, \"It's okay todisagree with one another but you have to operate in a compatible, respectful framework to dothat.\" Ellen too had described the perception that field excursions were \"wasting time, not doingexam papers\" as a tension.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 158 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Amanda-Leigh's concerns also focus on the learner as he or she functions in the technicalprocess of provincial assessment. She is perhaps the most articulate on the inauthenticity of thestandardized assessment process; she has completed extensive professional development inmatching assessment to curricular obiectives, particularly for individual learner growth:[The final exam's being worth 40%] invalidates me as an educator.There are other ways of doing it. I am ultimately opposed tostandards and product ... what product are we getting out of theteaching system? Where's the accountability? [It bothers me] thatthe taxpayer can ask of you a statement at the end of the year[which makes you accountable]. That statement means nothing ifyou have no idea where the learner came from and where they gotto. Our present system doesn't facilitate that. We're pretty goodat meeting the needs of the fast learners and those who alreadyknow the subject. We've got that down to an art.For her the process of teaching an examinable course is \"loaded with tensions\" which she finds\"so controlling.\"Echoing this focus on the learner, Tammy encourages students to stay and audit theGeography 12 course even if they have given up hope of passing. She accepts students astransfers-in from the senior science electives or mathematics, ones she describes as \"needing awarm fuzzy place to go,\" reflecting her department's philosophy that social studies, like society,should not stream or label into enriched and minimum essentials groups. She believes that bothGeography 12 and Law 12 should be \"inclusive rather than exclusive\" for the importance of thecurriculum content for students' life skills.Tammy's critical perspective, like Amanda-Leigh's, challenged the validity ofexam-writing which she perceives as a \"useless phenomenon.\" Students, she said, learn the skillof exam-writing, anticipating and decoding particular examination structures, a skill which hasvery little value beyond the provincial exam arena and for very few of them. Time is spentlearning to jump the exam \"hurdle to nowhere\" by dissecting the wording of multiple choice or\u00E2\u0080\u0094 159 \u00E2\u0080\u0094essay-type questions in anticipation of the exam that could be spent really examining the courseissues, the landscape, and people's interactions with the natural world. In an exam-driven course,she said, you teach students to label, draw, and memorize. You are so busy teaching to the examall the time that you cannot explore student interest or undertake application work. The examis a \"weight hanging over you.\" Though her students generally pass the exam, Tammy worrieseach year about students she knows understand the concepts and examples they will encounteron the exam but whose reading and writing skills are too weak to convey it well.Joan illustrated her teaching of critical thinking in relation to manipulation of data withan example of environmental issue analysis in Geography 12. The curriculum is grounded ininquiry and analysis; she views her approach in this to be a negotiation of the curriculum:Some parts of [the curriculum] are good, well done. Then there areother parts that I prefer to do in my own way. I do the physicalgeography my own way with labs and field studies and slides thatI've taken on my own .... I prefer to do an overview of that. ThenI start working in the modules (she is referring to the Ministrycurriculum materials which provide the content base for Geography12) and draw them into it. And then I require the kids toincorporate the skills that we've tried to learn into those studies.I know Louise does this too. We may take a map of the Carmanahand [the students] may have to determine the size of the area of thewatershed: what area does it drain? where is it treed? what part ofthat [is MacMillan Bloedel] proposing to log? They would haveto detail that [information] on a map, using the propertopographical skills and then interpret it .... I divided them intothree groups: one group had to represent the Ministry of Forests,one group was the loggers, and one group was theenvironmentalists/preservationists. It was interesting to see howthey drew the maps and created the statistical graphs to supportthese. So they learned it. They all had taken the same statistics.Every group had made them show that they were right.Joan described student anxiety with her innovative approaches to inquiry learning inGeography 12. Students, she said, are very traditional in their perception of what is teaching.By grade 12, they have learned that learning is worksheets, note-taking, and regurgitation; \"they\u00E2\u0080\u0094 160 \u00E2\u0080\u0094feel really insecure if that's not the method by which they're receiving the material.\" When sheimplemented a new approach to teaching Geography 12 using the computer and individualizedlearning programs, students were not long in asking, \"When are we going to start learning?\"They relaxed when, the next day, she started to give them notes. As the exam date approached,she eased their tensions with more and more traditional \"lockstep\" classes. In an aside, Joanexpressed hopes that younger students whose learning contexts are more consistently interactiveand varied will not strain against secondary teachers' efforts to implement more innovativelearning strategies.Joan spoke about other constraints she has felt in teaching Geography 12. She noted, inparticular, students' lack of geographic learning in earlier pre-requisite social studies courses, thelack of teacher background in geography, the imposition of exam specifications which dictate theemphases which each year's course should take, and the pressure of time to accomplish coursegoals.I don't see a whole lot of geography in the earlier grades and I seeeven less of it at a school like ours where the people are notgeography-trained .... so they don't teach it .... Kids think you'retalking a foreign language. If you don't have the basics ofcartography and geography, then the rest of it becomes irrelevant.How can you talk about marshlands and the environment when kidsdon't understand why that's a marsh, what drainage basins are, orthe water table, or terrain, [when they don't understand] soil typesthat cause drainage problems .... Each year they tell us that theseare the objectives that will be tested at the end. Well, I'm notgoing to throw out what I do because they're testing that. At thesame time, in fairness to my kids, I've got to get that in as well soI'd better have more time to get it all in.Joan was happier with the previous curriculum which placed more emphasis on physicalgeography than the current course with its environmental focus; the revised curriculum presentsanother tension in the teaching of geography. The grade 11 social studies curriculum, she said,\u00E2\u0080\u0094 161 \u00E2\u0080\u0094provides students with a good grounding in human and environmental issues; there is, in herview, too much overlap.Ellen described geography as \"the best course there is in the schools.\" I asked her whataspects of the course most excited her. Her excitement was visible:Resource management. [I liked] looking at the current channels andtrying to give the students an idea of how the government is tryingto meet the challenges. The whole idea of the geographycurriculum -- looking at things like the BC Roundtable,sustainability, trying to confront the students with the challengesand trying to get them involved. That really excites me. I madethem do these research papers and I had kids who weren't thebiggest academic stars ... going down to the offices of theEnvironmental Assessment and Review at the federal government,picking up material, standing in front of the class, and giving reallygood presentations. What I liked best about that course were thepresentations the students did. I didn't ask them to do videos butsome of them did exciting videos and picked good topics like theSquamish highway or the location of the Coquihalla or wildlifepopulation. They just seemed to know intuitively what was goodand they did it. That was just tremendous.For Ellen, the constraints in teaching Geography 12 are framed against the reality of nolonger having the status or \"notoriety of teaching the grade 12 classes,\" as she put it. The lastyear she taught it, 30 out of 33 students passed the exam with higher percentages than she hadpredicted; the three who didn't pass were all ESL students whose abilities with the languagepredictably impaired their chances of success. \"I don't have any doubts about my ability to teachthe course,\" she said.Ellen framed her discussion in comparative terms which further reveal curricular tensionsbetween the old and new geography curricular emphases. \"I couldn't NOT teach [Geography]without doing Environment. I like physical geography too. To me, it's not rote learning. It'sa lot more.\" As a physical geographer, the present teacher de-emphasizes the environmentalmanagement part of the course. \"He asks the kids to read the newspapers.\" Time that Ellen\u00E2\u0080\u0094 162 \u00E2\u0080\u0094would have spent on wilderness and environmental issues is allocated by the present teacher topreparing students in exam-writing; students begin in mid-April to practice previous exams. Thestudents do well: \"You can't help but get good results.\" Ellen is invited into his classes to teachenvironmental issues in three class hours.Her comments, particularly in the sensitivity and defensiveness surrounding having thecourse taken away, illuminate the notions of status or prestige and of ownership within teacherculture associated with the teaching of senior academic courses. Her reflections also give voiceto the tensions which challenge those with a passionate commitment to sharing the explicitobjectives of the current curriculum with students who must also compete in the arena ofstandardized assessment. Under the pressure of provincial exams, the teaching is turned into\"stand and deliver.\"You know that you've got to cover these areas. You're beingunfair to the students if you don't. It's not that I object to coveringthe materials. I think all the materials are great, but you have tomake some tough decisions about what you're going to leave outand how much of April and May you're going to leave for goingover the past papers .... If you didn't have to do that, then youcould do more student projects and things that I like doing .... Itcreates stress, a sense of urgency. You are not as relaxed, [you're]a lot pushier. You go into class on a day when students may notwant to learn about the beauties of podzols and yet you have tostand up there and do podzols [and identify] horizons. [Then youhave to identify] the type of exam question: where would this [soilprofile] come from? which rainfall and climagraph would thiscorrespond to? .... I think there is a place for some commonality ofassessment when you've got government scholarships andcompetition to get into university. But it's not a completely validpredictor. It's a pressure. The emphasis that's still being cast onit could be diminished.Ellen would like to see more time to cover the content, the course perhaps taken over two yearswith the grade 11 focus on student-based activities. The last half of the grade 12 year could bespent, she thought, practicing towards some form of assessment procedure. She would have liked\u00E2\u0080\u0094 163 \u00E2\u0080\u0094the freedom to choose the day to teach about podzols according to student interest. She isthankful that the science curricula for her junior classes and for Science and Technology allowher to be passionate in her teaching: \"Ironically, there is material -- population growth,environmental management, energy -- a lot of the material that's in Geography 12 that I love toteach.\"Alison's comments reinforce the more academic, traditional view of teaching andassessment in her approach to Geography 12. Her comments must also be contextualized withinthe highly academic environment where she teaches. She found nothing problematic in teachinga provincially-examinable senior course, though she considers the exam to be \"airy-fairy.\" Herexams, she said, are more rigorous; students are trained to interpret data. The tradition of testingstudent learning is, in her view, a well-entrenched and valid one. She \"forgets\" there is an examand does not refer to the exam specs or the curriculum guide, teaching instead what she thinksis important. She has been teaching geography all her life and is trained in the Europeantradition in which, she explains, geography, grounded in research, is a separate discipline, ratherthan the integrated and often subsumed form it takes in the social studies tradition of NorthAmerican education.Alison also wondered if there shouldn't be some assessment of students' reasons forchoosing Geography 12. She has found that many ESL students choose geography, mistakenlybelieving it has less reading than, say, history. This comment provides an interesting comparisonto the awarenesses of Tammy or Amanda-Leigh, for example, that Geography 12 is perceivedof as a safe environment for and by students whose academic abilities are limited. It alsosuggests the very different composition of student populations and academic climates whichframe these teachers' experience of classrooms, curriculum, and schools.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 164 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Two weeks before the exam, she reviews some previous sample exams. Alison's studentsdo well academically; the school upholds an extremely academic tradition, ranking high inprovincial government exam and scholarship results. She consistently has a first-place winnerin the national geography essay writing contest where the prize is $1000. Students are providedother opportunities to compete and are often successful in these, winning money and travelprizes. They are well-grounded in the nature of academic endeavour by the social sciencetradition of Alison's teaching.Yet, there is no question about the others' commitment to students' intellectualachievement. In Louise's district, for example, where scholarship is prized, she enjoysencouraging and tutoring the scholarship students. She has loved being involved in the markingof provincial exams; she has learned so much from the experience, she said. She has had apassionate commitment to enacting the curriculum which she helped create. Her studentsgenerally do well.The principal was just ecstatic. I could do what I wanted -- fieldtrips, equipment. He never asked, how did I do it? what was Iteaching? why did I do it this way? I was just allowed tofree-float.Annually, one of Louise's students also wins one of the national geography society's $1000prizes for geographic research. Her students all undertake independent research projects.Geography classes are taken on field excursions. Their success and their enjoyment of thelearning experiences she provides is important to her. On leave from the district this year, sheis pleased that the principal asked her to come back to help the new geography teacher with hispreparing geography students for the research essay contest and the exam in June. Their jointefforts have produced another winner, a girl who undertook a historical geographic study of a\u00E2\u0080\u0094 165 \u00E2\u0080\u0094small local island facing major development; tangentially, a teacher new to the course has alsoexperienced success in the opportunity to learn from Louise.Yet Louise feels confined in the freedom to explore student inquiry by the structure ofthe school day which fragments learning into discrete one-hour blocks:I don't really like those constrictions, the bells ringing when I'mnot ready for them and someone else's imposition of that on me.I like more intellectual freedom than that. Something should endwhen it's a natural time to end, not because a bell has gone.I think we use [one-hour blocks] in the wrong way. I don't thinkthere's any reason in the world why really good scholarshipstudents shouldn't take all the minutes ... they need to do a goodjob on their essay. Who's to say that an hour is the right time?Why do the statisticians think that's so important?She also has concerns about how exam results are construed and about the perception of somethat geography is a soft academic subject. We value cooperation and learner-focused teaching,she said, but at the end, students \"get a content-based exam ... that is used to judge teacherquality, quality results, and what students can do with their futures.\"In concluding this look at teachers' curricular and pedagogical negotiations, it is apparentthat the analysis of the teachers' experience of teaching Geography 12 is more multilayered thanprevious discussions we'd had about social studies curriculum and pedagogy. Their descriptionof relatively autonomous work in the regular social studies classroom contrasts with theconflicted experience five of these women have in transforming their more cooperative, inquiry-directed visions of social studies teaching to the competitive arena of teaching a senior academiccourse subject to provincial assessment. Their sense of autonomy, agency, and control is morereadily challenged by students, colleagues, administrators, even parents (as suggested byAmanda-Leigh's reference to \"the taxpayer\") as the education system provides accountability.They become agents within constrained circumstances. Their discussions, diverse in perspective,\u00E2\u0080\u0094 166 \u00E2\u0080\u0094expose the contradictory nature of fundamental educational and social assumptions andprocedures which intersect discordantly in the process of teaching and examining students at thegrade 12 level.The conversations expose the gap between rhetoric and reality where goals of cooperation,democracy, egalitarianism, and community face hierarchical school organization, competitiveness,authoritarianism, and selection (Weiner, 1985, p.111). Their negotiations in teaching Geography12 necessarily demand more skillful balancing of the rational and the subjective aspects ofteaching in a form of praxis. They expose the dichotomous nature of being both scholar andwoman (Miller, 1986, p.111). There is ultimately conformity; resistance creates the risk of beingseen as deficient, as intellectually inferior, where achievement and compliance imply equality.In the context of teaching for standardized assessment, the constraints of their workingare not specific to women but are shared by educators who \"live in a public and professionalculture permeated by 'an androcentric denial of teaching as personalized, nurturing work thatbridges home and work place [with] the need to produce ... teachers who don't contest their ownlack of power\" (Lather, 1983, as cited in Erdman, 1990, p. 184). Yet, gender may provideanother filter in women's understanding, as five of the six women's discussions of teachingwithin the social and educational constraints of provincial assessment suggest. Miller identifiesthis as the conflict between the nurturing and caring aspects of teaching and the goals ofmeasurable learning objectives and student progress; it is a conflict, she says, of women's\"professionalization\":The acceptance of the notion of the professional status of teachingthus ignores not only the possible ironic and subtle manipulationof teachers by the external measures of success through thestudents' achievement on standardized tests, but also the insidiouslack of control over policy as well as curriculum creation (p.116).\u00E2\u0080\u0094 167 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Women, according to Miller, may experience alienation when \"they feel they must sacrifice thenurturing aspects of their roles to the demands of 'professional' distancing that the tools ofobjective measurement dictate\"(p.117).Naylor (1993) discusses the dilemma of technicism for teachers:If the media were your only source of information, you'd think thatmuch is wrong with our education system. TV, radio, newspaper,and magazine coverage touches a sensitive nerve with taxpayersand with parents at a time of change in education. They arepersuaded by calls for greater accountability of the educationsystem.What does that mean to teachers? If we can learn from otherjurisdictions, public demands can lead to significant changes inclassrooms: more limited curriculum, increased testing, exclusionof students unlikely to pass tests, and teachers becomingtechnicians rather than professionals. Such changes have happenedin some British or American schools.The demand here for increased accountability for public schoolswas initiated by the federal government, corporate Canada, andsenior university administrators. Corporate Canada is arguably thedriving force for increased accountability (p.1).In Naylor's view, the calls from government, universities, and \"corporate Canada\" for improvedperformance in the education sector are questionable, serving as they do their own visions of thenational interest.Corporate or conservative sources strongly support a concept ofmarket forces: educational outputs can be measured, andproductivity checked in the same way that business measuresinputs, outputs, and profits. Measuring outputs by imposinguniform standards means more mandated standardized testing inschools, with teachers being required to teach to the test ... withdisastrous consequences for developing higher-order skills or forrecognizing individual students' needs (p.6).Casey and Apple (1989) discuss the \"industrial, military and ideological\" roots of \"theconservative initiative\" which calls for excellence through standardization of curricular goals andmaterials. Professionalization in teaching imports business metaphors from industry. The blame\u00E2\u0080\u0094 168 \u00E2\u0080\u0094for the crisis of economy, cultural authority, and political legitimacy is assigned to schools andto teachers, most of whom are women. Importing business metaphors from industry, the driveto professionalize teaching by incorporating controls for effectiveness such as teacher-proofcurriculum and standardized assessment erodes the quality of teaching:Teachers are deskilled, losing the ability to make curriculum, andare reskilled as managers of classroom procedures. They thus loseeven more power over their labour. Through the process of'intensification' the quality of teaching is eroded, as teacherscannot find time to keep up with their fields, to think, to plan, torelax, or even to go to the lavatory. The understanding which seesthe 'teacher as worker' reveals the sinister side of the technologicalsolutions proposed under the 'teacher as professional' construction(pp.178-179).Weiler (1988) too discusses altered images for teachers as education moves to increaseadministrative control over curriculum, quantify results, and test against uniform standards. Inher terms, de-skilling, or removing the control of knowledge from teachers, dehumanizes andconstrains teachers; it does not consider them to be scholars or independent authorities.Increasingly they are seen as functionaries in a technocratic visionof schooling in which they have to meet certain prescribed goals(are the test results rising?); and women teachers are all too oftenseen as a traditional nurturing presence under the 'expert guidance'of male administrators and academics. But their valuable work asintellectuals attempting to encourage critical analysis of texts andsociety is rarely recognized (p.151).Eisner (1993) offers a personal perspective:I cannot help but wonder whether this emphasis on standards islikely to move schools in the direction that I value. I do not valueschools that regard children as an army marching toward fixed anduniform goals. Standardization is already too pervasive in ourculture. We need to celebrate diversity and to cultivate theidiosyncratic aptitudes our students possess. Certainly, an array ofcommon learning is appropriate for almost all student in ourschools, but the preoccupation with uniform standards, commonnational goals, curriculums, achievement tests, and report cardsrings in a theme that gives me pause (p.23).\u00E2\u0080\u0094 169 \u00E2\u0080\u0094He looks beyond standards for evidence of achievement to the quality of the workplace and thecharacter of teaching in schools that \"excite both teachers and students\" about the educativeprocess.Discussions of five of the six women illuminate the contradictions of teaching when thenotion of excellence is a matter of whose definition it is, and who has the authority to describethe ways in which it may be authentically assessed. Tetreault's (1987b) comment that genderis not often used to analyze excellence, in schools bears serious consideration in light of the waysthese women define excellence as they teach for complex and integrated goals of intellectualattainment, critical thinking, environmental citizenship, social values of cooperation and caring,differences in the ways students construct knowledge, and the authority and passion of their ownknowledge and ways of knowing. Casey and Apple (1989) suggest that women, with their\"strong attachments to children\" (p.182), need to find ways to give voice to the struggle againstthe gendered nature of schooling. The increasing social emphasis on measuring student successwithin competitive and narrowly defined educational limits serves to constrain those whoseeducational vision seeks to understand and celebrate diversity and possibility in teaching andcurriculum. Within the paradox of conflicting educational directions, juxtaposed inuncomfortable ways in the arena of standardized assessment are messages that deny subtexts bywhich the women understand and enact excellence in teaching and learning; this denies them amajor role in the public discourse of education (Kelly and Nihlen, 1982). Instead of controllingteachers' work externally and blaming them for society's problems, \"we may first want to listento them. Who knows, our society may learn how important `women's work' is in the process\"(p.184). Miller suggests that conversations, such as these about women's work in social studies,\u00E2\u0080\u0094 170 \u00E2\u0080\u0094expose some of the fragmentations both men and women experience in teaching and create adialogue for mending the split.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 171 \u00E2\u0080\u0094CHAPTER 5: NEGOTIATING THE CONTEXTS OF TEACHINGThe six women's personal and professional narratives are contextualized within theparticular and interconnected social and educational communities in which they are activeparticipants. They experience and negotiate in diverse ways the political, professional, and socialaspects of school, district, and other professional communities. Their identities as strong,knowledgeable women and as social studies educators are shaped by individual ideologies whichhave grounding in the complex and concrete particulars of their personal and teaching lives.They embrace notions of critical thinking and participate in the liberal progressive discourse ofdemocratic citizenship and of social justice. Yet \"teaching,\" says Manicom (1992) \"isirremediably context-bound; context shapes what is possible\" (p.366). The culture in whicheducation and schools are embedded constructs and perpetuates male dominance and control(Gore, 1992; Spender, 1982).This chapter focuses on the women's stories of their careers and leadership roles beyondthe classroom; the stories are about negotiating recognition for the authority of their knowledgeof schools, of social studies, of teaching, and of leadership. The women's multiple voicesilluminate and interrogate the processes by which their identities as women teachers and leadersin social studies are experienced, ignored, or constructed within relationships of power (Weiler,1988). I concur with the view stated by Freire and Giroux (in Weiler, 1988) that power is \"boththe medium and the expression of wider structural relations and social forms, [positioning]subjects within ideological matrixes of constraint and possibility\" (p. ix). Walkerdine (1992)warns of the particular danger of women's relationship to power \"whereby power equalsauthoritarianism and absence of power equals helpful teacher and democratic relations (p.16).\"The progressive discourse of education, she claims, creates a \"fantasy of liberation\" for girls and\u00E2\u0080\u0094 172 \u00E2\u0080\u0094women who are confronted with the educational either/or dilemma of being \"knowers\" or\"potential nurturers of knowers.\" It makes invisible the powerlessness of individuals within an\"impossible dream, reason's dream of democratic harmony.\" The terms for their ways ofknowing and/or nurturing are not always their own.Analysis of the women's \"situatedness\" will incorporate the poststructural feministstandpoint (Luke and Gore, 1992) that the ecological factors for women's teaching are perceivedand lived as both differential and gendered. In this way, their different locations and identitiesare illuminated, some of the different master narratives of power and authority as they are appliedto women are explored, and the paradoxes of women's experiences within patriarchal institutionsare made visible.A poststructuralist feminist epistemology accepts that knowledgeis always provisional, open-ended and relational. Our treks throughlanguage and master narratives on the way to this kind of knowingare located in historical and cultural context. This contextualcharacter of all knowledge and knowing suggests that there can beno finite and unitary truths. So, for instance, while we might claimthat male rule oppresses women in a near seamless historical andglobal patriarchal regime, the specificity of women's oppression asit intersects with class, color, nationality, history and cultureimplies that one theory, one method of analysis, or one concept ofthe subject cannot unproblematically be applied to all women in allcontexts. Our poststructuralist feminist standpoints are groundedin the specific, emergent and conflictual history of the female-embodied subject (de Lauretis, 1990) and, especially, in ourhistories as academic women in education (Luke and Gore, 1992,p.7).Women who locate their teaching in transformative social agendas for justice and democracyassume a political standpoint (Manicom, 1992) which challenges the singleness of theory,method, and concept that has described the generalized truths of knowing and knowledge inteaching.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 173 \u00E2\u0080\u0094As leaders, their stories are not representative of many of the women currently teachingsocial studies in BC; there are not many women visible in leadership roles in secondary socialstudies teaching. These are the stories of the select few who have become department heads oradministrators or have served in some capacity on Ministry of Education Assessment andCurriculum committees. Again, it should be emphasized that their experience and understandingas related in these stories are not the same. Two kinds of stories emerged. Within these I foundseven themes; five describe women's experience as social studies teachers and leaders and twodescribe dimensions of women's understandings of leadership and authority. Some of theirstories are not encouraging.STORIES OF \"POWER WITH\": TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIPMaher's (1987b) discussion of the gender models of women's teaching provides the frameof reference for looking at women's experience of teaching contexts beyond the classroom.Women's identities as they are constructed within these models are grounded in their relationalcapacities. Feminist theorists, she says, citing Gilligan (1982), Ruddick (1983), Miller (1976),Martin (1985), and Belenky et al (1986), offer the perspective of a particular philosophical andepistemological female style:They argue that women's ways of knowing are different frommen's, and that there are at least two ways of viewing anyexperience -- viewpoints that cannot ever be universalized as longas experiences are gendered. They have gone on to analyze thepartiality of all knowledge, including its necessarily subjectiveroots. And by subjective, these theorists mean not only that allknowledge must be contextualized, and rooted in a particularframework and world view. They also mean that it always has,and indeed should have, an emotional component, a feelingcomponent, that comes from the knower's sense of purpose, senseof connection to the material, and particular context (pp. 95-96).Women, suggests Maher, feel more comfortable constructing notions of power not in thecompetitive terms of \"power over\" but in more cooperative and empowering terms of \"power\u00E2\u0080\u0094 174 \u00E2\u0080\u0094with\" (Miller, 1976, as cited in Maher, 1987b). Wilson (1993) calls this a feminine Ortransformational understanding of power and leadership.The most immediate context for all women teaching social studies is the department. Itis their primary collegial context. Daily contact with the others of a teaching staff who share thesame resources, courses, exams, and ideas is a teaching reality, one that most of the women haveexperienced as important and valued. Within departments where collegiality is valued, teachersfind support, creative and intellectual expansion, friendship, and sometimes opportunities forenactment of their leadership abilities. Departmental leadership is customarily the first step onthe ladder to administration. The stories related below describe the positive experiences all butEllen have had in social studies departments.In her third year at the school, Amanda-Leigh became the department coordinator. Theprincipal viewed his coordinators as members of an administrative \"team.\" The samecooperative, non-hierchical, democratic principles which govern her life and her teachinggoverned her leadership style. She was careful to speak for her department only afterconsultation: \"They're the department. You just happen to be the representative to theadministration on their behalf.\" Amanda-Leigh facilitated a process of departmental engagementin collegial decision-making and sharing of ideas. Timetabling was a collegial process whereeach member got his or her first and second choices of courses and nobody had more than threepreparations. A young department, they were friends and colleagues who supported each other.Amanda-Leigh never felt alone or undermined or threatened by the men of her department in herleadership role.Similarly, when Tammy first started teaching, her closest friends were her colleagues insocial studies teaching. The department members, headed by a well-known figure in teacherpolitics, were all men; they continue to provide her with a \"touchstone\":\u00E2\u0080\u0094 175 \u00E2\u0080\u0094[They] will be friends until I die because I know that they valued me as a humanbeing. They didn't say, well, she's less than what she seems to be because of hergender or you can discount her because she's younger.Collegiality and collaboration were the trademarks of the department. As a group, they sharedideas and resources. Their families went on camping excursions. There was a social andprofessional interconnectedness that was grounded in respect and mutuality of endeavour. Here,she felt supported and cared for.The present department at the school where Joan is now vice-principal operates on acollegial model. Though Joan no longer teaches social studies, she has taken her turn in therotation of department head duties at the same school. She values collegiality. \"It really helpsif you get along with people. All of [our teachers] are men. I get along with them really well.\"One of Joan's roles as a social studies educator was to share her knowledge of geography withcolleagues; \"there's a lot of acceptance ... we have a good group that way,\" though she could notsay whether there was follow-through in the teaching. She continues to make her expertiseavailable to the young man who has taken over teaching geography. As a department, theyshared decisions about resources, materials, units of study, assessment, evaluation, and timetables.She offered an example of a collaborative curriculum project designed to meet particularneeds of students in social studies:We have a large native population at our school and we decided toput a unit on native studies into every social studies program insupport of their heritage. It used to be Native Studies and whitekids could take it if they wanted to, but mostly native kids did.Instead of that, we said, it's a part of the history and we put nativestudies in all the programs. Then we sat down and said, well, howare we going to do this? We, as a department, decided to allowtime. We would pick up the extra time so that one person, Jack,could spend the time putting together the package and liaise withthe native peoples and [we would get] the time back when whenthat unit was done. Jack took each person's class and we set up atimetable for doing it.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 176 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Louise has always worked with men and women whom she respects as social studieseducators for their humanism. She has had experience as the department head. Her colleaguesprovided her with many opportunities to share her geography expertise and holistic re-visioningsfor social studies curriculum; they were receptive to her input. She has known no barriers orimpediments to self-expression in any capacity in social studies teaching.Alison has been a department head for two years. She shares with her departmentmembers the opportunities which come to her because of her high profile in the national arenafor social studies teaching. Her leadership style reflects a formal and courteous collegiality anda strong respect for the equality, integrity, and professional autonomy of the men and women ofher department:A:^There are ten teachers. It's a bigger department than someelementary schools. I would create chaos here if I started to laydown the law. We get along, and this is a wonderful school towork in. I have wonderful colleagues. We get along because weall are courteous to each other and we all listen to each other'sideas, although we teach totally differently, every single one of us.ME: How would you describe your leadership style?A:^I coordinate. I am the conduit through which ideas comeand I distribute them to whomever. I certainly don't lead in thesense of [stating the policy and insisting they follow]. They wouldthrow me out of the window or tell me to sit down because theyare all capable people.ME: Do you consciously work to maintain a collegial workingenvironment?A:^Yes, everybody works at that and I just go along with it, aswe always did. There really hasn't been much change [from theprevious leader's style]. They come to me if they want things, andI facilitate their getting it. I often, because of my connections,particularly with the national organizations, get things sent to meto be distributed which I do when people want them. I encouragethem to go in for various competitions -- like the historicalgeography contest ... and the forestry project ... we spread themout.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 177 \u00E2\u0080\u0094ME: Do you encourage their development as professionals?A:^Yes. I suppose you could say that. I am able to offer themopportunities for different kinds of experiences.Alison is a facilitator within a department that has its traditions. I asked her aboutdecisions regarding the allocation of courses within her department. Alison negotiates adiscussion process with individual department members, seeking an optimal arrangement ofdesired courses and numbers of preparations. There is tacit agreement that certain members ofthe department are most suited to teaching the senior electives. Many of the senior courses ather school are taught by women and have been for years. Though there is less emphasis in hernarrative on collaborative curriculum or course-sharing projects than in comments by the others,there is a strong statement of the importance of maintaining good human relations grounded inrespect for difference.For these five women, social studies departments have afforded friendships and places toengage in growth as competent professionals. They have been supportive places. All but Tammyhave had the opportunity for departmental leadership. To varying degrees, the narratives suggesta facilitative, participatory, collaborative notion of the departmental context for the leadership andteaching of social studies. Helgesen (1990) describes feminine principles of leadership forbusiness, noting that there is a \"teacher-like quality\": women emphasize maintenance of goodrelationships within organizations; as leaders, they are concerned with caring, being involved,helping, and being responsible; they view themselves as at the centre, not on top; they conceiveof work relationships in horizontal terms as grids or networks, not as hierarchies; given thecomplexities of their lives, \"they have no choice but to become well-integrated individuals withstrong psychological and spiritual resources\" (p.33). Studies indicate that schools where femalevalues are predominant, have benefits for all participants (Shakeshaft, 1986).\u00E2\u0080\u0094 178 \u00E2\u0080\u0094STORIES OF \"POWER OVER\": TRANSACTIONAL LEADERSHIPTraditional relations of power are constructed in the vertical terms of \"power over.\"Themes of collaboration, negotiation, sharing, and connection give way to transactions betweenthose with authority and those whose subordinate position makes them the recipients of thatauthority. Wilson (1993) calls this a masculine or transactional leadership style. Bernstein(1992) links this leadership or management style to dominant economic ideologies whichconstruct schools as agencies of symbolic control and which hold education responsible for thereproduction of individuals skilled in society's productive processes. These skills are acquiredin contexts where there is celebration of a \"new individualism\" and a dominance of the marketanalogies of competition for selective success or failure and not of collective and cooperativecommitments to social relations and transformation.Not all departments offer the kind of collegiality described in the stories told in the firstpart of this chapter. Some teachers have had quite different experiences within social studiesdepartments, experiences that inhibit growth, are unsupportive and discouraging. In severalinstances described in our conversations, the lack of democratic, cooperative, equitable, andfacilitative leadership has had powerfully inhibiting effects for women.Joan worked briefly in a social studies department where there was little collaborative,collegial interaction.J:^In our school, teachers are very professional and receptiveME: Cooperative and collaborative?J:^Yes.ME: Have you worked in contexts where that isn't acharacteristic?\u00E2\u0080\u0094 179 \u00E2\u0080\u0094J:^Yes, I have. It was frustrating. You tend to shut your doorand do your own thing, and it's not a pleasant environment. Itdoesn't provide the quality that kids can get when peoplecooperative.ME: Was it discouraging for you?J:^I didn't stay there long enough for it to be discouraging. Itwasn't where I felt I wanted to be to do what I wanted to do, so Iapplied for a different job after a year and left.ME: You are happier in a place where you can exchange ideas?J:^Yes.For Joan, there was the option of moving to another district. The stories told by Amanda-Leigh, Tammy, and Ellen of unhappy experiences within social studies departments also pointto career decisions made for these women beyond the departmental level, that is, byadministrators, which have, consciously or unconsciously, stunted or threatened to stunt theirfreedom to grow and move as social studies educators.Isolation is a factor of teaching life for Ellen, as it is of her life married to a fieldgeologist. She has never experienced working within a social studies department that has beencollaborative, supportive, or collegial. Her sense is that her experience is commonplace, thatteachers in BC, unlike those in New Zealand, work far more in isolation. There was very littlesharing of resources when she taught social studies. Compared to the science and Englishdepartments where she teaches now, there was very little professional development in socialstudies.Ellen described the factors of her feeling alone. Ellen felt exclusion as a woman; sherecalled a department meeting discussion about a speaker from the United Nations. One of themen suggested that they didn't want the speaker because \"she was old and ugly as sin.\" She andtwo other women teachers in the department got together to talk about concerns that they had\u00E2\u0080\u0094 180 \u00E2\u0080\u0094with such pervasively sexist attitudes that have, they felt, a way of percolating into classrooms.\"We didn't like that. We didn't like the male clubbiness.\" The meeting and their discontentwere kept secret. Nothing came of it.Course timetabling, in Ellen's experience, was not a collegial decision-making process.Courses were owned, particularly the senior ones. The notion of ownership appears to havegender dimensions. In her school, the men have taught all the senior electives for years, thougha woman was recently made department head. The woman department head would like to teachhistory; another woman has a background which is suited to teaching law and would like to doso. The new department head would like to have Ellen teaching some geography again. Thosedecisions, however, are made administratively, and the new department head, in pushing theissue, would do so \"to her own detriment,\" suggests Ellen.Ellen concludes of her experience in social studies, \"You're working in isolation. You'reby yourself. You feel a sense of disquiet.\" There aren't many opportunities to talk to otherwomen about it; such conversations feel strangely subversive. Being practical, she has movedin her quiet way past the anger and disappointment of being reassigned, choosing to accept thesituation, though there is strong awareness of the inequities. There is no avenue for appeal. Sheprefers the known to the unknown of another school. There are major construction changes duefor the facility, and she would like to work in the new building. She carries on, working in herscience and English classrooms now, to make the small but very personal changes for studentswho can help to make a difference.For Ellen, the principal's unilateral decision to move her out of social studies to a courseload of English and science was a hard blow. A man whom Ellen acknowledged had both theexperience and qualifications in the teaching of geography was given precedence over her afterrequesting a transfer to her school. Ellen learned very quickly that this decision was non-\u00E2\u0080\u0094 181 \u00E2\u0080\u0094negotiable and that the geography courses would not be shared and will never be shared as longas the principal remains at the school. The principal was \"up front\" (his words) with her: if shewanted to teach geography again, she'd have to transfer to another school. Though he apologizedin private for the situation, Ellen still feels the humiliation of having a senior academic coursetaken away. She knows that her colleagues are unclear and confused about why she no longerteaches the course. Ellen speculated that the principal would like to have seen the load sharedbut that there was a kind of agreement or deal that would not be violated unless the teacherhimself wished to share. The \"new\" geography teacher has several blocks of geography andteaches one other course of social studies. He will not hear of sharing the assignment. Thecourses are his. The concept of course ownership, paradoxically, did not apply to her. Ellen'sflexibility as a teacher made it expedient to reassign her. The irony of being forced to takesecond choice for being the more flexible teacher is not lost on Ellen. \"I've got no power in thatsituation.\" Her voice, a quiet one, was ignored by the principal.Her construction of meaning in this context is mindful of the hierarchical nature of powerwithin the school; it acknowledges the fear of \"backlash\" and punishment for being \"a bad girl,\"as she said. She has chosen the political expedience of becoming silent, of overcoming theanger, and of accepting the challenge to change. Her choice to move laterally within the schoolis practical; she had been \"force-transferred\" before and has known career interruptions asdisruptive and distressing. Besides, she said, the teaching day is so very complex; it would takea \"groundswell to raise the consciousness\" and that could only be accomplished with morewomen teaching social studies. Women managing complex lives sometimes have to decidewhich is the biggest crisis or issue on their teaching agenda, she said.Neither Tammy nor Amanda-Leigh chose acceptance; both were empowered by the strongconvictions which underlie their critical pedagogies and their personal perspectives. The personal\u00E2\u0080\u0094 182 \u00E2\u0080\u0094had become political; the political became personal in the emotional toll that it exacted on each.In these examples of women teachers dealing with authoritarian impositions can be seen thedetachment of rational \"contract\" language from the lived personal reality. \"Board initiated\"transfers are misnomers; these are usually initiated in fact by a principal dealing with a teacherperceived as difficult and have all the same stigma and personal violence within teacher culturethat had been attached to the \"forced-transfer\" of previous teacher contract language.At the end of her third year, Amanda-Leigh received a \"board-initiated\" transfer toanother school. Her current department is very traditional, consisting of older men who do notwork in a collaborative way. There are no exchanges of ideas or curriculum developmentinitiatives. There is little social or professional interaction. Amanda-Leigh feels very alone. Thecollegial dynamics of her former department stand in stark contrast to her present feelings ofisolation.In Amanda-Leigh's case, the transfer felt a lot like punishment. As a departmentcoordinator, she was a member of the administrative team and expected to be \"on side\" witheducational directions the principal believed were worthwhile for the school. \"I was supposedto be a cheerleader,\" she said. She, supported by her social studies department, was on recordas being philosophically opposed to a scheme to which the principal had committed his school.The opposition was supported by the BC Teachers' Federation, in particular because it wouldcreate precedent for a two-tiered system of public education. All who vocally opposed thescheme received \"board-initiated\" transfers.Educational reasons were given to explain the transfer: she would have an opportunityto share her expertise with other schools; she would develop as a professional, particularly inleadership qualities. But Amanda-Leigh was subjected to very unpleasant, condescending, andintimidating meetings with the principal, and later with the Superintendent, pressuring her to\u00E2\u0080\u0094 183 \u00E2\u0080\u0094come \"on side\" and develop as the \"chosen one\" on the path they had defined for her. They had,after all, envisioned her as one day advancing to administration. Things grew increasinglyconfrontational and uncomfortable for Amanda-Leigh. The principal tried to withdraw her rightto participate in the provincial assessment marking committee. She was subjected to theprincipal's anger; he shouted at her, pounded his fist on the desk, and paced the room while shesat. She was made to feel that she had been \"a bad little girl,\" in ways she had never known ingrowing up. She grew quickly, however, and learned to ask a union representative to accompanyher to meetings the principal would call her to without notice. Her actions were governed bynotions of democratic rights and responsibilities, adherence to due process, and understandingsof the process for educational reform. She very much saw herself in the positive role of an\"agent for change\" within the school; she has read Fullan's work on educational reform. Thereis, of course, the irony of the principal's positive comments in her teaching report at the end ofher first year about her modelling of attitudes towards people and cooperative society whichechoes throughout the narrative that follows.The following is an excerpt from Amanda-Leigh's letter of appeal to the board:By transferring me to another venue, the board is clearly sendinga message to other staff members, \"do not speak out against anyissue that is contrary to the mindset of the administration.\" Theopportunity to question or debate the educational focus of theschool without being punished will no longer exist. I amdisappointed that I am being punished for having the integrity tospeak out on an issue that I cannot philosophically believe in. Ihave openly exercised my deep belief in a democratic system andthe adherence to due process by publicly voicing my opinion onmatters pertaining to the educational focus of the school. As aSocial Studies teacher, one would be hypocritical not to do so. Itis my perception that, although I model this in my classroom, thisis not an acceptable practice in interactions with the administration.In one of our conversations, Amanda-Leigh had commented on the absence of women insocial studies teaching. \"Social studies,\" she had said, \"lends itself to [including] the female\u00E2\u0080\u0094 184 \u00E2\u0080\u0094perspective of the world, not to exclude the male perspective.\" She had been concerned abouthow women are allocated to junior courses, \"not allowed to teach senior courses becausesomebody owns them.\" Amongst other concerns with the intent of the transfer, she queried theeducational rationale in moving the only \"senior female Social Studies teacher in the district toa middle school,\" stating that she was the only geography teacher in the district to be involvedin the Ministry of Education provincial exam marking committee, an opportunity which hasafforded her important perspectives on the assessment process and on the curriculum as well asa place in the professional community and professional growth.There is anger in her conversation about feeling threatened, unsupported, and personallyattacked, not only by the administrator but by those who supported his initiative, by:... being told you're out of line, you're too young, you're notallowed to do that, you're a product of the system, you're supposedto pledge allegiance to it forever. Being told you're hurting theschool because you're going against what the school stands for.Being called into a principal's office and being told you're hangingyourself on a \"falling star\" when you're socializing with somebodyon the staff that you hold near and dear to your heart, care moreabout as a person than as a colleague, and being told that they arethe wrong kind of person to associate with.She recalled being asked in her coordinatorship interview if she could be trusted. She hadresponded that she could be trusted to be a fantastic professional. That was apparently not theright answer as the question was posed again. \"You know that you are up against ... a networkof power that does not want to be eroded.\"Tactics of indirect intimidation were not discussed in her letter of appeal, though theprincipal's lack of professionalism and inappropriately paternalistic manner was explicitlyaddressed:It appears to have been difficult for him to recognize me as acolleague and working professional and not an upstart studentchallenging his authority. [He] has belittled me by addressing me\u00E2\u0080\u0094 185 \u00E2\u0080\u0094as \"kid.\" I am also not comfortable with his putting his armaround me when engaging in a conversation. I have not questionedthe principal's authority, I have questioned certain decisions ...made without regard to due process and their impact on theeducational focus of the school.Pointing to his \"hidden agendas dictating his personnel practices,\" she cited two instances wherehe had cautioned her against particular personal/professional friendships. In addition toquestioning her loyalty to the school, he had accused her of \"plotting the demise of theadministration.\" His methods, she said, were \"an insult to [her] professional integrity.\"Though the transfer was enacted, Amanda-Leigh successfully challenged it in a grievanceprocedure that took eight months during which time she assumed a teaching position at anotherschool. The emotional cost was high. When it became evident that Amanda-Leigh, supportedby the Federation and legal counsel, would not back down on her right to express philosophicalopposition and that she would not accept the Board's educational justifications for her transfer,the Board settled. She will be reinstated as a teacher at her former school, fully recompensedfor her department head's allowance. Ironically, the principal and the scheme are both gone.She may apply for the position of department head again.Amanda-Leigh had chosen to live what she had taught her students about standing up forwhat you believe, provided that you can justify it, as the right of an individual in a democraticsociety. The whole process violated her belief in resolving conflict in non-confrontational ways.\"It's a confrontational, unacceptable, archaic model .... It was a very costly personnel process,\"she said, describing the costs in emotional and physical terms, as well as financial. The winnersare those down the line, though she knows that, despite \"the tremendous [personal] painincurred,\" there has been validation of the fact that she had been wronged. \"Standing up for whatyou believe in, if you can support what you believe in and ... have a foundation on which to\u00E2\u0080\u0094 186 \u00E2\u0080\u0094stand, ... being an individual and true to yourself is absolutely critical.\" Amanda-Leigh's storydepicts a praxis-oriented approach to social studies teaching.After Tammy's re-assignment to her present school following her pregnancy leave, shewas asked to assume an assorted teaching load of junior courses, including Home Economics,Drama, Math, and English. She was qualified to teach none of the courses. Contractuallyguaranteed only a job within the district, she was extremely upset at the prospect of returning asthe mother of a four-month old to a new school and a hodgepodge of courses not in her field.Tammy sought the advice of her former colleagues and her local association. As a criticaleducator who taught students the avenues of challenge, she was prepared to challenge on apersonal level what she saw as unjust and to risk the personal costs of being seen as a dissidentvoice. She fought the issue in a grievance with the School Board and lost. But a senior Boardmember approached the assistant superintendent and said, \"She's been dealt a bad hand so makethe little girl happy. Give her whatever she wants at the new school.\" The assistantsuperintendent, in turn, phoned the principal, repeating the message. The principal phonedTammy to say that she could have the biggest, best, newest classroom in the school and that shewas to be the first on the new timetable: which courses would she like to teach? She was givenan appropriate load of social studies courses. Yet, her victory was costly in terms of her imagewithin the educational community; there were lingering resentments of her \"use\" of power to gainaccess to desirable courses. The real benefits, she said, were to be felt by other women returningfrom maternity leave.In her present school, the social studies department at that time, again all-male, wasnotorious: the resource room had a door sign that said \"Male Room\" and offensive posters hungon the wall. Jokes and innuendo heightened her feelings of exclusion. There were signs of\u00E2\u0080\u0094 187 \u00E2\u0080\u0094relenting only when Tammy stopped attending department meetings. Some of the men havesince moved on.When asked if she'd ever considered departmental leadership, she told the following story.Shortly after she arrived at the school, an administrator with whom she had worked previouslyasked her opinion of ways to improve the social studies department, suggesting that he wantedher to replace the man doing the job. There was, in Tammy's view, a lot that needed to be doneand she was prepared to consider the job; she took the task of outlining suggestions forimprovement seriously, compiling a list of twenty recommendations. The principal took the listto the then-head, telling him that these were ways that Tammy would clean things up in thedepartment if she ran it. A year later, the principal relieved the head of his duties and replacedhim with another man with whom he had made a similar deal.It was intentional on the principal's part. Since then, I've neverhad any aspirations to lead anybody anywhere. It felt like a suckerpunch. It made a worse mess of the situation. I had my fingerswell and truly burned.Collegial relations have been strained since. Tammy thinks she will never be asked tobe department head, though her input is considered: recently, the current department head cameto ask her endorsement of a first-year male teacher for department headship next year. She wasuncertain that he understood how his request tapped into the anger of not being acknowledgedor recognized for her knowledge, experience, and qualifications and for the contributions she hasmade in academic, professional, and practical ways to the teaching of social studies.Like Amanda-Leigh, Tammy misses the special and encouraging relationships of herformer department and has kept in touch with them. Like Ellen, she too works very much onher own; there is a feeling of isolation. The men call on her to teach about women's issues.They do not invite her collaboration in adding her woman's perspective to their own curricular\u00E2\u0080\u0094 188 \u00E2\u0080\u0094transformations. Tammy has learned to confine her critical perspective to the curriculum andclassroom dynamics:It's a pretty stable situation now. I feel like a bit of a badger.They know you're there, they know how you fight, and they leaveyou alone because of it. They just kind of respect your territory.Tammy also recalled the principal who systematically reassigned the women teachers inthe school to junior course loads:He changed the entire structure of the school so that women wereteaching only junior high school subjects .... The only exception tothat in any department was in Home Ec and in Social Studies withme and that was because I was just so angry with him. I think Ifrightened him by how angrily I lashed out at him ... it certainlysurprised him at the very least .... [He was] a real traditional kindof guy. I liked him because he would make decisions. Normally,for any issue other than dealing with women, he had a pretty strongsense of intellectual balance. He could support his decisions withgood reasons. The only real exception I saw to that was histreatment of women on staff and it was characterized by the mostappalling lack of sensitivity and chauvinism. It was justunbelievable .... The \"old boys' network\" was so strong at theschool. This fellow was kind of a \"classic\" administrator whopooled young, aggressive, just-recently-graduated men around himand that was the entourage he constantly had. If he spoke to awoman, it was about what colour the lockers should be painted orwhere the silk plants that he was thinking about buying to enhancethe atmosphere of the school should be placed. That was our realmof knowledge, I guess. He just absolutely refused to accept thatwomen could do other things. He ignored it. He couldn't see it.Tammy and I talked about punishment. Though there had been none with the principaldescribed in her story above, there had been hefty consequences for her response to anotherprincipal. She spoke of him with dispassionate detachment and laughter. She recalled \"watchinghim talk,\" though in fact, he had yelled at her within hearing of a class of 30 students. He hadtaken up a complaint from a male social studies teacher unhappy about something she had saidin a department meeting; the matter of the male colleague's unprofessionalism in not approaching\u00E2\u0080\u0094 189 \u00E2\u0080\u0094her directly before going to the principal as required by the teachers' code of ethics was notaddressed.The principal took it upon himself to ... tell me very strongly thatI had no right to say anything to an older member of thedepartment, that I had just better kowtow and be nicer and be morefeminine with other department members and not as rigorous inexpressing my opinion. I watched him talk for quite a while, andthen I thought, why am I watching him talk? So I told him tocome back when he could be more coherent. What an assininething to do to your boss, right? And I closed the door on him! ....The next year, did I suffer! I had 246 students registered in myclasses. I had the largest class size by far .... He refused to doanything about it, refused to give me access to any kind of amarker although other teachers with large classes had markers. Tothis day, he still has trouble talking to me. I think he wasn'tpleased with my response!Many of Alison's experiences were discussed off the record, but she spoke with barelyconcealed outrage about the \"old boys' network\" which operates, in her experience, not at theschool level but in contexts beyond. Being independent and outspoken, she has challenged thestatus quo, her questions directed squarely at issues of power and opportunity used to constrainwomen, issues she had not known in teaching outside BC:I got the shock of my life. I met this narrow attitude, this\"myopia\" .... I'd never come across this impression that I wastotally insignificant and that all my learning was of absolutely noconsequence, that my opinions were not counted .... It's an attitudetowards women because of the strength of the \"old boys' network\".... Women, to get where they're going, have to be more qualifiedand more experienced than males. On the other hand, that makesthem a threat. So it's a Catch-22 and I don't know how it's goingto be solved.In Alison's school district, those who seek leadership within departments are screened for adepartment head pool by a five-member selection committee in a process defined by agreementbetween the board and its teachers' association. A young man with four years' teachingexperience was appointed acting social studies department head at a school in her district, a\u00E2\u0080\u0094 190 \u00E2\u0080\u0094young man not in the pool. The pool, consisting of Alison, two other women, and several men,was ignored in this appointment. Alison challenged the board's figures which showed that 30%of department heads were women, demonstrating that only 8.8% were women heading academicdepartments in the district. They thanked her for the information. A year later, she wasappointed head of the department at her own school. Since then, she has applied foradministrative advancement but is aware of the perception that she is \"the pea beneath theproverbial mattress,\" as one board official called her. For her critical perspective on the misuseof power and authority in a number of situations, she had received a letter acknowledging heracceptance to the pool but including a warning to \"conduct herself in a professional andconsistent manner,\" which clearly meant to restrain her tendency to express opinions on mattersof business-as-usual.\"I do not think there's a gender problem in the schools at all,\" she said. But she spokeof a \"certain cameraderie\" within male professional groups beyond the schools which works toidentify as threatening strong women teachers who ask for their share of the power. She referredto power in the hands of those lower down the ladder in the social studies context as a \"littleboys' network\":If you point out that that is not necessarily the only way of lookingat something, instantly you are not [seen as cooperative], that youare [trying] to change the requirements, and then you are a threatto them. So you're not allowed in the power structure. Once[they're] in the power structure, as the \"little boys' network\" isnow, never mind the \"old boys' network\" -- it's just been takenover by the \"little boys\" -- they're never going to let women in andsocial studies seems to be the worst.These \"little boys\" show up in the lower level administrative role as participants and leaders inMinistry social studies committees and professional associations; it is here that she has\u00E2\u0080\u0094 191 \u00E2\u0080\u0094experienced being ignored, as well as denigrating and disrespectful gender jokes, both effectivelytrivializing the expertise and experience she brings to these contexts.Cunnison says of gender joking,[It] is almost entirely initiated by men. It is men defining womenat work in sexual, domestic, or maternal terms, terms which detractfrom their image as professionals. As such it is a put-down, a wayof controlling and subordinating women and one mechanism amongothers which militates against their promotion. The stereotype ofthe woman teacher is used to pass judgment on women teachers'commitment, competence, and confidence (p.166)Alison has little patience with the \"silliness and the politics of the whole thing.\" Believingherself to be the equal to any person in teaching, Alison has exposed the contradiction thatequality is defined by very clear rules articulated by those with vested interest in gender roleexpectations of compliance and obedience. She is, she knows, expected to behave herself ontheir terms for women's behaviour; she has chosen to speak in the traditional, objective, andindividual language that is reserved for men. Her self-identity as a strong knowlegeable personwith the right to speak with authority and to seek respect as a scholar is a traditional choice, yetit confronts and is constrained by social constructions of women's identities and manners ofspeaking. Her traditional choices, though entirely appropriate for men, are perceived asunbecoming in a woman and therefore invalidated.Shakeshaft (1986) identifies the gender crisis in education; her argument extends towomen's experience of systemic gender inequity:There is a myth that the culture of schools is female and thattraditional female behaviour is rewarded while traditional malebehaviour is punished .... The evidence shows that they arecertainly not a nurturing environment for females.Two messages emerge repeatedly from the research on gender andschooling. First, what is good for males is not necessarily good forfemales. Second, if a choice must be made, the education\u00E2\u0080\u0094 192 \u00E2\u0080\u0094establishment will base policy and instruction on that which isgood for males (pp.7-8).Educational goals, school structure, instructional techniques, classroom dynamics, curriculum,special education programs, and school climate, says Shakeshaft, are all limiting factors in theeducational and personal choices of girls and women in schools. Females do not get either equaltreatment or equal outcome in most schools. Discussions of excellence which have emerged ineducation since the release of A Nation at Risk in the US in 1983, she says, ignore thecontributions of women in schools, rendering them invisible. \"The unwelcoming environmentthat female students experience also surrounds female teachers and administrators\" (Shakeshaft,p.502). Connell (1985) refers to institutionalized patterns of gender relations in schools as genderregimes, noting the strong link between authority and adult heterosexual masculinity wheresystems of power are administered by male officials, principals, and subject heads. Shakeshaft'sdiscussion of whether the perception of location of the gender problem is in schools or withinschooling parodies the conservative rhetoric which focuses on excellence at the expense of equityin the US. The hostile environment for girls and women is a major crisis and would be viewedas \"an act of war\" if such a limiting and harmful environment were imposed on males by \"anunfriendly and foreign power.\" Schooling puts women as \"truly a gender at risk\" (p.503).NARRATIVE THEMESThere are recurring and powerful themes of experience which are woven in as particularsthroughout the collective narrative. \"Our most salient gift here is our regard for the particular,that microscopic knowledge often ridiculed by men, which tells us that each event is differentand deserving of full attention\" (Nemiroff, 1987, p.535). Analysis of these themes untangles theknots of discontent and anger, removes the focus from the effects, and places it on ways in whichdistress and constriction have been imposed in conscious and unconscious ways upon women\u00E2\u0080\u0094 193 \u00E2\u0080\u0094who negotiate personal and professional notions of participatory citizenship and democraticegalitarianism within master narratives of hierarchy and patriarchy. As a \"consciousness raising\"strategy, the effects, in their particularity, are essential. \"When words disappear, actionsdissipate,\" (p.535) as Nemiroff says.Theme: Women and AngerWomen, states Lerner (1986), are socialized to be nice. We may keep our anger toourselves to avoid open conflict, and \"we may avoid making clear statements about what wethink and feel, when we suspect that such clarity would make another person uncomfortable andexpose differences between us\" (p.5). Nice ladies are not angry; angry women becomescapegoats \"for men who dread female anger and for women who wish to avoid their own\" (p.9).Women's anger is thus trivialized as \"bitchiness\" or as a \"personality problem.\" Repressed anger,however, exacts high personal costs in women's emotional and intellectual lives. Learning toacknowledge anger, to identify its true sources, and to vent it appropriately to challenge, ratherthan maintain, the status quo means using \"anger energy' in the service of our own dignity andgrowth\" (p.10). In Nemiroff's (1987) words,We must not underestimate the energy trapped by women's anger;we must draw upon it. Millennia of oppression create a form ofexistential anger. In women this is often turned into a self-destructive sense of despair and impotence. It is important for usto touch upon this anger, vent it, dispassionately examine it, andthen redirect it as energy towards transformation in our own livesand the social order in which we live (p.539).Tammy's and Amanda-Leigh's anger was ultimately transformative, but both would havepreferred to avoid the combative arena of grievance procedures. Alison had not recognized howangry she was until she became involved in this study; she can hear the anger in her words asshe reads. Her anger is re-directed to challenging the social order, as we will see later in this\u00E2\u0080\u0094 194 \u00E2\u0080\u0094chapter. For Ellen, this research project has been an opportunity, in sharing her anger, toovercome the discouragement which comes from turning anger inwards.Theirs is the anger of not being acknowledged as strong, knowledgeable womenpassionately committed to issues of justice in ways that are not only professional but verypersonal and political. Culley (1985) argues for women's accepting the authority of theirintellect, imagination, and passion; \"part of that picture is the authority of our anger\" (p. 215).The anger of these stories is essential for action.Only when our anger has been felt and acknowledged, not denied,when it has been demonstrated to be grounded in a personal andcollective sense of self-worth and not their opposite, can we hopethat our students will join us in the remaining work ... ofaffirmation and social change (p.216).Interestingly, Riddell (1989) suggests that younger women teachers are more likely to beaware of the contradictions inherent in traditional schools.The fact that women do not share a common perspective onmale/female power relations clearly makes it difficult for them tounite in challenging their unequal position. In turn, the lack of aunified political stance makes it difficult for individual women tochallenge injustice (p.136).Anger suppressed or isolated or negated has no potential for the transformative, collectiveaffirmation of women's worth and women's work. The feminist agenda seeks to validatewomen's anger by seeking change. However, as Connell (1985) notes in his study of genderregimes within schools, \"the most common reaction to feminism among the men was scorn anddisregard.\" He identifies a \"ruling class style\" of patriarchal response that assumes \"womensimply do not count in big matters and can be dealt with by jocular patronage at other times\"(p.187). Another common response to issues of sexual politics was that of not seeing that thereis any problem at all. Either makes for powerful opposition to change as called for by feminists.Both are powerful sources of anger for women.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 195 \u00E2\u0080\u0094The women's stories also provide evidence that women develop strategies to avoid others'anger, particularly the direct anger of men. Women's socialization to niceness and to attendingto the feelings of others can make them uncomfortable with confrontation and aggression.Interestingly, some of these strategies have a \"subversive\" undertone to them. Meeting with otherwomen to share common concerns, as Ellen did, or protesting offensive posters and jokes, asTammy did, are indirectly subversive of men's authority to construct images of women, but thesestrategies also subvert the processes of dealing directly with their own anger and avoid riskingthe anger of men. Both Tammy and Amanda-Leigh remain extremely uncomfortable abouthaving to resort to political measures to confront the anger of men who expected obedience.Examples of Louise's strategic and Joan's maternal versions of subversive avoidance ofconfrontation are discussed as aspects of leadership styles later in this chapter. Alison directlysubverts the gendered expectations of women's niceness by refusing the role of \"nice lady\" whenshe starchily critiques inequity and injustice in relations of power. This refusal to play theappropriate womanly role, however, has consequences. She is viewed as confrontational, \"theproverbial pea,\" a style which has earned her \"expert guidance\" (Weiler, 1988, p.151) in the formof the letter of acceptance to the leadership pool which implied she had been unprofessional andinconsistent. As a result, she is vulnerable to being the subject of jokes or explained away interms of a personality problem, both strategies serving to obscure and trivialize the seriouscontent of her message.All the stories indicate that these women would prefer to negotiate agreements andunderstandings based on dialogue amongst individuals whose educational and social identities andvoices are valued and respected equally. Negotiation is associated with women's culture; it isa process which recognizes individual and collective capacities to act upon the world, to bedifferent, and to gain empowerment and self-esteem through success in effecting change (Kenway\u00E2\u0080\u0094 196 \u00E2\u0080\u0094and Modra, 1992). As women teachers and leaders, they are adept negotiators within thepatriarchal and hierarchical content and contexts of social studies and teaching. They negotiateand construct meaning around complex structures of power. In their stories,... we see ... a dialectic between agency and structure and theimportance of mutual support and a critical understanding ofteaching practice for [those] attempting to work politically withinschools (Weiler, 1988, p.124).Theme: Women's DiscomfortWomen's attunement to the importance of the subjective aspect of knowing placessignificance on feelings of comfort and discomfort. There are several undercurrents of shareddiscomfort expressed in the narratives. It is significant that all but one of the women alluded tothe \"athletic\" nature of social studies teaching. (For Louise, the men she's known in socialstudies teaching have all been humanists, though she did note the disruptive presence of \"rugbyboys\" in her classes.) Rutter's profile of social studies teachers had identified the \"coaching\"characteristic of social studies teachers as different from other academic areas. Though we haveall encountered the humanists in social studies teaching, many teachers do bring a socialstudies/physical education background to the BC secondary school social studies teaching context;identification of the presence of a \"jock\" identity within social studies, in juxtaposition with thehumanist identity of which Louise and others have spoken, illuminates another contradiction andlevel of discomfort for women in teaching social studies. In further identifying social studies asan essentially masculine subject, Ellen said, \"It's seen as a course that a PE teacher can pick upan extra couple of blocks in, [a place to] maintain some of those macho aggressive young guys.\"Alison's talk of male cameraderie and the silliness of the little boys' games, Ellen's awarenessof the clubbiness, Tammy's discussion of the Male Room, and Amanda-Leigh's reference to theteam and to being required to be a cheerleader all suggest a pervasiveness of game rules created\u00E2\u0080\u0094 197 \u00E2\u0080\u0094in the patriarchal locker rooms of teaching. They denote harassment, create exclusion, press forsilencing of women's views if they are not perceived as being on side, and define women'sidentity in the most repressive of male terms. As Riddell (1989) says, \"Teachers of traditionallymasculine subjects have more traditional attitudes to gender issues\" (p.129); some of the storiesindicate that the masculine leadership style which derives its metaphors from male sport and frombusiness is also quite traditional in its attitudes to or understandings of women. Many maleadministrators come from the ranks of coaching (M. Sadker, 1985, and Shakeshaft, 1987, as citedin Sadker, Sadker, and Klein, 1991).Joan has no false illusions as to how she got her first job. Though her teacher trainingreports were excellent and \"got her into the category,\" it was her coaching ability that got her theinterview. As an administrator now, she elaborated on hiring practices: with social studies andphysical education constructed as a \"natural\" combination, the hiring of social studies teachersis often based on their coaching abilities. She knew of one instance where an excellent womansocial studies teacher was not hired; instead the school hired a basketball and cross-country coachwith mediocre social studies teaching skills, \"strictly Captain Video,\" she said. \"I think that'swrong .... Where everything else is equal, and one can offer the additional parameter of beingable to coach, then there's nothing wrong with hiring that person.\" For the present, she said,schools are communities and hiring is essential to meeting the needs of the extracurricularprograms which are a vital part of the school community. Extracurricular sports were a benefitshe wanted her own sons to have, she said. There is, underlying this, a notion, for Joan, that\"anybody can teach social studies.\" Perhaps we need to change the university coursecombinations or change society, as she suggested.Joan can play the games according to the boys' rules but the other stories suggest thatwomen's rules of play are different and that they are uncomfortable with aggressive play and\u00E2\u0080\u0094 198 \u00E2\u0080\u0094competition. Helgesen (1990) identifies the prevalent metaphor of team sports which constructsboys' games as good preparation for business and which discredits the usefulness of girls' gamesfor leadership. Citing the work of Gilligan, Helgesen points out that girls' games incorporatesimple, fluid rules, are social, and emphasize improvisation, flexibility, innovation, creativity,role-playing, and cooperation:Females learn to value cooperation and relationships; to disdaincomplex rules and authoritarian structures; and to disregard abstractnotions like the quest for victory if they threaten harmony in thegroup as a whole (p.38).Current leadership models are powerfully male; they make many women uncomfortable. Womenas leaders are expected to play by the rules of the boys' game, their own rules creating negativeidentities for them. Women's discomfort with the sport and business metaphors of education isfurther problematized by the lack of opportunity beyond the classroom to create leadership gamesaccording to their own rules.Discomfort, for women, is also experienced in the ways in which their gender makes themextremely vulnerable to what Weiler (1988) calls the \"expert guidance\" (p.151) of maleadministrators and academics. In these stories, the power of expert guidance cannot be ignored.Used positively, expert guidance creates opportunities and provides support; Alison and Ellen donot have stories like this to tell. Where it takes the form of \"sanctions,\" such as gender joking,intimidation, threat, and \"violent action\" (as in respect to transfers), as it does in some of thestories told by Ellen, Tammy, Amanda-Leigh, and Alison, it can be termed \"backlash,\" apowerful force that creates \"a harsh and painful climate for women at work\" (Faludi, 1991,p.363). Backlash works to undermine women's momentum in the job market; it aims to silencetheir \"different\" voices and exclude them from a discourse which tolerates only conformity.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 199 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Despite clearly articulated policies of gender equity and gender harassment in education, womencontinue to be subjected to the backlash in direct and indirect ways.Theme: Women's LateralityAnother theme which recurs is one I will call \"laterality\" with reference to their careerpaths. The term emerges from a statement made by Tammy in discussing response to lack ofrecognition: \"You know, Moira, we're geographers. We're quite lateral. You squish us in oneplace, we pop up in another!\" For Tammy, moving laterally has meant taking on writingcontracts with eastern publishers. For Alison, there are the \"national arenas\" of geographyassociations, writing for a publisher, and the National Ministry of Education. Amanda-Leigh ismuch more attentive to her personal time; taking care of herself is a present priority. But shehas committed more of her time now to becoming involved with professional activities in socialstudies and teaching. She and Ellen both have taken more active roles in local teacher politics.For Ellen, the lateral move has also meant finding a place in her current teaching assignment forteaching her love of the environment, spending precious personal time in travel and wildernessexcursions, and taking courses in counselling. Louise has chosen to move laterally to anotherphase and another focus in her life. Constrained by the increasing demands placed uponclassroom teachers, by the artificiality of the technicism in teaching, and by the fragmentationof the teaching day, she has difficulty with the idea of returning to the classroom full-time andis currently negotiating with her school principal for a creative timetable which would allow herthe personal flexibility to attune what she sees as the natural rhythms or inclinations of her lifeto the realities of teaching. Though Joan has since moved vertically, she had first chosen tomove laterally in leaving the district where she had not been happy. Implicit in the notion oflaterality is the sense of autonomy and choice, albeit in circumstances of constraint. None havedabbled long in the angry and dangerous realm of \"becoming a victim.\" Women, say Briskin\u00E2\u0080\u0094 200 \u00E2\u0080\u0094and Coulter (1992), often resist the tendency to characterize women, themselves included, asvictims.Becker's (1970, as cited in Acker, 1989) notion of \"situational adjustment\" whereinindividuals assess the requirements for success in various contexts and turn themselves into thekind of person demanded by the situation provides a curious dilemma for women. Whereinstitutional structures, advancement procedures, and career opportunities are described incompetitive and masculine terms, the images of success may tend to negate women's\"adjustment\" to the situation. Acker calls this \"coming to terms with a situation unlikely to bechanged by wishing it so\" (p.14), a kind of resignation. But Helgesen suggests that women reachout, not down (p.2'7). When \"up\" is not an option, there is instead resistance to the hierarchicalin the form of lateral adjustments by which the women seeking opportunities for leadership intheir fields appear to find professional expression in their own terms.For several, laterality can also be measured in the number of roles \"juggled\"simultaneously; those with demands of family, for example, may tend to make career choiceswhich deviate from the male norms of traditional patterns for \"career ambitious teachers\" (Grant,1989, p.41), further perpetuating the gender stereotype of career ambition as masculine. Womenwith children or of childbearing age have traditionally not been perceived as wanting to pursuecareer goals. Joan's career mobility was facilitated by a supportive husband, not a choice forTammy or Louise. Grant (1989) cites research showing that \"few women who intended to returnto teaching after a period of maternity leave expected substantial help from their partners witheither domestic or child care chores\" (p.41). In Tammy's encounters with the arbitrary andinformal department head selection process at her school may be read another story: while itappears that selection seems to mitigate against choosing women who have critiqued the statusquo, there may also be traditional assumptions about career goals of women teachers who are\u00E2\u0080\u0094 201 \u00E2\u0080\u0094also mothers. Grant's research showed that \"combining teaching with the care of children hasa negative effect on women's intentions to seek promotion\" (p.40). Regardless, from Tammy'sstandpoint, maleness seems a requisite for career movement and recognition.All the women's leadership styles tend to be lateral; most preferred collaborative, collegialendeavour to \"top down\" management style. Helgesen, with an essentialist notion of the feministprinciples of leadership, claims that women create webs which attend to social process forinclusion, connection, and communication. \"Women are more likely than men to empower othersand work collaboratively to achieve group goals\" (Shakeshaft, as cited in Sadker, Sadker, andKlein, 1991, p.289). There is discomfort for these women when lateral department structures areweakly developed or non-existent.Theme: Women's NurturingThe labour market is not governed by rules of competition \"where everyone has equalpower and competes with everyone else\" (Gaskell, McLaren, and Novogrodsky, 1989, p.24).Gaskell et al identify \"segregated pools of labour,\" gender being one category for organization.Such a system depends upon credentials and seniority and is structured by internal variables ofworkers' power and employers' interests. Women, channelled into traditionally female areas,have \"flat\" career structures. Female teachers, in the context of market metaphors, are cast asnegative identities, depicted in \"images of deficiency and deviance\" (Casey and Apple, 1989,p.175).Tammy, Ellen, and Amanda-Leigh all drew attention to women's ghettoization into juniorcourse loads. Interestingly, Ellen had recalled meeting Tammy at a conference several yearsearlier:She said ... that male principals see the junior classes as theprovince of the female teachers because they're mothering and\u00E2\u0080\u0094 202 \u00E2\u0080\u0094warm and that the females really don't quite have what it takes forthe grade 12 courses. This is the domain for men.It was Ellen who asked, later in our discussion, about men's responsibility for \"fathering\"! Caseyand Apple comment ironically upon research which attributes women teachers' lack ofcommitment to work to their obligations to natural roles of wife and mother.[The research showed that] whereas women used the flexiblestructure of teaching for shopping, household duties, and the careof school-aged children, \"few men mentioned compatability withfamily life as an attraction [to teaching]. More pointed out thatteaching schedules allowed them to undertake further study or doother kinds of work.\" Whose definitions of commitment are beingemployed here? (p.175)Connell (1985) also alludes to the gendered division of labour in schools, identifying theways in which it is crystallized by school timetabling procedures.The collective teaching obligations of the school are dividedaccording to the different contents of learning ('subjects'), the ageof the student and difficulty of the content ('grades'), the presumedability of the students, either generally or in a particular subject('streams,'...), and a complex set of rules about how much time,and what blocks of time, particular subject/grade ... combinationscan claim of the pupil's working week.This carving-up of the total teaching effort of the school's staffalready embodies some important educational decisions about whatis learnt and under what circumstances. There is an equallycomplex set of rules, understandings, and agreements about whichteachers will do what bits of the total. Teachers are very consciousof who does the dishing-out, who has influence on it, whatprinciples govern it, and are often far from pleased by the result (p.82).School timetables in BC are tools for entrenchment of women's nurturing identity. (One youngwoman, on hearing of my research, commented cynically about her junior status in an all-maletraditional social studies department: \"I'm taking my turn 'breastfeeding' the grade eights!\")Counsellors who place problematic students in \"warm, fuzzy\" places, classrooms like Tammy'sor Amanda-Leigh's or Louise's which are considered safe or nurturing, are also agents in the\u00E2\u0080\u0094 203 \u00E2\u0080\u0094process of reinforcing gender role expectations and workplace inequity. Often, these are alreadylarge classes, and students who require additional attention are more likely to place an additionalburden on those teachers who are viewed as \"mothers\" than on those who are not.The stories of the six women of this study show that some women are nurturing whileothers are not and that some women are more nurturing than others. Nurturance, caring, andother associated feminine qualities may be viewed as women's natural attributes, aspects ofidentity which reflect personal choice, or socially constructed expectations for women. Each ofthese women, however, would be devalued as an educator and as a strong knowledgeable womanif her teaching were viewed only by its nurturing capacity for students. Teaching to nurtureand/or teaching for intellectual growth are rather dimensions of a tension which surroundswomen's teaching identities. Tammy and Amanda-Leigh have actively struggled to maintaintheir rights to academic identities which also exhibit caring qualities. Alison could not bedescribed in nurturing terms. Hers is an active choice of the role of the woman as scholar.Ellen, despite her natural inclination to a more abstract and dispassionate academic identity inteaching, has had to accept the gendered constraints for women's teaching for intellectual growthand to work at incorporating more caring qualities in her teaching style. Her relegation toteaching junior courses in other disciplines might be considered in terms of who has the authorityfor social and scholarly expression. Louise and Joan construct their identities as educators inactive and individual processes of synthesizing and transforming the either/or dualisms ofmasculine and feminine, the rational and the feeling.The stories suggest that education is enriched by the diversity of women's ways ofteaching. The differences, however, are significant in illuminating how women's identities inteaching are negotiated and constructed. The stereotype of women as nurturers is constraining.Riddell (1989), in a study of gender relations in schools, found that male teachers believed that\u00E2\u0080\u0094 204 \u00E2\u0080\u0094women's teaching was secondary to their reproductive roles, considering it \"natural\" for womento take full responsibility for children's upbringing. Yet, \"belief in the importance of free choice[was] used to conceal the power of structural forces shaping people's lives and to justify sexualinequality\" (p.135).In reference to progressive pedagogies, Walkerdine (1992) notes that:Women teachers became caught, trapped, inside a concept ofnurturance which held them responsible for the freeing of eachlittle individual, and therefore for the management of an idealistdream, an impossible fiction. (p.16)Walkerdine challenges \"the assumptions about the civilizing process and the place of the 'naturalenvironment' in it\" which underpin progressive pedagogies. Confining women to teachingyounger children assumes that \"women's bodies [are] unfit for reason, for intellectual activity.The possession of a womb [is] thought to render a woman unfit for deep thought\" (p.18). Shesuggests that notions of freedom from overt control in teaching are \"a sham!\" Such overtcontrols, hierarchically imposed, represent unjust and oppressive notions of gender which canerode women's sense of agency in career growth. \"Gender models\" informed by culturalassumptions of women's \"natural\" abilities with children work to confine them \"to the devaluedjobs of teaching younger rather than older children,\" despite as strong a commitment as men(Gaskell and McLaren, 1986, p.25). Collegial decision making with respect to course allocationoffers women a greater sense of autonomy. Unequal access to senior courses \"owned\" by menis a form of systemic discrimination which further devalues women's work and which attributesstatus and authority for knowledge to men.Manicom (1992) takes issue with women's underrepresentation in senior positions andwith the essentialist and egalitarian notions of feminist pedagogy which reinforce the stereotypeof women's \"natural\" abilities to care, collaborate, connect, share, and know in \"women's ways.\"\u00E2\u0080\u0094 205 \u00E2\u0080\u0094She questions the political assumptions of feminist pedagogical goals of analysis and solidarity,asking, \"Who shares? Whose sharing is blocked? What is shared easily and what withdifficulty? When is sharing empowering and when it is disempowering?\" (p.376) The fact ofthese women's stories being the stories of a few who have gained access to senior positions isdirectly linked to politically subordinating and socially constructed assumptions of women's\"natural\" place or identity as teachers of the young and men's \"natural\" place as the authoritiesfor knowledge. Such assumptions underpin a man-made agenda and process which is neithernatural nor neutral (Lewis and Simon, 1986; Lather', 1992). Currie (1992) asks, \"Who shalleducate the educators?\" (p.358) Women's challenges are often questions asked of authority frompositions without authority. Questions form the language of critique and reflect the understandingthat knowledges are partial, multiple, shifting, tentative, complex, contradictory, political,negotiatied, reflexive, and irreducible to a single truth (Hoodfar, 1992; Luke, 1992; Kenway andMocha, 1992).Theme: Women's VoicesThe women of the study speak in different voices and different intonations from differentplaces in teaching. Their actions and words depict women whose work is valuable and highlypolitical. Their stories speak to students and other educators about the tensions of the search forpersonal empowerment through recognition and acceptance on their own terms. Yet opportunitiesin teaching to give voice to shared awarenesses and concerns, as well as shared joys, are hardto find. Women's storytelling has a long history, but isolation and underrepresentation workeffectively to silence the stories of women teaching social studies. Their narratives create aconversation which spans differences and distance.Their stories are partial, but their collectivity suggests some truths about women's voices.The women in social studies partake in a triangular discourse with authority, as women teachers\u00E2\u0080\u0094 206 \u00E2\u0080\u0094integrally attached to political subject matter and working within the politics of institutionalsettings. There are, however, simple rules for their participation, rules which can be derived fromthe stories themselves and which women know well. Women, as working professionals, mayspeak when symbolically transformed as \"mothers\" or \"playmates\" (Martindale, 1992, p.334) or\"cheerleaders\" (Wilson, 1993). They may not interrupt or contradict (Lewis and Simon, 1986;Lewis, 1992; Ellsworth, 1992). Men do not support women who speak too loudly (Lewis, 1992).Women's stories should not implicate men (Lewis, 1992; Manicom, 1992). Women should notpresume to use the privileged language of men nor should they expect the respect, recognition,and authority which is given to men who tell stories (Lewis and Simon, 1986; Pagano, 1988;Manicom, 1992). The message of the culture for women and others, compliance, is attended withconsequences of marginalization and exclusion and silencing (Lewis, 1992; Lewis and Simon,1986; Ellsworth, 1992; Luke and Gore, 1992; Manicom, 1992).Lewis and Simon (1986) encourage men to locate themselves differently in relation towomen and to themselves. They see that men need to move from the voice of authority to avoice of questioning in seeking ways to take responsibility for the oppressive social forms thatdeny freedom and human possibility. Men must learn how to listen, to hear, to see, and to watchin becoming more fully aware (Lewis and Simon, 1986). Women who work to find ways inwhich to speak as women in women's different terms face a difficult task. The tasks of \"thefathers [are] easier,\" says Luke (1992): \"writing and speaking 'truth' from the singular locationof insider, an insider with unifocal and monochromatic vision, are not great accomplishments\"(p.49). Donating freedom from a position of privilege is not the same as understanding andrisking and challenging the power of privilege and the privilege of power (Lewis and Simon,1986).\u00E2\u0080\u0094 207 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Manicom (1992) identifies four kinds of silence that women choose for survival.\"Silence,\" she says, \"is the underbelly of sharing\" (p.377). When women are excluded fromparticular educational contexts, as they are in the discourse of social studies to a large degree,theirs is the silence of \"not being present.\" There is the silence of \"being present but not heard\";what is said is diminished or not acknowledged, its language apparently indiscernible to thosefor whom it is intended. There is the silence of \"preserving privilege\" which comes from the fearof saying something which will given offence. There is also the silence of \"feeling unsafe.\"The most obvious problem is speaking with authority, in both senses of the expression.\"Women who try to be more assertive face a double bind, for they are perceived as 'hostile'females rather than as 'forceful' men\" (p.32, Maher as cited in Culley and Portuges, 1985).\"Conflict may be open when feminist teachers run up against unsupportive or actively hostilemen in positions of authority in the school\" (Connell, 1985, p.139). For Tammy and Amanda-Leigh, the critical/feminist perspective in teaching creates \"the double bind [for women] ofneeding to speak and to remain silent at the same time in order to guarantee some measure ofsurvival\" (Lewis, 1992, p.183). For Alison, trying to interrupt by speaking the dialect ofpatriarchy has invoked the sanctions and the awareness of the need for safety. For Ellen, theexperience of sharing concerns about misogynistic attitudes with other women departmentmembers felt somehow subversive. She worried that there would be consequences. Ellen's isthe silence of \"feeling unsafe,\" knowing that what she has to say will make men look bad,lacking trust in the system and in the support of colleagues. \"The threat of social sanctionsdefuses the vitality of storytelling\" (Lewis, 1992, p.177), reducing the stories to mere whispers.Telling our stories of violation and subordination in the presenceof those whose advantages are highlighted and challenged by suchsharing, or doing so in the presence of those who hold thediscursive power to subvert the act of consciousness raising as a\u00E2\u0080\u0094 208 \u00E2\u0080\u0094feminist method, is for many women a contradictory outcome oftheir experiences (Lewis, p.177).Those who are accepted into the discourse of schooling do so on clearly defined terms.Louise reflected on her acceptance, saying she had learned at a very early age to be nice. Sheis accepted because she speaks appropriately in the gentle tones of the mother. She has recentlystarted reading Steinem's Revolution from Within and is reflecting on the ways in which heridentity has been shaped in relationship to men. Joan learned at an early age to play, and playbetter, the boys' games. The rules of the game do not exclude her or marginalize her to thebleachers of teaching, as they do for many. She does not challenge the coach.Martindale (1992) has noted this imposition of the identity of mother and playmate as aphenomenon of women's professionalization. The problems arise for those uncomfortable withthe competition or the rules or the sideline roles they are required to play, or the coaches' vision.Anger is the underbelly of the niceness to which white middle-class women are socialized, toborrow from Manicom and to paraphrase Lerner (1986). The refusal of the identity as nicemothers, players, or cheerleaders invokes the sanctions of silencing and exclusion. The studysuggests that women do not speak in the single \"different voice\" described by Gilligan; Faludisays that such a notion continues to reinforce the subordinate status of women where \"sexdifferences can be used to rationalize oppression.\" The tensions in the voices which tell someof these stories reflect the contradictions of women's teaching for democratic citizenship in asociety where the terms for participation are gendered. Their stories are the narratives from thesidelines of social studies teaching, in some cases depicting the foul play for women who are noton side, suited to the sport, or appropriately respectful in their tones. \"Their stories of violationviolate at each retelling\" (Lewis, p.182).\u00E2\u0080\u0094 2 0 9 \u00E2\u0080\u0094DIMENSIONS OF LEADERSHIP AND AUTHORITY IN WOMEN'S TERMSThe narratives express different notions of leadership and citizenship within theeducational community, in the language of women. Implicit in the negative encounters withthose with \"power over\" are visions of a leadership style which does not negate or marginalizethe experience of strong, knowledgeable women, but which incorporates, encourages, and valuestheir personal, professional, and practical perspectives and standpoints in inclusive and more trulydemocratic visions of education. Some of the women make explicit statements about leadership.What is abundantly clear in the narrative collection is the complexity and diversity of ways inwhich these women conceive of and negotiate relationships of power and authority.NARRATIVE THEMESTwo recurring themes emerge from the data as incidental findings, adding dimensionswhich suggest alternate or expanded models rather than an essentialist or stereotypical model forwomen in leadership. The themes do not occur in every narrative but are recurrent andsignificant as women's responses to the contradictions of their multiple roles and perspectivesin education.Theme: Educational LeadershipAmanda-Leigh has a vision of educational reform which places value on all the processparticipants, including teachers and students, in the articulation of that vision. Her close friendsare those in education whose alignment is similar, whom she respects for their values, theirintelligence, and their commitment to teaching, whom she sees as \"leaders\" in the teaching field,and who recognize the extremely political nature of enacting a vision. \"My friends are thestrongest teachers in the school.\" She cites Fullan in discussing her personal meaning ofeducational change and her sense of her identity as an \"agent of change.\" Hers is a vision verymuch grounded in her understanding of Fullan's (1982) work on the meaning of educational\u00E2\u0080\u0094 210 \u00E2\u0080\u0094change. Fullan says that many educational changes are initiated by administrators for symbolicpolitical or personal reasons, such as the need to appear innovative or to respond to communitypressure or to gain more resources. These changes are not real educational change, however, andare not neutral in their benefits (p.22).Fullan's research on innovation and school effectiveness has shown that the principal isessential to the success of instructional reform but that most do not play roles as instructionalleaders. Change is influenced by the character and climate of the school as an organization (seealso Goodlad, 1984). The principal, peer relationships, and teacher orientations create theschool's character and climate for reform. Fullan's research further shows that effectiveprincipals talk with teachers, help them get together, and are knowledgeable about what ishappening. Ironically, he cautions principals undertaking change that commitment to changemust allow for teachers to develop their own sense of meaning in relation to change.Amanda-Leigh's vision of leadership is constructed around her notion of conflictresolution through a dialectic process, the \"talking with teachers\" to which Fullan refers, whichinsists upon the critical perspective that those who actively participate within and understand thesystem have a right to be heard; the voices do not have to be in agreement. \"My goal is to keepthose lines of communication open. It's okay to disagree with one another but you have tooperate in a compatible, respectful framework to do that.\"She expresses her frustration at working in an \"inadequate system\":\"Inadequate\" is more than just the money or the physical structureof the school. It's the bureaucracy associated [with it], particularlyin BC and the way administration works with their teachers. Ican't stay in a system where I am dictated to -- that's not me. I'mfar more intelligent than that. I don't mind being dictated to if youtell me why you're doing it and I accept it. But I definitely haveproblems with the present structure of the system [as I know it].\u00E2\u0080\u0094 211 \u00E2\u0080\u0094People leave the system because they are disenfranchised, she said. Pollyanna, the idealist whochose not to work for External Affairs because of the ladder-oriented, bureaucratic, controllingnature of government as workplace, has had to come to terms with teaching's stark reality:It's hard to work in a system that doesn't believe in or facilitateindividuality too much. You're being forced to condone or acceptthings that you don't like. If you're looking for improvement in asystem and those opportunities don't exist, it makes it very verydifficult. Even wanting a minimal change that will make theoverall school function better, a simplistic thing like moving themorning announcements to a different time in the day so that thewhole school operates a little better, when that becomes a battle,you wonder why you're there.For Amanda-Leigh, being an educator has the attendant mandate of commitment to anintegrative process which validates her vision of herself as an agent of change and which trustsand respects the holistic ways she applies her personal, practical, and professional knowledge toboth educational and social realities. \"I get a lot of satisfaction from challenge and change andnew things.\" From this standpoint, she had asked nothing more of the system than she gave tostudents within her classroom and gave to her colleagues as department coordinator.In her position as a school administrator, Joan is able to enact the role of educationalleader. This role is her particular strength: \"I like to see change and to find ways to bring aboutchange.\" She is supported by her principal in developing and encouraging staff participation inthe implementation of projects such as the creation of a Humanities program or the computertechnology program.In contrast to the administrative role of educational leadership is the notion of leader-as-business-manager which has its roots in the technicist \"excellence/efficiency\" programs andmaterialist reforms of the 1980s. Amanda-Leigh is opposed to the more management orientationof present administrative structures. She would consider a career in administration if teacherswere not politically separated from administrators:\u00E2\u0080\u0094 212 \u00E2\u0080\u0094I can't come into administration in BC under the present structure.I couldn't leave the [Teachers'] Association and work outside of it.Should we ever get back to a more cohesive approach and awayfrom this middle management [idea] -- principals are no longereducational leaders, they're managers -- then, yes, I would reallyconsider it. [It] is one of the reasons I went for the coordinator'sposition when it came open. But I won't go after anadministrator's position or even train myself in that capacity at thispoint until they restructure the system. It is one of the mostdestructive forces working in [the BC education system] right now,the relationship between A.O.s (administrative officers) andteachers.Louise added another dimension, articulating some women's discomfort with the\"business\" or rationalizing of education. She discussed the principal whose leadership stylefacilitated her growth in the teaching profession. In his leadership, Louise saw the natural styleof a humanist, not governed by current mandates of the positivist realm to measure effectiveness:That man was a really good man .... If he felt that you were asound person and knew what you were doing, you did it. Hedidn't write reports by sitting in the class for three lessons withina week and writing down detail after detail. He was around theschool all the time, noting what was going on. He really had asixth sense. But now it's all so formalized, so bureaucratic. Theprincipal gives you the sheet of what he's going to look forbeforehand and you sit down and talk about it. Then he comes tosee the lesson. It seems so artificial. I can do it all, but it justfeels so artificial. I really liked those days when there was moretrust between principal and teacher. It had to be mutual, but if itwas mutual, it was great. How I really evolved in my teaching lifewas on a series of [agreements of] mutual trust.For Louise, administrators have not always been as supportive. She, however, has a fairlystrong avoidance factor in her personality: avoid the unpleasant, avoid the confrontation, she said.Implicit in her statements is the preference for leadership which is underpinned by concepts ofpower with rather than power over and which is facilitated in a dialectical and respectful manner.The non-confrontational character of her personal style governed her response:I learned early in life to just listen to somebody and go about anddo what I believed in myself. I guess I'm not aggressive and I\u00E2\u0080\u0094 213 \u00E2\u0080\u0094don't challenge. I would leave things, but I'm very strong in myown way. I remember a vice-principal who loved to rap myknuckles. I just learned not to confront him ever in person but todo it with notes, more indirectly, putting it on paper.Effectiveness, for Louise, is grounded in trust and respect and is measurable only in terms ofhumanness.Joan discussed two ways she had recognized, in her location as an female administrator,the influence of a gendered perspective. The first is an acknowledgement of the maternaldimension in her leadership. When Joan evaluates teachers, she does so through her identity asa mother: \"My ultimate bottom-line is, would I want my son in this class? .... That's somethingyou can't see other than from a mother's point of view .... There's something inherentlyprotective that mothers tend to have.\" Being a mother can be helpful with discipline problemstoo:I discipline some of the bigger boys differently than a man would.There's nothing that makes them tell you what they've done wrongand promise to behave more than to tell them I'm disappointed inthem. Boys have a strong affinity for their mothers or that motherfigure and don't like that person to be disappointed in them.Less comfortable with the authoritarian style, she referred to women's ways of handlingdiscipline problems as more subversive.The second aspect of her gendered location which has influenced her leadership style hasbeen an increased sensitivity to gender issues within the school community. \"I'm more consciousof girls that I'm dealing with and their insecurities. One of the saddest things I've come acrossso much lately ... is the abuse of girls in the home situation.\" She identified two groups of boyswhose dominating attitudes make girls uncomfortable within the school community: the rugbyboys and First Nations boys in their treatment of First Nations girls. She noted that racism does\u00E2\u0080\u0094 214 \u00E2\u0080\u0094not tend to be an issue in the school which has a 10% presence of aboriginal students. There areactive attempts made to deal with these gender problems, but, she said,... you're not going to change the attitudes of 16- and 17-year oldboys who have proudly worked on these for the last 15 years andit has obviously not been stopped in their homes. In some cases,you also have to realize that what they act out covers a problem intheir own lives. [Problems arise] if that's then supported by 4 or5 other fellows who may have different reasons but who feel betterabout themselves by lording it over someone else and that may bebecause they've been so dominated or abused or the only thingwhere they've achieved success.Involvement in this research process had given her cause to reflect on the genderdimensions of schooling. She was to go as a member of an external accreditation teamresponsible for the Humanities programs and would, she said, definitely assume a gender lensin her analysis of the departments. As an educational leader, she actively incorporates humandimensions in being open to and choosing to fuse, rather than dichotomize, the male/femalecomponents of leadership. Effectiveness, in Joan's terms, is also measured in terms of humandynamics.Theme: MentorshipTammy's narrative described a further dimension to the vision of effective leadership.Her story begins to articulate the significance for women of leadership as mentorship. Often, thementor has the capacity to invite another to explore career directions. Mentorship is not thearbitrary and capricious bestowal of favours upon those who are subordinate such as the seniorBoard member had bestowed upon the \"little girl\" who stood up for herself. For Tammy,mentorship has been the characteristic of her personal and professional relationship with WandaCassidy whom she first met in her role as education director for the Legal Services Society.Wanda is a social studies methods instructor at Simon Fraser University, a doctoral studentworking with the University of Chicago, and, as the only woman in social studies education\u00E2\u0080\u0094 215 \u00E2\u0080\u0094teaching at a BC university, an important role model for women who teach social studies. ForTammy, Wanda's capacity to invite her to work in ways alternative and additional to teachinghas made all the difference in her confidence and sense of self-worth as a teacher; the invitationswere given in recognition of Tammy's ability. Such invitations are extended by those who havepower and can be powerful tools for advancement in both positive and negative ways; the veryact of including one excludes others. Often, however, the criteria by which mentoring isextended to some and not to others are exclusive, elusive, and arbitrary. Women have knownthis phenomenon more frequently in its exclusive nature, where those with power offer it to thosewith similar interests and thus reinforce the status quo, a hegemonic structure which denieswomen both recognition and access to power. Old boys' networks and boys' clubs have longtraditions of this kind of exclusion.In contrast to Tammy's story, Ellen's story speaks in painful ways about how women canbe alienated in a system that often does not measure leadership effectiveness in terms of theability to mentor or facilitate human resource development in teaching. As one who has beenprofoundly vulnerable to administrative decision-making processes which have not seemed toplace value on her contributions and capacities in teaching, Ellen has chosen the safety ofacceptance and the practicality of moving laterally to other areas of interest. Her career planshave changed in light of her experience in BC schools. As there have been few role models forher of \"women's ways of teaching,\" there has been no mentoring or active recognition of theimportance in encouraging or developing her teaching strengths to offset the discouragements shehas faced. Ellen values her collegial relationships but does not see these as mentoring. Shedescribed the nature of teaching as isolated. Like \"ships in the night,\" teachers go into theirrooms and work in circumstances that mitigate against collaboration and development of collegialrelationships.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 216 \u00E2\u0080\u0094As the least extroverted woman in the study, Ellen perhaps does not have as visible apresence in social studies or in school as the others in the study and has not been offered theinvitations which have transformative and creative capacity for women's careers.Mainly, I've gone it alone. I wish I had [had mentors.] BasicallyI was thrust into a teaching position, [expected to] shape up, andfrom then on it's been the same. I don't really think I've ever hadanyone who's taken me under their wing .... This is how youshould go to make the next stage. I've had to come to my ownconclusions .... I think [the mentors] exist. One woman, ourcurrent science department head, was mentored. [The principal]encouraged her to go for department headship. The guy who wasrelinquishing the position said he wanted me to do it. I didn't seethat as mentoring but as politics because he didn't want her to doit!Under the circumstances, she has basically done things \"under her own steam.\" She has valuedthe opportunity to participate in this project for the perspective it has given that \"she is notalone.\" Such conversations amongst women had seemed subversive to her. The issues, she said,are important to address in more proactive ways. We must prioritize them, find ways to offer\"protection\" for women, and not get distracted by the many other things in our teaching lives.Her stories also speak of the importance for women of role models who are women speaking aswomen about teaching and leadership.Issues of safety have emerged for Alison as she has tried to claim a place on theadministrative ladder. Twice denied the invitation to advance to administration, she has sincereconsidered her role in respect to the nature of the practical conditions of leadership. In ourdiscussions, there was no mention of leaders who had mentored her career, though she spoke ofvaluing the mentoring or support of friends and colleagues in teaching. Her recent decision notto apply again for administrative advancement was reached in discussion of her career goals withher present principal.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 217 \u00E2\u0080\u0094Leadership is, for Alison, exclusive, removed from teachers' realities, unsafe, and oftenenacted in patronizing ways which do not recognize the voices or \"different messages\" of thosewhom it purports to lead. She has chosen to accept her \"small\" role of departmental leadershipand social studies teaching. She reinforces the notion of laterality previously discussed: she has\"carved out a niche for herself which may not be recognized in [the district] but obviously isnationally.\" She does not need the extra money, nor does she want the job's insecurity:I want to stay where I am. They can hardly remove me from myjob, unless I do something terrible. They're not going to blacklistme in Ottawa. Working with the [National] Ministry, they phoneme and ask me to do what I do again. It's they who approach me.I'm in a fairly secure position. I can say what I like. It doesn'tmatter that I tell the principal he's not a king ruling a kingdom. Icouldn't say that if I were a vice-principal. Once I had figured thatout, ... I decided that actually I was in a far better position and Iwould be much happier to stay where I want .... Human dynamicsare very complicated. You ask the wrong question at the wrongtime, you even show that you can think, even by asking thequestion .... [some] would find gentle ways to say things -- well,there's a point at which I'm fed up with being patronized and sothings do tend to seep out.She can now critique the system in safety and she sees that as important, though sheacknowledges the discomfort it can cause for the leaders.Alison acknowledged that gender was an additional factor in her being refused promotion,but she believes that men who have \"different messages\" receive the same response. Womenwith strong messages may appear more threatening:I think that my problems with the board certainly stem from agender-based point of view, that [they perceive that] I am a strongwoman and quite frankly scare most of them to death, although Iam not threatening, and I don't wish to emasculate, swallow, orcastrate any of them. In many ways, I do have something to saythat is different to their message but I know lots of men who havebeen caught in exactly the same way because they have a differentmessage. So while I can say it's because I'm a woman, I couldalso give you the names of men who have been refused promotionfor the same reason. I think I have an extra [point against me] in\u00E2\u0080\u0094 218 \u00E2\u0080\u0094that I'm female, but I have more trouble sometimes with otherfemales than with other men in getting my point of view across.Her comments reflect her sense of herself as politically independent. She knows that those whodefine the models for leadership in her district do not give credit for independent thinking oroutspokenness, extending their invitations for advancement instead to those who \"don't rock theboat.\"The power-to-invite dimension of mentorship is particularly significant for Louise whofeels she has been \"lucky\" in her location as a teacher.We've had good superintendents in our district who've always beensupportive. I've never felt that there was any barrier in my waybecause I was female and that might be unique to my district. Iwas asked really early on and over and over again to consideradministration: how did I see my career developing? I didn't[consider it] because my children came first. I didn't want tospend any of the summer with administrative tasks. I also didn'twant to do education courses. I was more interested in theintellectual exploring. But I was given the opportunity.Louise has turned down the invitations to become an administator, not prepared to sacrifice herfamily's needs, her summer of farming, or her own need for a more harmonious existence, to theadditional pressures of administering schools; as a humanist, too, she would find it hard toadminister the sometimes \"cruel\" decisions which are required of an administrator. The supportand mentorship of others such as the Berkeley professor and the humanistic men of social studiesteaching who were all role models as well as friends have been important in Louise's growth asan educator. The invitations have, however, served to reinforce her sense of being recognizedand of self-worth in a system which can undervalue the work of its teachers: \"I've never had anybarriers put in front of me.\"Louise's vision of leadership reflects the value she places on caring and on connectingin the management of teachers as a human resource. Her story speaks of the personal and\u00E2\u0080\u0094 219 \u00E2\u0080\u0094professional growth which is possible where value is placed on supportiveness, collegiality,autonomy, trust, and respect. She, on reading this thesis in its developmental stages, hasexpressed the greatest concern for the loss that education suffers in not encouraging andsupporting women like Ellen.Joan offers the standpoint of one who has accepted the invitation into the ranks ofadministration. She was encouraged by her principal to apply before she felt she was personallyready to undertake that direction; she was busy playing basketball at the international level anddidn't see that she had the time.When she first applied for vice-principalships, the positions were given to men. \"It was... an old boys' thing,\" she said. Despite a district policy requiring applicants to have graduatedegrees in progress or completed, one position went to a man with no graduate degree or anyintention of pursuing one. He was the principal's golfing buddy. Her qualifications exceededtraditional administrative profiles; she more than fit the criteria for acceptance on her own termsinto the masculine world of administration. Her third application was successful; ironically bothprincipals who had chosen to invite others now consult her in matters of computer applicationproblems.As an administrator, she sees herself as \"playing with the boys\" on a level playing field,though she acknowledges that other women's experience is not the same:I'm comfortable, but then I've always been comfortable in malecompany -- it doesn't bother me, having been the only femalesecondary administrator in the district for four years .... I think thatcomes from learning at an extremely early age how you dealt withthe boys from having to deal with my brother and his friends ....and also finding that there are very powerful ways of getting yourown way with them .... they've always accepted that I'm one ofthem and I can do whatever.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 220 \u00E2\u0080\u0094The idea that women may be dominated or threatened by men never occurs to her. Accepted onher own terms, she has never been baited or excluded or not invited. Her terms are written inthe language of a woman gifted in academic, athletic, musical, professional, practical, andinterpersonal skills, terms that are in very essential ways unchallengeable credentials forexemplary instructional leadership.As in her teaching, her leadership style is an eclectic negotiative process of reflectingupon and acquiring skills \"that work.\" She debated the role of gender versus personality in herparticular style, not wanting to split the model into the masculine/feminine dichotomy:I think a better way of looking at it is that it doesn't matterwhether it's male or female. What you take are the best attributesof those people whom you admire in roles of leadership and adaptand suit those that can fit you. Then you create your own style.It doesn't matter whether you are male or female. You have tohave some female role models to fill [out the style]. You can takeattributes of a male role model that you feel make that person asuccessful leader and you can adapt those attributes to suit you.That's the key: you don't copy that style. You develop your ownstyle by selecting and adapting.Her principal has been her primary mentor and role model in leadership, particularly inareas of staff development. His vision of school as a \"people place\" and as a family where allmembers are treated with respect governs hiring and personnel practices. She has learned bymodelling strategies that have worked successfully for him in drawing out the strengths of thepeople that he's hired. Both work to maintain good collegial relations which are viewed as veryimportant. \"The other thing is that I can go in there at any time and shut the door. That's thekey, you shut the door. The conversation is kept private. I can disagree with him and it's neverheld against me.\"Joan laughingly said, with respect to the research I was conducting, that her narrativemust seem like she's \"from another planet.\" The comment reflected the way in which her\u00E2\u0080\u0094 221 \u00E2\u0080\u0094experience of schooling and teaching is not typical of the experience of most, either men orwomen. I reassured her that she was fine, that she fitted in perfectly. She provided a model ofjust how exceptional women have to be in order to be accepted without question into male-dominated areas. She has also described a model of a fluid, dynamic, and collaborativeleadership style from which the answer to Currie's (1992) question, \"Who shall educate theeducators?\" might be derived.Conclusion: Negotiating Identities as Women in Social Studies and LeadershipThe complexity of the six women's negotiations of the terrain of social studies becomesincreasingly problematic within the stories as they move beyond the more personal and privateworlds of their classrooms, within which they construct respect and authority in their own terms,and into the more political and public realms of schools and the broader professional settingswhere respect and authority are less likely to be theirs to construct and more likely to becontested. Within classrooms, they are relatively autonomous in creating and enacting their ownidentities and realities, though even these are structurally constrained and negotiated with studentswho have social and cultural understandings about women, teachers, social studies content,processes of learning, and dynamics of power. Their experiences speak of skill andresourcefulness in these kinds of classroom negotiations.Beyond classrooms, however, the personal negotiations take a more profoundly politicaldirection. There are too many stories of painful negotiations to ignore the difficulties womenface in striving for their own identities as educated and critically informed citizens whose work,taken seriously, necessitates thinking critically about the study of human action in the socialworld as it socially constructs the acceptable terms for women's actions in masculine language.Women's work in social studies teaching is fraught with contradictions, as this study has shown.The stories told here claim the space to reflect upon why so few women choose to teach social\u00E2\u0080\u0094 222 \u00E2\u0080\u0094studies and why so few teach the senior courses which require the most authority for knowledge.Their stories illuminate the tentativeness and partiality of traditional knowledge and understandingabout curriculum, pedagogy, and leadership in social studies and teaching. The stories posequestions which challenge others to think and teach critically about the content of the partriarchalcurricula, the old stories or master narratives of education and of social studies. The old storiesimpose constraints in contradictory and systematic ways to deny some the democratic rights ofequity, social justice, and freedom as persons to express themselves in their own language, to beheard and acknowledged, to be different, to care, to feel strongly and still be strong andknowledgeable, and to live without fear. The women's stories invite readers to a dialogue of re-negotiation in which the master narratives which have described models of curriculum, teaching,and leadership are reconstructed -- transformed -- as new stories more inclusive of the diversityof human experience.- 223 -CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSIONSTHEMES OF THE STUDYThis study of six women's experience of teaching and leadership in social studies doesnot find that a single model or story is appropriate. \"Models can only be restrictive and reductivebecause they cannot predict and thus cannot take into account the complexity of contingent andmaterial realities\" (Lewis, 1992, p.189). Neither do these stories illuminate a monolithicdiscourse of feminism; rather, the stories explore multiple feminisms (Kenway and Modra, 1992)as these are described in the women's reflections of their identities as women, as teachers, andas leaders in social studies. They explore the complex dimensions and possibilities withinpersonal and teaching narratives for constructing new meanings and knowledges about teaching.Each story has something important to say and to teach us about the possibilities of narrative forexploring in more diverse and fully human ways the lives of teachers as social actors.Within the women's personal stories, we can find the grounding of the social vision thateach has negotiated. Amanda-Leigh grew up in a family where the children were taughtexplicitly political ideologies of liberal democratic citizenship and were given the opportunitiesto practice these. Tammy, a child of the fractious sixties and seventies, grew up to challenge theconventional thinking of her traditional French Canadian heritage, adapting the cultural skills oflively debate to the critique of social and educational conventions which limit or constrain fullyempowered and equitable participation by all. Joan knew no gender or social boundaries in herpersonal story of growing up to be the best she could be in sports, academics, and music. In herfamily, her giftedness and growth as a person were encouraged, not constrained. Ellen grew upwith the constraints of an education removed from the centre and with the cultural separation ofemotion and reason. Few caring women figure as strong models in her stories of educational and- 224 -personal growth. Yet, she struggles to find her own maps for the journey to participating as awoman in a world powerfully defined in men's terms. Her stories are the most tentative anddifficult explorations of women's vulnerability in the unequal gender dynamics of educationalcommunities. Alison's childhood models of strong knowledgeable women are both integratedand resisted in her adult life. Her mother's caring in the community limited her capacity to carefor her own children. In constructing her own identity, education and the tradition of teacher asscholar, not nurturer, have been the keys by which Alison understands personal, professional, andsocial empowerment. By contrast, for Louise, her identity is an integration of women's nurturingand intellectual capacities. Caring and the love of learning which have enabled her to face themany demands of her life are reflected in the personal and political understandings she modelsin her teaching.The six women tell diverse stories of social studies pedagogy as education for democraticand environmental citizenship, for social critique and transformation, for intellectual andindividual growth, for community participation, and for human understanding and possibilities.Some styles more closely resemble the models of feminist pedagogy than others. That is, themesof caring and connection are more fully realized in some women's teaching and curriculumnegotiations than in others. They span a continuum from quite traditional approaches to oneswhich challenge students to engage in a critical approach to the social and educational status quo.No one story is told in this study as better than another; all are viewed as different, valid, andsignificant stories of social studies teaching. Yet, all stand as powerful stories about theprocesses and ideologies which underpin teaching for social transformation and social justice.Within each story is a political and social vision of the classroom as a community and as areflection of the possibilities for community in which individual differences are recognized andvalued. Democratic harmony is constructed as possibility by complex and dialectic processes of- 225 -negotiating relations of power in classrooms which reflect particular personal, practical, andpolitical understandings of those social relations.Their curriculum negotiations incorporate these same understandings. The women do nottalk of conveying curriculum but of creating and enacting it in relatively autonomous ways. Theyadapt the content, skills, attitudes, and processes of social studies in integrative, reflective, andholistic ways which suggest their different ways of knowing and being located as womengeographers in social studies and the social world, a kind of praxis. Their teaching stories oftenspeak implicitly of the girl-friendly curriculum approaches which are made explicit in theliterature of science and math teaching.The freedom which characterizes their curriculum transformations of social studies is moreconstrained in Geography 12; their negotiations, more complex. Standardized assessment is astructural constraint. Formally measuring student progress, teaching and testing under thecompetitive agenda of success for some, failure for others, and assessing quantitativelyeducation's productivity and effectiveness are difficult processes for five of these women; suchprocesses collide with their personal and educational narratives of teacher and student autonomyin constructing knowledge and authentically assessing that knowledge in terms of the manydiverse stories which are classroom and curriculum realities. Individual resistance to thestructurally constraining nature of teaching for standardized assessment takes the form of self-reflexive dialogue. Teaching for critical thinking, they think critically about who they areteaching and what they are teaching for. All of the women respond to the challenge bynegotiating for optimal student success within the constraints of teaching and assessmentconventions; in this critical and dialectical way, they conform to the curriculum and assessmentexpectations. These stories suggest, however, other ways of understanding and respecting humandiversity in learning. They expose some educators' real discomfort with the metaphors which- 226 -cast education in the technical terms of business and which seek ultimately to impose rationalmethods upon the rich, authentic possibilities for human learning.These women also participate actively within broader educational contexts. Theyconstruct identities as leaders within schools, departments, and other professional contexts. Inthis way, they live out notions of participatory citizenship within educational communities beyondtheir own classrooms. They are again guided in the processes of negotiating these contexts bythe personal, practical, and political understandings which underpinned their classroomnegotiations of curriculum and pedagogy.What characterizes their stories, however, is the increased complexity and contradictorynature of their negotiations for some of the women, as they encounter gendered social andstructural constraints in relations of power. Three identity constructions seem to be sociallyacceptable for women and women teachers; those who work as mothers, as playmates, or ascheerleaders under the expert guidance of men are more likely to be accepted in their growth asteachers and leaders (Weiler, 1988; Manicom, 1992; Wilson, 1993). In living out these roles,women are more likely to succeed in social studies teaching and leadership. This, of course, isproblematic; women as intellectuals, for example, who think critically about their identities andlocatedness as teachers and leaders, seek respect for the authority of their different types ofknowledge but do not always speak in the deferential tones or from the appropriate place thatthese roles require.Learning that one can speak in a voice of one's own is not easy for women; there are fewmodels in education of women whose stories are not told as sidebar narratives. There are,however, stories of those who choose to reject or re-negotiate the identities socially constructedas appropriate for women. These are the women subject to sanctions, such as gender jokes,intimidation, transfers, and punishing timetables. In social studies teaching, women's rejection- 227 -of these roles is grounded paradoxically in each one's particular political understanding of herplace and role as a citizen in a system which endorses empowering notions of the rights of theindividual, of educated and democratic citizenship, of community participation, and of socialjustice. These, it would seem, apply conditionally to women.Some of the women who have resisted the socially constructed and constraining terms forwomen's participation encounter and deal with anger. They struggle to maintain a sense ofagency and personal autonomy. They develop strategies of resistance such as silence, repressedanger, and lateral movement to other routes for development and recognition of their abilities.They seek the political support of unions for grievances but struggle with the preference for lesscombative negotiations between equals and with the uncomfortable personal costs of such actions.They protest against the repressive gender regimes which can characterize some teachinglandscapes. They speak subversively about the status quo which subverts their own capacitiesto speak openly and authoritatively. They struggle with their niceness in circumstances not nice.They eschew the competitive, the combative, the powerful, the isolating, and the hierarchicalrelations of power which contextually locate them as marginal and as less than those whose storyis told at the centre of the educational text. Their stories of teaching as senior subject specialistsalso contest the singular feminist pedagogical story which can serve to stereotype women asnurturing and as therefore natural teachers of young children. Such strategies challenge the socialand professional stories which subordinate women and which deny women's intellectual andprofessional identities.In visions of leadership in social studies and teaching which are comfortable for women,the women of the study articulate stories of collaboration, negotiation, lateral relations in the formof collegiality, and respect for different knowledges. Particularly significant in some of thesewomen's stories are the themes of instructional leadership and mentorship in facilitating their- 228 -creative, professional, and intellectual growth. As teachers who seek democratic, equitable,relational, and empowering places for their work, these women place value on leadership whichencourages the authority of women's personal, political, and practical knowledges and whichconstructs educational stories in terms of diversity and human possibilities. Women's workbenefits from the recognition and support of mentors or instructional leaders who offer themrespect and opportunities to negotiate their own terms for identities and authority as leaders andteachers of social studies. Women, the study indicates, work successfully and comfortably incontexts where power is enacted transformationally, that is, laterally, rather than transactionally,that is, hierarchically.Research about women's leadership supports these findings. Schools with womenadministrators have a greater focus on instruction, communication, achievement, studentperformance, individual differences, and staff morale. Women are more inclined to beinstructional leaders and have greater knowledge of the practice of teaching, emphasizing bothachievement and affective goals for learning. Women are more likely than men to empowerothers and work collaboratively to achieve group goals (Sadker, Sadker, and Klein, 1991;Shakeshaft, 1986; MacLeod, 1988). \"Women exhibit a more democratic, participatory style ofleadership than men, a style that encourages inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness in schools\"(Shakeshaft, 1986, p.503).CONSTRUCTING WOMEN'S 'CITIZENSHIP' WITHIN EDUCATIONALCOMMUNITIESThe women of this study do not explicitly articulate their understandings of citizenship,nor were my interview inquiries framed specifically to address their stories of teaching socialstudies for its citizenship goals. But I would make the case that, within the stories they tell, thereis a re-definition of citizenship which, in viewing schools as social models, is more inclusive of- 229 -the ways women participate in society. The conceptual networks and landscapes of organizationwhich constitute the geography of teaching are, in Greene's (1986) view, only schemata forunderstanding cultural life.The stories these women tell begin to unveil the gendered nature of current models ofcitizenship within the educational community. These models separate public and political(universal) concerns from the private and personal (feminine) social concerns of women,articulating culture and law in androcentric terms which subordinate and exclude the particularsof women's lives (Luke, 1992). Citizenship models inscribe the individual's relationship to thestate; they offer \"conceptions of male individualism, power, and public speech disguised in therhetoric of universalized self- and social empowerment\" (p.33). Teachers of citizenship educationare encouraged to empower students with the critical skills for political and public citizenship byvaluing their experience and voice. Yet, such models theoretically and practically deny theprivileging of some experience and voices and \"the gendered structural divisions upon whichliberal capitalism and its knowledge industries are based\" (p.37). The traditional concept ofcitizenship, suggests Noddings (1992b), views a citizen as \"a person of recognized public rank\"entitled to the privileges of a freeman; but a citizen, she says, is also a member of a communitywith duties more positive and voluntary than those prescribed by abstract law.Each woman in the study engages a triangle of personal, practical, and politicalunderstanding as lenses through which she constructs the meaning and the form of her life andher work as a teacher. Each skillfully negotiates constraints. Some are more constrained thanothers, but all are driven by political agendas for social and educational change. Their storiesof experiences both of and as authority are integrally linked to their political conceptions ofwomen's citizenship and leadership in educational communities as personal, practical,participatory, relational, community-based, and grounded in the particulars of the everyday life- 230 -of schools. In these women's stories can be heard contradictions which reveal a system muchin need of re-formed and re-visioned leadership and citizenship models.For Amanda-Leigh and Tammy, personal and political commitments to the particulars ofcritical/feminist and democratic pedagogy collide with harshly-imposed gender role expectationsof compliance. Despite their passionate adherence in pedagogical and personal ways to theliberal tenets of the critical discourse and democratic notions of citizenship, their locations aswomen illuminate the cultural realities of unequal power relations within schools. \"More willhave to be done to clarify the importance of everyday realities,\" as Greene (1986, p.497) says.Alison, the scholar, and Ellen might well consider what Greene (1986) says about images of theeducated person and citizen being male images, that is, identities not constructed for women.By interrupting the patriarchal \"business-as-usual\" with women's everyday realities and byresisting or refusing subordination, women risk the anger of men which, in its real consequencesfor them, contradicts the very foundations of the educational vision of empowerment.Critical citizenship has gender implications, (Gore, 1992), offering as critique of criticaland feminist pedagogies their lack of attention to the contexts for empowerment: \"They need toprovide better guidance for the actions of the teachers they hope to empower or they hope willempower students\" (p.68). Concerned about the contradictions of empowerment or liberatorypedagogies, Gore sees as dangerous the failure to address the regulatory context or institutionallocation of the struggle:When much of the empowerment rhetoric pertains to practiceswhich could or should take place within ... schools, we must askhow much freedom there can be within the institutional contextsand pedagogical exigencies of teaching? More attention to contextswould help shift the problem of empowerment from dualisms ofpower/powerlessness, and dominant/subordinate, that is, frompurely oppositional stances, to a problem of multiplicity andcontradiction. It may be helpful to think of social actorsnegotiating actions within particular contexts. I hasten to add here- 231 -that I am not advocating a notion of context as simply apseudonym/synonym for the present or the immediate. Rather, Iwould argue that context must be conceived as filled with socialactors whose personal and group histories position them as subjectsimmersed in social patterns. Thus contexts for the work ofempowerment need to be defined historically and politically withacknowledgment of the unique struggles that characterize theexercise of power at the micro levels (p.61).Teaching, for Gore, \"remains embedded within a history of moral and cultural regulation\" (p.68);the study indicates that these regulations and social patterns operate in particularly restrictiveways for women.Greene (1988) looks at the situatedness in which notions of freedom are enacted, wherefreedom is defined as the power to act and the power to choose; women's agency and choice arenarrowed and constrained by the nature of women's experience. The rhetoric of male autonomyand self-determination is abstract, hierarchical, and exclusive. The language of authority is oftencontractual and conventional, apparently objective, and detached from the affective, the private,and the concrete particularities of the everday lives of women. Women do not stand up anddemand their rights as autonomous citizens in the public sphere. It would be difficult, suggestsGreene, for a single mother, for example, to assert her natural rights and God-given liberties ifshe could not engage dialectically with the determining forces around her; her life is constrictedand confined by the needs of others and by lack of support. Women, socialized in \"niceness,\"protected in their upbringing from darkness, ambiguity, and complexity, are not well preparedfor the dangerous actualities of claiming the freedom and rights inherent in traditional notionsof citizenship.Freedom cannot be conceived apart from a matrix of social,economic, cultural, and psychological conditions. It is within thematrix that selves take shape or are created through choice ofaction in the changing situations of life. The degree and quality ofwhatever freedom is achieved are functions of the perspectivesavailable, and of the reflectiveness on the choices made (p.80).- 232 -Tammy, Amanda-Leigh, and Alison did stand up for their rights. Niceness gave way to the needto push back when determining forces could not be negotiated or engaged dialectically. But onemust ask, at what cost? How much better for the community of schools would it have been ifthey had been recognized as citizens with important contributions to make? How much morewould schooling gain by encouraging, rather than discouraging, the equal participation of Ellen?How might the processes of schooling be improved by placing greater value on the models ofcitizenship which Joan and Louise embody in their teaching and leadership?Currie (1992) views women's identities as social and historical preconstructions in theWestern liberal tradition. The normative dualisms of male and female, reason and emotion,culture and nature, doing and being, universal and particular, have created a system of genderedsocial organization. The \"revalorization of 'feminine' ways of knowing\" with its emphasis onwomen's intuition, emotional commitment, maternal qualities, and personal experience has servedto further distance women from public/political discourse and to obscure the real differences inpower relations (p.344). The \"hero of philosophical moral and political discourse\" is sustainedand re/produced through women's work or services:... through personal service (the work of maids, cooks, personalsecretaries), sexual service (including provision for his genitalsexual needs and bearing of his children, but also including \"beingnice,\" \"being attractive for him,\" and so forth), and also ego service(encouragement, support, praise, attention) (p.345).These categories relegate women to the service of men in the socially constructed andmarginalizing roles of mother, playmate, and cheerleader which were previously discussed in thisthesis. Louise, the mother, and Joan, the playmate, have constructed identities which conformto what is socially defined as acceptable for women and which afford them privilege. But theseroles constrain women's freedom to construct different identities and stories which claimauthority for their intellect, politicization, passion, voice, and equal participation, for example.- 233 -One wonders what the consequence might be if Joan or Louise chose other identities, thuschallenging the status quo and confronting the inequities? Both acknowledge that they havelearned the rules of the game.Vickers (1987) comments further upon women's work in the service of men by linkingwomen's natural capacity to physically reproduce the species and to nurture children, translatedas social nurturance, to the roots of patriarchy and nationalism: women's roles are inscribed asa patriarchal technology which creates and reinforces a culture's loyalties, identities, rights andresponsibilities, inclusions and exclusions, but these national and ethnic groups identities andloyalties, or citizenship expectations, are male-defined. \"Women are rarely viewed as culturemakers but as conduits for the identities of others\" (p.485).Noddings (1992a) points to the hypocrisy and sophism of schooling which pretends toendorse critical thinking and freedom of thought as primary virtues, while excluding the storiesof others and denying participants in the school community the opportunity to exercise andacquire these skills. The contradictions for women whose token equal access is granted by theliberal/democratic principles of equity and freedom which undergird education and the workplaceare discussed by Luke (1992):The liberal state can grant legal and equal opportunities of accessto the public sphere without providing for women the conditionsfor equal participation. This move, in turn, denies them equalaccess to the power (and rewards) with which to articulate andlegislate change in their diverse interests (p.36).Women participate as citizens by voting, working for wages, serving on city councils, teaching,typing the nation's memos, wiping its tables, making its beds, scrubbing its toilets. Their workis too often confined to extension of domestic labour. In secondary social studies, women teachthe young ones; men do not value or contest ownership of junior courses. The asymmetricalnature of women's social and educational participation is further illuminated in Luke's analysis- 234 -of what constitute \"substantive political problems\" significant enough to gain men's support: \"Wehave yet to see men organize to lobby for the right to housework, to childrearing, and to bringtheir wages in line with women\" (p.36).The social construction of women's identities as different, therefore deficient, and asdependent creates divisions that need to be overcome, says Spender (1982). She suggests thatWoolf's (1938, as cited in Spender) analysis of schooling as \"men's education\" is as valid todayas ever. Woolf advised women in subversiveness. Women should stay outside of men'seducation, she said, as it did not develop in the young an abhorrence of war or an understandingof cooperation; rather, men's education interpreted difference as threat and conquest as solution.Schools and other educational institutions can practise on a smallscale what nations can practise on a large scale, where competition,not cooperation, is the order of the day, where winning rather thana fair share is most valued, where difference is seen as deficiency.It is still men's education, and the same weaknesses, limitations,and exploitations are still valued. Virginia Woolf argued that ifthis was the 'civilisation' that men had created, women should be'disloyal' (Spender, 1982, pp. 138-9).The central paradox for women teachers whose personal and intellectual identities arelocated in social studies is found in the overly simplistic view of democratization in which theuniversal or master narratives of power deny practices of privilege and devalue the particularcontributions and knowledge of women.Critique and action, deployed at the classroom level withoutcritique of the metanarratives that theoretically and practicallysustain the structures and discourses of schooling in the liberalstate, may miss the point altogether. Equal opportunity to speak inthe classroom, like equal representation in imagery and languagein curricular text, will do little to challenge the outer limits of theepistomological horizon where the masculinist logic of theuniversal subject and its naming of the other is firmly inscribed(Luke, 1992, p.37).- 235 -Those whose \"heightened sense of the politics of power in the work of teaching and learning\"would seek to \"interrupt, interrogate, struggle with, or manage that power\" strive for transformedconceptions of citizenship which include the diversity and experience of others (Briskin andCoulter, 1992, p.254). Claiming authority for voice, intellect, passion, and imagination, andclaiming equality as citizens within educational communities are actions which, for women andothers denied equal access to the public discourse of education, challenge the liberal masters' textfrom the margins (Luke, 1992, p.45). The dominance of the masculinist subject in the discourseof democratic and critical education \"renders [the] emancipatory agenda for 'gender' theoreticallyand practically ineffective\" (Luke, as cited in Kenway and Modra, 1992, p.138).This project makes the case for putting gender on the social studies agenda and fordeconstructing patriarchy's narratives of democratic citizenship in both social studies andeducation. The case is made collectively and dialectically, forging alliances across others'differences; such cases must be inclusive and well-documented. The case is made when thesidebar narratives are woven into the mainstream of social studies and educational thought. This,according to Noddings (1992a), would mean re-thinking social studies and the models ofcitizenship we currently teach to include the private world of women's culture and caring. Witha re-visioned social studies as the heart, \"New curricula should reflect the fundamental interestsof private life as well as those of public life, and public life itself should be deeply influencedby the articulation of private life\" (p.240). The standards of women's culture, suggests Noddings(1992b), can also guide us in educationally planning for a more caring community and a saferworld.Casey and Apple (1989) make a further case for attending to women's stories of teachingwhen they look at trends in recent years towards technicism and the intensification of teachers'work, often viewed as \"women's work\":- 236 -With the working conditions of a predominantly female teachingforce a subject of intense political debate at the present time, andwith conservative policy proposals recommending more controlover teachers, we must accept the challenge to publicize the pastand present effects of such agendas on women teachers' lives. Asthe discourse of woman as teacher shows, finding ways for womenteachers to have a voice can be part of the struggle to alter theconditions of gendered labour (p.83).FEMINIST RESEARCH AS PRAXISFeminist research for me has been a personal, practical, professional, and political processin which I have negotiated and re-negotiated my understandings of women's teaching andleadership in social studies, of my personal story, values, and ideologies, and of the politicizedpraxis-oriented feminist research agenda. Collaborative research is, of necessity, a complex andconstant process of negotiating the theory, the data, the subjects' responses to meaning, advisors'critique, my own standpoints, and the very personal sense of integrity and responsibility in tellingother women's stories. Nor can one make the feminist case without reference to the dominantstory. Lewis (1992) says that men do not have to be present for \"women carry the parametersof patriarchic meaning-making as a frame from within which we struggle to articulate our owninterests\" (p.174). Feminist collaborative research takes longer for its need to attend to so manystories.Those who discuss feminist pedagogy know that \"the dynamics of power andempowerment are intricately intertwined\" (Briskin and Coulter, 1992, p.259). As students inclassrooms are empowered by negotiating, not avoiding, the power dynamics, so too are womenwho are given the opportunity to negotiate in the unequal power relations of institutional,academic, and social structures. Transforming the social relations of power within this thesis sothat it was safe for an individual to speak meant conceptualizing safety and empowerment in- 237 -women's collective, as well as individual, terms. This collection of women's stories consciouslyincorporates notions and processes of collective empowerment and safety.Alcoff (1992) says of the problem of speaking for others that \"a speaker's location isepistemically salient\" (p.7). She identifies the dilemma of the presence of the voice of the onewho speaks for others as a \"crisis of representation\": Is it the speaker's responsibility to speakout against oppression, or to follow the lead of those spoken for in uncritical ways, or to \"moveover and get out of the way,\" either by keeping silent or by deconstructing [bracketing] one'sown discourse? Is it sufficient to replace \"I\" with \"we,\" or to adopt the passive voice, therebyerasing agency, responsibility, and accountability? Neither can \"the positionality or location ofthe speaker and discursive context ... be ignored\" (p.12):How what is said gets heard depends on who says it, and who saysit will affect the style and language in which it is stated, which willin turn affect its perceived significance (for specific hearers) (p.13).To the extent that the discourse of schooling has a politicized context, does a voice not neutralhave legitimate claim to be heard? Once uttered, can meaning and truth be controlled? Doesone retreat from truth-telling and meaning-making, thereby \"[undercutting] the possibility ofpolitical effectivity\" (p.17)?Even a complete retreat from speech is of course not neutral sinceit allows the continued dominance of current discourses and acts byomission to reinforce their dominance (p.20).Alcoff argues for dialogue, reconceptualized \"as an event, which includes speaker, words, hearers,location, language, and so on\" (p.26), wherein listening is valued as much as speaking.April, 1993: And can you hear my voice? I have struggled with its place in this study.As I coordinate a conversation between six women, two advisors, and the theorists in whose workmy study is grounded, I am conscious that my own voice has gained strength and confidence.I have chosen the questions which generated the data, thereby omitting other inquiries and other- 238 -answers. I have selected the theory as well as the data to support the argument. I havepresented the stories, attentive to the integrity which underlies friendships, and protected thenarrators. I have struggled to be fair, trustworthy, and attentive to the dialogue. I have a stakein making the careful and well-documented case in collective terms. I have chosen to speak forothers who speak for me. I have chosen the tensionality and tonality of the story. I havereflected on the consequences and possibilities of choosing to interrupt the game. I acknowledgethe passion which drives my experience of research and teaching, which seeks to define a newgame more generous and inclusive of difference, and which no doubt, can be heard in my voiceas the storyteller.Ellsworth (1992) identifies the feminist poststructuralist perspective: \"Any women'spoliticized voice will be partial, multiple, and contradictory\" (p.103). A speaker, she says, mustacknowledge the \"multiplicity of authentic voices in her/himself.\"April, 1993: I speak as a woman, a mother, a graduate student, a practicing teacher ofsocial studies, a friend, and a feminist. All of these voices have political implications. There arerules for each voice. There is a critical tension where no one of my voices can be heard withoutthe others being there. I am choosing to talk, refusing the safety of silence, negotiating from theposition of collective narrative and careful documentation because the rules for and dynamicsof democratic participation don't define my or others' experience of it.Ellsworth's argument that critical pedagogy has failed to address \"issues of trust, risk, andthe operations of fear and desire around such issues of identity and politics in the classroom\"(p.105) must be extended to systemic issues for critical educators who live in socially constructedpositions of subordination. As in Ellsworth's classroom, we need, within academia and withinteaching,- 239 -... to see the task not as one of building democratic dialoguebetween free and equal individuals, but of building a coalitionamong the multiple, drifting, intersecting, and sometimescontradictory groups carrying unequal weights of legitimacy withinthe culture (p.109).The sidebar narratives, mine and others, need safe space in which to be heard, not as discordant,but as different and valid.May, 1993: I have had three opportunities to observe \"audience effect\" and will haveseveral more. The first was in making public the project questions at a Gender Equityconference jointly sponsored by the university and a local school board. The women whoattended my session represented teaching and the academy. No administrators or school boardrepresentatives chose to attend. The stories I had to tell would not have structural impact. Inleaving a half hour for discussion, I was interested in evaluating the effect of the presentation.Two young women new to social studies teaching seemed most enlivened with the opportunityto share their experiences and to ask further questions. I wondered at the empowering effect theyseemed to have gained from merely knowing, at that time, that the questions were being asked,stories shared, understandings explored.In two academic contexts, I had an opportunity to share and receive feedback on the workI had been doing. The first was a meeting of an academic social studies group. Early in themeaning-making stages of this study, I shared my draft of chapter 3, the stories of the women'spersonal lives. My analysis at that stage was tentative, but I had thought their life stories wouldbe interesting as \"something different\" in social studies research and might generate questionsabout how this would relate to their teaching stories. I was stuck for answers at times. Myanswers and grasp of the concepts felt a lot like the tentative use of language one might expectfrom a woman graduate student whose project is unfinished and who is speaking to a room ofvenerable men in social studies education. There was nothing tentative about the response of- 240 -the one who represented the politics and practice of social studies teaching who said he wasoutraged and offended by their life stories. I have offered to give a workshop at the socialstudies teachers' conference in the fall. My language is no longer tentative. Part of me hopesonly women will attend; that will be safe. Part of me knows that others must hear andparticipate in the dialogue, but that could be painful. I walk the difficult path between theauthority and energy of my knowing, the fear of the backlash for knowing what I know, and thesafety of silence and deferential tones.Feminist research is also about reflexivity and about empowering those involved in theresearch process. How have the researcher and the researched been affected or transformed bythe project?Certainly, the sense of isolation which Ellen has felt has been overcome in knowingothers' stories; she has a sense of supportive community. She has been excited by the storiesof women's teaching, having no models like these, and would like to have the opportunity tocollaborate more directly with women like these, to try doing things as they do. She is currentlyfacing yet another timetable-dictated shift in her teaching assignment, this time almost whollyinto English where they need someone for five additional blocks. Despite her request to teachScience full time, her flexibility as a teacher makes it expedient once again to disconnect herfrom her preferred courses. The tyranny of the timetable and its operators can still be felt aspunishment rather than reward for teachers whose diversity and expertise are not confined to asingle subject identity. The research cannot empower or transform her in her response to thisyear's situation, but she speaks now of seeking a transfer next year.Alison has not been transformed by the research process but is better informed, she said.In an ideal world, women could be respected and accepted for ourselves. She has recognized herown anger in what she terms the \"arrogant\" tone to her voice. She is angry and will continue- 241 -to do something about it in her own independent way. Interestingly, however, after thisconversation, Alison phoned to discuss the possibility of a collective statement to the Ministryof Education and the Teachers' Federation about the importance of addressing women's concernsin social studies in their selection procedures for the formation of a curriculum revisioncommittee. These stories, she felt, were important to share in political ways. She and Ellen bothmade the case for telling men's stories of difference as well, though feminists would suggest theycan make their own case!Louise has been on leave from teaching this year. She realizes now that she has beenexhausted with the increasing demands placed upon classroom teachers and has spent the yearexamining creative ways of returning to teach in blocks of time that allow her to pursue otherdimensions and directions in her life. She and her principal are still ironing out the details,though she is encouraging the district to offer more flexible timetables for other teachers who risklosing themselves in their work. In participating in the study, she has seen the importance ofdefining one's self and one's work \"from the centre.\" Involvement in this study and her year'sleave of absence have given her the chance to reflect seriously on her work and upon the realimportance of having women as role models for students and for other women in social studies.Joan's recent disappointment in not being shortlisted for a principalship in her district,despite tremendous recommendations from her principal, was shortlived. Instead, she wasappointed to joint positions as district principal and as coordinator of technology. The study,along with the review of her own and others' experiences, has made her more sensitive to thedifficulties which girls and women face. In observing classes in her present school, she paysgreater attention to the gender dynamics. In one or two instances, she has been aware of \"male\"classrooms as places where girls are not comfortable. She was also more critically aware of theproblems for women in social studies in her role as a member of an external accreditation team.- 242 -Two young women with new and innovative ideas and successful practices in social studiesteaching were openly intimidated by two older men whose practices were quite traditional anddidactic. The women were viewed as \"rocking the boat.\" Yet gender equity was not perceivedas a problem in the school, where most of the teachers were men. The words of the externalteam's report, she said, were carefully chosen. It recommended the need to move towards genderbalance and to provide gender role models in the school. Gender issues require tremendousdiplomacy; they are easily dismissed as the causes of women who have \"axes to grind,\" saidJoan.Joan and I discussed feminism as she had come to understand it. She had initially resistedthe term, she said, because of her discomfort and unpleasant associations with lesbian feminismin women's competitive sport. She thinks now, however, that she relates to the principles offeminism differently, particularly as she looks at the differential experiences of women and menin teaching and administration.Amanda-Leigh, in reflecting upon her involvement in this project, said that she is evenclearer about what she stands for and believes in as a teacher of social studies. The stories ofthis study are about women, she said, with strong personalities; all are survivors, but at whatcost? What does the system lose in terms of human energy and potential for growth when itsubjects those who are passionately committed to their work to the minimalizing and emotionallydraining circumstances depicted in her own and other stories? Nobody should have to go throughwhat she or Ellen or Alison or Tammy have been through, she said. In their stories, the messageof \"don't rock the boat\" overrides the key understanding of teachers' work, that of the importanceto committed teachers of personal integrity, pride, and professionalism. There is anger anddiscouragement in her voice. I know her best of all, and I rather think she will find thetransformative capacity in her anger to make a real difference some day.- 243 -Tammy has developed a more detached and bemused perspective on what she does. Shedoes not take the gender dynamics of her teaching situation so seriously or so personally anymore, consciously incorporating more of a sense of humour in how things go; they don't, manyof them, know how they offend. She is also more aware of the difficulties and inequities theyounger women on her staff are facing; she is \"not so much an island\" any more, realizing shehas to be more protective of them. What, she wonders, will the teaching lives of these womenbe like? She can see how easily they could be like hers. The inequities are still there andchange is surprisingly slow. Tammy has never had any difficulty with the principles of feminismas these reflect women's politicized understandings of social and educational life.May, 1993: And me? How have I been transformed by the research process? I'm a lotlike Tammy: in claiming the time and place for documentation and reflection and in movingfrom tentativeness to authority in what I know, I find I am no longer so inclined to be angry.I don't take the master stories so personally any more. I am careful to try to catch thatreactivity, the oh-so-quick responses to perceived and real slights, which can be used toundermine the case. And these new responses seem to transcend other facets of my life. I takethe time now to listen attentively to what others are saying, reflect on my own understandings,consider the implications and the consequences, and negotiate the meaning. As a graduatestudent, I have had the benefits of role models and mentors who were absent when I wasteaching and of encouragement in the academy to create meaning with passion. I have movedfrom tentativeness to confidence in negotiating and telling important educational stories inpersonal, gendered, holistic, and integrative ways. I am amazed that, once conceived, the projecttook on its own natural life and was nurtured, shaped, and formed to independence in exactlynine months! Yes, feminist collaborative research as praxis takes longer but it is such importantwork for women who engage in teaching as social and personal praxis and who face the\u00E2\u0080\u0094 244 \u00E2\u0080\u0094disjunctives of thinking critically and thus politically about teaching, as they teach for politicaland critical thinking in social studies and the social world. So much along the way wasdiscovery that I realize I could not have wholly designed the study in advance; I had to allowfor the tentative and open-ended nature of critical feminist inquiry. The research process hasbeen as much a personal process of transformation as ones of academic and professionalmastery.June, 1993: I had once joked about giving a social studies workshop on women'sexperience entitled \"Is it just me, or -- ?\" But the question, framed tentatively, partially,deferentially, imperfectly, is really rhetorical. I know the answer. What I have liked best aboutthis research process is that there is a sense of community where there wasn't much of onebefore. All of the women in this study have encouraged the completion of this project, but I findnow that I am encouraging and supporting them in some way. I have found myself saying thingslike: Louise, it's all right to step back from teaching -- your story provides a model for others.Joan, teaching needs your way of seeing things. Yes, Alison, use my story in making your case.Amanda-Leigh, don't give up -- you' re on the right track and your vision of education holds thepromise of better things. You do good and important work, Tammy, and there's real strengthin being able to support others. Ellen, we miss you in social studies. And my sense of thiscommunity is that there are others -- student teachers with whom I worked this year and youngwomen teachers who came to me, knowing the work I was doing -- who need to know that theyare welcome and valued, that they are on the right path and part of a community. It's been hardand serious work, yet in its collaborative and integrative nature, it has been fun and personallymeaningful. Everyone wants to come to see the defence. We have talked of getting together fora real conversation.\u00E2\u0080\u0094 245 \u00E2\u0080\u0094IMPLICATIONS OF THE RESEARCHWomen's underrepresentation in social studies teaching is not specifically addressedwithin the scope of this project, though the study has real implications for issues of women'sequal participation. Further research needs to be conducted in the field to discern whethercurricular, pedagogical, and structural barriers and hiring practices mitigate against women'steaching and leadership in social studies. Similarly, the decision-making of female pre-serviceand in-service teachers with social science majors, including those who choose to teach in otherfields, would yield valuable information in the matter of women's absence andunderrepresentation in social studies. Additional studies of the ways in which women make orare limited in making course and career choices in social studies teaching and leadership wouldprovide more definitive information about the ghettoization of women in junior social studiesteaching and their invisibility in leadership roles. Studies of students' understandings of thegendered nature of social studies teaching and curriculum are also important.The women's pedagogical, curricular, and leadership narratives provide valuable insightsinto critical, collaborative, democratic, and learner-focused approaches to teaching which haveimplications for current educational reform initiatives. In social studies, more attention must bepaid to developing curriculum inclusive of other stories. Women's social and politicalunderstandings are presently located as the token representations of sidebar narratives to thepresent master text of social studies. The call for inclusion remains unheeded.Recognizing women's pedagogies as particular and valid in social studies criticallyexposes the single voice of the manifest curriculum and its traditional teaching approaches.Better representation of women teachers in social studies would reflect the multivoicedness thatis our social reality and would provide students with a balance of perspectives, an understandingof social balance. Girls are already disadvantaged by the conventions of schooling; the gender\u00E2\u0080\u0094 246 \u00E2\u0080\u0094gap affects girls' interests, attainment, self-esteem, and career choices (Sadker and Sadker, 1986;American Association of University Women, 1992; A Capella, 1991; Martin, 1982, 1985;Gaskell, McLaren, and Novogrodsky, 1989). In light of research showing students' lack ofinterest in social studies and of the role of the social studies teacher in creating positive attitudesand learning environments (Fraser, 1981; Haladyna et al, 1982; Schug et al, 1984; Shaughnessy,Haladyna, 1985), Stanworth's (1983) research that showed girls were more responsive towomen's teaching and Fouts' (1990) finding that girls are more positive about social studieswhen they have women teachers bears some serious consideration.[It] may be the unique perspectives, values, and insights the femaleteachers brought to the social studies classes because they arefemale. That is to say, either consciously or not, these teachersmay have injected into the curriculum values, content, andperspectives that are of more interest and relevance to youngwomen than the curriculum provided by the men teachers. Theymay have employed feminist pedagogy (Maher, 1987), or teachingmethodologies to create a learning environment that appeals tofemales. Consequently, the females felt more involved in the class,closer affiliation with their classmates, and more support andconcern from the female teacher than the male teacher. It may alsobe that for the first time some of these young women were exposedto a female role model who is vitally interested and involved insocial education (p.420).More research which explores women's teaching and curricular transformations and theireffects on student learning and attitudes would be particularly significant. In light of thedominance of the traditional curriculum and pedagogy of social studies which speaks of politics,culture, law, history, geography, economics, and citizenship in androcentric terms and the lessthan positive research findings, it is conceivably a dysfunctional experience for boys and for girls.When there are very few women to articulate these dimensions of the social world in their ownterms and to act as role models for girls, it is perhaps not surprising that women areuncomfortable with social studies curriculum and its traditional teaching methods, that women\u00E2\u0080\u0094 247 \u00E2\u0080\u0094are underrepresented in social studies and related fields in the social world, and that social studiesreinforces gender role stereotypes. Viewed by students as the legitimate domain of men andmen's knowledge, the messages of social studies deny women major roles in public life (Kellyand Nihlen, 1982). The validity of women's identities as teachers of social studies and as thosequalified to speak about public life is measured by their presence and by their status as subjectspecialists, as department heads, and as administrators. This, in turn, suggests that hiring andpromotional practices in social studies, schools, districts, and related professional contexts, suchas Ministry committees, need further exploration for the public ways in which women arerepresented, misrepresented, and underrepresented.Additional ethnographic studies of women's personal, political, and social understandingsand transformations of social studies curriculum at the junior and senior levels are also merited,in light of this study's findings. Narrative insights into women's ways of teaching add powerfuldimensions to our understanding of the art of teaching social studies. The stories begin the taskof providing role models of social studies teaching for inclusion, equity, and socialtransformation. Such stories are valuable for pre-service and in-service teacher education anddiscourse in social studies; they span the chasm which separates the public from the private worldof social studies teaching and overcome the isolation for women with few role models in thefield. These stories begin the building of a stronger, safer, more inclusive social studiescommunity; they invite the membership of others. Many more stories need to be told if we areto enact Lewis and Simon's (1986) previously-cited imperative to \"create [the] space for liveddifferences that is not framed in oppositional terms\" (p.216).\u00E2\u0080\u0094 248 \u00E2\u0080\u0094EPILOGUEJune 25, 1993: This thesis was celebrated on June 18. Four of the women who hadparticipated in this study were able to attend. Tammy had picked Louise up at an early morningferry from the Island. Though they hadn't seen each other in years, they were having a greattime catching up on each other's news when I encountered them looking for the building. Alisonand Amanda-Leigh were able to come as well. It was a sunny day and the room was warm. Butthere was a special other warmth which comes from a sense of common project and mutualsupport and encouragement that created tangible ripples of celebration within the context ofdefence.One important aspect of the defence was a discussion prompted by Alan Sears' (doctoralstudent and social studies methods instructor) comments on the importance of the messages ofthis project, including his own lack of awareness of women's absence in his classes. Alan andI agreed to consider a co-presentation -- an alliance -- to create better understanding in the fieldof the meaning of inclusive curriculum and pedagogy in social studies. Valerie (Dr. Raoul,external examiner) suggested incorporating Dr. Deborah Tannen' s work, You Just Don'tUnderstand, on the different languages of men and women.We all went for a champagne lunch afterwards. Valerie wanted to know which one wasLouise; in fact, she had no trouble guessing. The two were off in a flash, deep in discussion ofecology and organic gardening. I overheard each of the women whose story I had told -- whoseconfidentiality I had so carefully protected -- introduce herself during the course of lunch: first,by her real name, and then by the pseudonym used in the study! Peter (Dr. Seixas, advisor)remarked on how interesting it was, \"like getting to meet all the characters in a novel!\" Jane(Dr. Gaskell, advisor) talked about how the study had been a catalyst for her own sense of theneed to ensure more women participated in post-secondary social studies education; I wish her\u00E2\u0080\u0094 249 \u00E2\u0080\u0094luck in her new position as Associate Dean of Education in creating the forum for change withinthe academy.And my son and his friend, both 16, attended the defence. They had some ideas forchanging social studies teaching too. Though they didn't speak up at the time -- I wish now I'dthought of creating the space for their comments -- they had lots of ideas which were promptedby the discussion and lots to say over lunch.In finishing this project, I have decided to try to find Miss Debrecen. During my ownhigh school years, Janet Debrecen was the only woman who taught me social studies. She madeall the difference; in that one year in grade 10, social studies came to mean so much more thansimply taking notes off the board, answering questions from the board, listening to the droningof history, and memorizing facts which I never remembered adequately for tests. That was theyear I was the top student in my junior high school. We studied Canadian geography that year,I remember. I was in her classroom when we heard the news of JFK' s assassination. It was amemorable year for me. I need to thank her for her part in that and for her part in this project,as well.- 250 -APPENDIX IREPORT 2082 - 1992/1993 SCHOOL YEARMinistry of Education and Ministry Responsible forMulticulturalism and Human Rights, Victoria, BCMALE AND FEMALE HEAD COUNT OF PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERSAND ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERSBY SECONDARY SCHOOL COURSE AND SUBJECT AREASOCIAL STUDIES -- PROVINCIAL DATASelected Courses and Data DerivationsMale FemaleRegular Program: N^% N %Law 12 225 90.7 23 9.3Geography 12 174 86.1 28 13.9History 12 178 82.8 37 17.2Western Civilization 12 129 78.7 35 21.3Social Studies 11 498 77.8 142 22.2Social Studies 10 587 77.4 171 22.6Social Studies 9 588 76.5 181 23.5Social Studies 8 584 68.9 264 31.1By comparison:Sciences Humaines 11 8 33.3 16 66.7Sciences Humaines 10 17 38.6 27 61.4Sciences Humaines 9 24 43.6 31 56.4Sciences Humaines 8 28 45.9 33 54.1Junior/Senior Course Teaching Distributions in Social Studies in BC:NWomen teaching regular program social studies:^ 881Women teaching junior (SS8, 9, 10) social studies: 616Women teaching senior (SS11, electives) social studies: 265Men teaching regular program social studies:^ 2963Men teaching junior (SS8, 9, 10) social studies: 1759Men teaching senior (SS11, electives) social studies: 1204Total number of regular program teachers:^ 3844- 251 -Distributions By Percent of Total BC Secondary Social Studies Teachers:Male: 67.1%Female: 22.9%(Of whom 69.9.% are teaching junior courses)Men teaching senior courses: 31.3%Women teaching senior courses: 6.9%- 252 -APPENDIX IIQUESTIONNAIRE RESPONSESTHINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT SOCIAL STUDIES: WOMEN'S PERSPECTIVESINSTRUCTIONS: Please complete the following experience and qualifications information ascompletely and as accurately as possible. Some of the questions will be explored in further detailduring our upcoming interviews. Please be assured that every effort will be made to ensuresubject confidentiality during the research process and within the interpretation of results.CONTACT INFORMATIONNAME, HOME ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBER, SCHOOL, SCHOOL ADDRESSAND PHONE NUMBER.PERSONAL INFORMATIONMarital status: 2 single, 1 divorced, 1 widowed, 2 married.Ages: 30, 40, 42, 44, 52, 53.Number of children: 1 x 1, 1 x 2, 1 x 3, 3 x 0.Ages of children: 11; 12, 14; 28, 33, 35.Also listed were interests and personal accomplishments, referred to as relevant in study.ACADEMIC INFORMATIONDegrees:^5 x BA; 3 x BEd; 1 x MEd; 1 x MA; 1 x MRM.Academic standings:^All marked \"superior\" or \"above average\"Majors: Geography, History, SS Curriculum, English, Ecology,Economics, SS/Phys Ed, Political Science.OTHER PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATIONS1 has been an administrator (vice-principal) for 7 years.Other leadership roles:5 x department heads6 x school, district committees6 x Ministry assessment/curriculum committees2 x writing contracts2 x curriculum development2 x professional development workshop leaders2 x accreditation2 x PSA executive2 x local teachers' association representatives1 x national geographic associations (2)1 x district Pac Rim coordinator- 253 -1 x provincial assessment1 x director, educational affiliations (2)Provincial Specialists' Association (PSA) memberships:4 x SS; 1 x Environmental Educators'; 1 x Science.Extracurricular Activities:3 x coaching; 1 x refereeing; 4 x clubs; 2 x sponsor, schoolactivities; 4 x school programs; 1 x Yearbook sponsor.TEACHING EXPERIENCE115 years cumulative; averaged at nearly 20 years each.Career interruptions: All. 3 x leaves of absence for travel, education orother reasons; 3 x maternity leaves; 4 x transferred to another country,province, district, department, or moved to full-time administration.Teaching full-time social studies, September, 1992: 3 x yes; 3 x no. Oneleave of absence; one full time administration; one transferred to anotherdepartment.Years of social studies teaching experience:History 12^(2)^5 yearsGeography 12 70 yearsLaw 12 (2)^17 yearsWestern Civilization 12^(1)^3 yearsSocial Studies 11^79 yearsSocial Studies 10 69 yearsSocial Studies 9 60 yearsSocial Studies 8^39 yearsOther subjects taught: 6 x yes3 x English; 4 x Sciences; 3 x Math; 1 x Home Ec; 3 x counselling; 1 xPhys Ed; 1 x Spanish; 1 x Outdoor Ed; 1 x Geology 12; 1 x Humanities;1 x Sociology; 1 x Psychology.Department head experience: 3 x currently department heads; 2 xpreviously department heads; 1 x No.TEACHING PRACTICEHow often do you integrate social studies with other curriculum areas?1 x always; 5 x usually.How often do you coordinate projects and assignments with teacher-librarian?1 x always; 4 x usually; 1 x sometimes.- 254 -How often do you coordinate units, projects, assignments with department colleagues orwith district colleagues?1 x always; 2 x usually; 3 x sometimes.Check those activities which one might observe in any of your social studies classes.How much do you think students learn from each of these?The data were summarized as a total in column 1. High values representperceived high value for student learning. Respondents checked A Great Deal =2; Some = 1; Not Much = 0. Columns 3, 4, and 5 represent the number ofresponses in each respective category.10 Small group discussions 4; 2; 09 Film or video 3; 3; 07 Debate 3; 1;^14 Worksheets 0; 4; 06 Simulations, role play,cooperative games 1; 4; 13 Lecture 0; 3; 28 Laboratory 3; 2; 09 Library research 3; 3; 09 Field studies 4; 1; 04 Giving notes 1; 2; 29.5 Guest speakers 3; (1); 2; 03 Computer programs 0; 2;^16 Using textbook 1; 4; 12 Other: (learning stations) 1; 0; 0What limitations do you find with using any of these teaching strategies in any particularcourse?Class size; limited software; individual student needs; time (3), especially withGeography 12; classroom dynamics; student variables; limitations of lecture,worksheets, notes; number of students for field studies; stress.On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is very enjoyable, 2 is enjoyable, 3 is not sure, 4 isunenjoyable, and 5 is very unenjoyable, please rate these activities for students.Again, the data were summarized as a total in column 1. Low values, in this case,represent teachers' perceptions of very enjoyable. Columns 3 to 7 represent thenumber of responses in each respective category.9 Working in small groups 3; 3; 0; 0; 021 Doing worksheets 0; 0; 4; 1;^114 Taking part in games, drama,or role play 1; 2; 3; 0; 014 Doing a research project 1; 3; 1; 1; 014 Using the library 1; 2; 3; 0; 08 Going on a field excursion 4; 2; 0; 0; 0- 255 -21^Using their textbooks^0; 0; 4; 1; 1Other: (individual creations,lecture)^0; 1; 0; 0; 1What importance do you place on each of the following for evaluating students'achievement in social studies, where 1 is very important, 2 is important, and 3 is notimportant?The data were summarized to a total in column 1 below. Here, low valuesrepresent teachers' perceptions of high importance for evaluating students'achievement. Columns 3 to 5 represent the number of responses in eachrespective category.10 Teacher-made tests 2; 4; 015 Standardized tests 0; 3; 313 Provincial exams 1; 3; 211 Student-teacher conferences 2; 3; 18 Individual research projects 5; 0; 110 Group projects 2; 4; 010.5 Oral presentations 2; 3; (1); 011 Anecdotal records 2; 3; 18.5 Professional judgement 3; (1); 2; 013 Peer evaluation 1; 3; 212 Homework assignments 1; 4; 1Other: 0; 0; 0In your social studies classes, what do you do to foster critical thinking?Develop self-esteem; incorporate a variety of points of view and resources (2); usecurrent issues; use open-ended questions; emphasize process and reasoning; labs,tasks, problems.How do you evaluate students' critical thinking?Assess, not evaluate; look at support for their views; professional judgement;written and oral work (3).Do you perceive students in your classes as having a more positive attitude to socialstudies than to other course? Clarify if necessary.Yes x 4; sometimes x 1; too many variables x 1. Positive, non-threateningclassroom; they return after Grad; enrollment; depends on student interest andtopic; students perceive Geography as easier.Do you think that being a woman influences the way you teach social studies? Pleaseexplain.Yes x 2; no x 2; maybe x 1. Compassion; compromise; process; women's history,law, issues; women in global context; different perspective; men are humanists;teaching style is a factor.- 256 -Do you think that students respond differently to women than to men as teachers? Pleaseexplain, relating it to social studies, if possible.Yes x 1. Women's approach to teaching war, social and historical issues; studentsrespond to teacher personality and as person (2); student response may be family-based (1), cultural (1), socially determined (1) eg: male aggression, previousschool experiences; depends upon student; interest in students as individuals iskey.SOCIAL STUDIES CURRICULUMHow useful do you find curriculum guides in communicating social studies goals andobjectives?3 x very useful; 2 x somewhat usefulHow often do you refer to the curriculum guides when preparing for social studiesclasses?1 x never; 1 x at the beginning of the year; 3 x every month; 1 x almostevery week.In your understanding of the curriculum for social studies (omit electives here), howimportant are each of the following aspects? 2 is very important, 1 is moderatelyimportant, and 0 is not important at all.The data were summarized to a total in column 1. High value represents teachers'perceptions of high importance. One did not respond as her experience has beenlimited to Geography 12 in recent years. Columns 3 to 5 represent the numberof responses in each respective category.10 History 5; 0; 08 Global Awareness 3; 2; 08 Social and Cultural Diversity 4; 1; 08 International Relations 3; 1; 04 Sociology and Anthropology 1; 2; 210 Canadian Studies 5; 0; 08 Inquiry Learning 3; 2; 010 Citizenship 5; 0; 09 Decision Making 4; 1; 08 Media Literacy 3; 2; 08 Geography 3; 2; 07 Environmental Studies 3; 1;^16 Law 2; 2; 110 Current Events 5; 0; 09 Problem Solving 4; 1; 07 Political Science 2; 3; 09 Rights and Responsibilities 4; 1; 05 Economics 1; 3;^110 Critical Thinking 5; 0; 06 Attitude Development 1; 4; 0- 257 -9 Research Skills 4; 1; 05 Community Participation 1; 3; 16 Report Writing 1; 4; 08 Communication 3; 2; 0Other:^(Humanities, integration) 0; 0; 1From your point of view, should some of these aspects of social studies have more or lessemphasis in the curriculum for social studies 8 to 11?More emphasis: 5 x Geography; 3 x Global Awareness; 1 x each of Law, Inquiry,Humanities, Community Participation; 1 x students should be exposed to all.Less emphasis: Canadian Studies; History; Content, esp. Grade 8.Please comment on any concerns you have with the current social studies (or seniorelective) curriculum.Lack of geography, grades 8 - 11 (2); too general nature of geography; weakbackground of students in geography; too much content; content emphasized overprocess; poor texts; history taught at expense of other area; lack of integration.Please comment on any difficulties you have experienced in implementing the currentsocial studies curriculum.Amount of material in Geography 12 (2); changing course loads; some teacherslack \"depth\" of background; best ways of implementing new materials; class sizes;lack of resources (2); no support for field experiences.Please rank the following broad goals of social studies, adding any that you feel may bemissing. Use 1 to represent most important.The data were summarized to a total in column 1 Low values represent teachers'perceptions of most important goals.17^To encourage inquiry and critical thinking17^To facilitate understanding of global concerns24^To prepare students for participation in society24^To promote attitudes of tolerance and understanding29^To facilitate positive and constructive social change30^To transmit a nation's cultural legacy(1)^Other: (1) To respect and understand the natural worldIn your opinion, does being a women influence the way you teach the curriculum, thatis, explain the world, its history, cultures, events, problems, politics, places, etc.? Pleaseexplain.Yes x 2. Supplement curriculum, to tell \"rest\" of history; discuss issues as theypertain to women; include ordinary people; emphasize social history.No x 1. In teaching, gender is a point of view which is included; \"in teaching,gender ought not to be a factor.\"Considering the question x 1. Not sure x 1.- 258 -Can you identify concerns that women in teaching may have with any aspect of socialstudies education?4 identified concerns: Women in minority in leadership in social studies, thereforeanomalous situations; omission from history; lack of access to teaching highergrades; poor support materials for studying women and history, women and law;problems with hiring and advancement of women in school system.No x 1. No answer x 1.Why do you think it is important for women to teach social studies?4 x Role Models. Demonstrate competence. Demonstrate women can teach senioracademic courses. Important for both boys and girls. Changing role models insociety reflected in social studies. Gender equity. Important not to be limited byprejudice and societal expectations. Quality and type of information women bringto students. Possibly different teaching style which promotes different skills andattitudes. \"Women have opportunity to foster growth, not control it.\"- 259 -APPENDIX IIISAMPLE INTERVIEW QUESTIONSTHINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT SOCIAL STUDIES: WOMEN'S PERSPECTIVESRESEARCHER: MOIRA EKDAHL, GRADUATE STUDENTSOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL STUDIESFACULTY OF EDUCATION, UBCINTRODUCTORY STATEMENTS: In these two hours we will be together, I am interestedin who you are as a person, as a woman, and as a teacher of particular subjects in particularcontexts. Specifically, I am interested in concrete detail, example, your stories. Thequestionnaire gives a sense of who you are, how you teach -- I need to know how you view theworld, what factors shape or have shaped your view of the world, and how that particularworldview translates to your teaching. You have read the purpose of the study and I am veryhappy that you have agreed to participate so willingly. All information is confidential andsubject to your review and permission to incorporate in the study.QUESTIONSFirst, can we start with your childhood. What kind of a family did you grow up in? relationswith parents? siblings? family interests? ideas, values? important friendships? activities? anyother significant influences? the most significant aspects of your childhood that have influencedyour way of viewing the world now? did you grow up in Canada? if not, what do you see asthe biggest differences in cultural context?Can we take a look at your schooling? What did you like best about being a student inelementary school? in secondary school? why? can you remember anything or anyone havinga real impact on you as a student? an important friendship? involvement in activities? whatsubjects were your favourite? can you recall a particular teacher -- his or her characteristics --who had an impact on you? what aspects of social studies were of interest to you? were thereparticular aspects which you found boring or irrelevant? what about high school in general wasproblematic for you?Did you move directly from high school to university? What factors were involved in thedecision or in delaying the decision? was the decision entirely your own? did you have ayobstacles to overcome in going to or completing university? what about your decision to majorin : who or what influenced you, or was this entirely your own decision? if you hadthis decision to make over again, would you make it the same way? can you describe some ofthe interesting aspects of being involved in the discipline while at university? did you financeyour own education by working at the same time? what kinds of jobs did you hold down? whatkinds of activities did you take part in, and how did you spend your \"social\" time while atuniversity? what impact did your time at university have on your later life? have you returnedto university? do you plan to?- 260 -I'd like to have a look at your married and family life. You are/were (married, divorced,separated, widowed) with/out children. What factors influenced your decision to get married atthat stage in your life? were you working, finishing school, etc.? what about the decision to(not) have children? can you describe for me the adjustments you had to make in becoming aworking mother? continue to make as a working mother? the difficulties? joys? sources ofsupport? any major hurdles you've weathered as a married coutple or as a family? how doesyour family spend the summer?Can you tell me about single life. What kinds of activites are you involved in? what do youdo for fun? how do you meet new people? who do you spend most of your time with, socially?what about single life do you like/not like? do you see lots of your family? what are your futureplans?I'd like to look at teaching next. Can you recall the process of arriving at the decision to enterteaching? was it your decision, or were there other influences? what about yourself did you feelmost suited you to the profession? are there characteristics which sometimes made or make youfeel not suited to the profession? an example of where this might be a problem? what wasstudent teaching like? did you have a good relationship with sponsor teachers? what did youlike or not like about them or their style? did they have an influence on your teaching? can yourecall incidents where you decided teaching was not for you? any difficulties, problems,conflicts? what factors or incidents have convinced you teaching is a rewarding profession?what do you see as the personal benefits of teaching? was it difficult to resume teaching afterleaving? can you think of any penalties for these interruptions? can you describe your style ofteaching? an example, event, or incident where this is best displayed? your best lessons? yourworst lessons? what about your first job: how were you hired? what were the students like?what about the area? the assignment? and subsequent jobs?Can you tell me about your personal interests. How do you spend your summers? how willyou spend next Christmas? is this the usual way? how do you manage a working day? a typicalweekend during the school year? what of your friendships: who are your friends? what do youvalue in these relationships? are any of them friends through work? are there things you wouldlike to do with your life that you are unable to?I'd like to look at your view of social studies. You are a specialist in teaching Geography:when did you first develop an interest in this subject? what did you like about it? can youdescribe your feelings about aspects of the subject at that time? at other times? was yourtraining to teach it adequate? are there aspects of the training that you would change? do youattend workshops and conferences? are there aspects of social studies as you now teach it thatexcite you? can you give me examples of lessons or units of study that you feel personallycommitted to teaching? do you sometimes feel you go beyond the curriculum to, say, emphasizesome aspects more than others, or bring personal values or commitments to? other examples insocial studies teaching? how about units or lessons you feel uncomfortable with? based on yourquestionnaire response, I can see that you feel strongly that social studies include .do you personally include these or emphasize these topics more than is recommended by thecurriculum? why or why not?- 261 -With respect to the various teaching contexts within which you work -- and I mean by that yourschool, your district, committees, I have some further questions: What are the maincharacteristics of the school's student population? can you describe any special relationships thatyou have developed with students, or any special role that you feel you've played in their lives?examples? do you have any particular working relationship that you value more than others?any particular friendships that you've developed with staff members? any particularly supportiverelationships on staff? within distict? how about anywhere there has been conflict in values,ideas, personality? how do you feel about these? what do you feel about the importance ofcollegial relationships? how about relationships with members of your department? is thereanyone in particular who you feel has been especially helpful to your career advancement? inwhat ways? what role do administrators play for you? how about the department head? arethere any examples that come to mind of feeling unsupported or not understood by others? howmight a typical teaching day go for you? do you anticipate any differences next year? whatpersonal qualities do you think make for good social studies teaching? how might these qualitiesdiffer from other subject areas, say, Math or English?In the area of social studies curriculum, are you aware of consciously transforming the formalcurriculum? can you give some examples of this transformation or extension, perhaps, or addingyour own touches to lessons or units? what is unique about your interpretation of curriculum?do you feel at odds with the curriculum on occasion, or uncomfortable with its intent oremphasis? what are your favourite themes, units, or lessons? your least favourite? why? howdo you adjust your teaching for these? are you aware of a particular notion of time or place thattranscends your teaching? a particular political view or social perspective? what do you mostwant your students to understand about the world or about Canada from your teaching? whatgift would you give students, if you could?Finally, I would like to talk about women who teach social studies. 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Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use."@en . "Graduate"@en . "Thinking critically about social studies : women\u00E2\u0080\u0099s perspectives"@en . "Text"@en . "http://hdl.handle.net/2429/2227"@en .