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NWSA Journal 12.3 (2000) 212-215



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Book Review

Common Science? Women, Science and Knowledge

Feminist Science Education


Common Science? Women, Science and Knowledge by Jean Barr and Lynda Birke. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 165 pp., $29.95 hardcover, $13.95 paper.

Feminist Science Education by Angela Calabrese Barton. New York: Teachers College Press, 1998, 155 pp., $44.00 hardcover, $19.95 paper.



Science is too powerful a kind of knowledge in late-twentieth-century western culture to be left to the boys.

--Barr and Birke, 8

Jean Barr and Lynda Birke's Common Science? Women, Science and Knowledge and Angela Calabrese Barton's Feminist Science Education use feminist pedagogy as an entry into the debate surrounding women's participation in science. These works challenge an "add and stir" approach to science education that tries to increase the number of women scientists without ever addressing science itself. Barr, Birke, and Barton see women's lower participation in formal science communities as a critique of the ways our society constructs science and science education. In response, their studies examine and analyze student experiences to help us envision a more liberatory science pedagogy.

Common Science? tries "to make sense of how nonacademic women perceive science" (5). Barr and Birke base their work on a series of surveys and interviews of 110 women enrolled in British adult education courses. By focusing on adult education students, Barr and Birke want to listen to the voices of those women whom discussions of science and science education most often ignore. Central to their investigation is a focus on women's feelings that science is divorced from the realities of their lives. Three tensions that frequently arose during interviews reflect this alienation: a distinction drawn between science (alienated knowledge) and common sense (appropriated knowledge), a distinction between using a principle (what women do in their daily lives) and actual understanding (abstract science), and the seemingly contradictory statements that "science is all around us" but "it has nothing to do with me." Barr and Birke's analysis of their survey and interview data forms part of a larger project to promote a more inclusive science. They argue that the experiences of those science has previously marginalized must form the center of a feminist science pedagogy.

In their opening chapters, Barr and Birke begin an extended critique of what they term the deficit model of public understanding of science. Instead of viewing the public's (and especially women's) lack of knowledge and participation in science as a form of ignorance that can be solved by more education and outreach, it should be seen as a reaction to the sort [End Page 212] of science and science education promoted by government and industry. In other words, it is necessary to start questioning science and the way it is taught. Women's absence from science is not due to a failing by women but rather a science pedagogy that does not account for different styles of learning and a scientific establishment that has created an abstract, elitist set of knowledge with little connection to women's lives and experiences.

Chapters three through seven more closely look at the survey and interview data. Chapter three focuses on two individual case studies and then three group case studies, the first from students at a women's residential college, the second from students who took a "Women and Science" course, and the third from a discussion group of Muslim students. Chapter four investigates feelings of exclusion from science and dissatisfaction of the way science currently is practiced. Chapter five analyzes how expressions of silence, mistrust, and ignorance that arose during the interview sessions can be seen as moments of critique and resistance. Chapter six examines the interviewees' use of nature metaphors especially in connection with food and genetic engineering. Chapter seven attempts to correlate some of the interview results with larger observations in feminist theory.

Chapter eight uses the collected data to advocate the creation of critical science education. Built on a wide range of peoples' experiences, such an education would...

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