Pedagogies of Resistance: Women Educator Activists, 1880-1960

by Kathleen Weiler, Petra Munro, Margaret Smith Crocco

Book Overview

The stories of six women for whom a career in education serves as leverage to live their lives as agents of change. By profiling women as educational activists, the book challenges historical interpretations that have cast women as passive in the face of educational change.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807762989
• ISBN13: 9780807762981
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Teachers College Press
• Length: 132 Pages

Customer Reviews

Pedagogies of Resistance

The book Pedagogies of Resisitance highlights the efforts of six accomplished female educators. The book portrays each woman effectively both in their personal life and their professional life. The accounts of the journeys that these women embarked on give us a true picture of what it means to be a progressive education activist in the Progressive Era and today. It also provides today's teachers with true accounts of how to be a maker of change. The women in this book were also forced to confront their own ideas of education and what it means to be a professional and to have a career. In Jane Adams and Ida B. Wells, we meet two women whose work in settlement houses and women's clubs seek to promote a vision of education that was community based and directed toward social equality - an effort that was largely ignored by educational history. Marion Thompson Wright and Elizabeth Almira Allen enlisted others in their work that created a grass roots movement that collectively resisted centralized forms of education and supported a vision of education of social equality. For their work, they received less professional recognition than men in their field did. Their views created controversy and as a result, their personal lives remained scarred. Helen Heffernan and Corinne Seeds were committed to social equality and saw public education as central to that task. For their accomplishments and struggles they have been rewarded by being forgotten, largely due to their gender. From the stories of these women, we truly see how women struggled for a voice and for equality while instituting reform. "In complex and constrained cultural milieus, women have managed to create expressions of feminist agency shaped by their own historical specificity and human particularity."

Woman can and have made a difference!

I have chosen to write a review of this book because I found it very interesting to follow Crocco, Munro and Weiler as they chronicled the contributions by six separate women in history to education. The authors refer to: Jane Adams & Ida B. Wells, both from Chicago; Marion Wright & Elizabeth Allen, both from New Jersey; and Corinne Seeds & Helen Heffernan, both from California; as "agents of change." I found it most interesting that, like the individuals discussed in the book, the three authors were also women from all across the country, Crocco from Columbia University, Munro from Louisiana State University, and Weiler from Tufts University. The authors wanted to show how these individuals fought the status quo. Crocco, Munro and Weiler's g goal, I believe, was to share the experiences of these women and how they were treated unfairly by many of their male counterparts. These six women want to be leaders and have a positive impact on the pedagogical practices affecting children. While attempting to become leaders they opened the door for future generations of women that also wanted to lead. The underlying theme, that I did not like, from the authors, was that men were knowingly, as a majority, attempting to hold women back in the late 1800's and early 1900's. As I read I felt that most men actually conspired to keep women out of positions of power. I resent implications like this, because I believe that there are simpler reasons as to why men hold more administrative positions. I believe that in nature, as can easily be witnessed on the Discovery Channel watching shows about animals, the Alpha almost always tends to dominate and the others willingly follow. We, both men and women, are more primal than we want to admit and education is the only way we can inhibit some of more bestial tendencies. Good book to read and it was fun experiencing three different author styles under one title.