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  • Connecting Girls and Science: Constructivism, Feminism, and Science Education Reform
  • Maralee Mayberry (bio)
Connecting Girls and Science: Constructivism, Feminism, and Science Education Reform by Elaine V. Howes. New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2002, 169 pp., $24.95 hardcover, $8.95 paper.

I assume that almost everyone reading this book is familiar with the pipeline metaphor commonly used to characterize the underrepresentation of women and minorities in science. Since the time of its inception in 1987, large pools of funding have been earmarked for the development of educational programs aimed at "patching" the pipeline to produce a more diverse and scientifically literate populace. As a result, advocates for women's advancement in science have articulated a variety of recommendations on how classroom pedagogy and culture should be changed to get women into the pipeline, make them fit, and keep them there. Feminist scholars have pointed out the profound problems associated with this position and suggested that what the pipeline metaphor ignores is an understanding of who the pipeline is designed for and why the situation of women in science is what it is. In Connecting Girls and Science, Elaine Howes clearly recognizes that"fitting" women into the science pipeline is not the goal of feminist science education. Rather, Howes asks us to imagine new ways of constructing high school science courses to reflect issues central in feminist scholarship.

Chapter 1 engages readers with a set of issues that will be familiar to those who have followed feminist science studies scholarship: What is it about scientific practice itself that is exclusionary to some populations? What role does science play in Western culture? What is the relationship between science and policy and who benefits and who does not? Is scientific knowledge objective and free from social context or is it embedded in the human social world? In what ways have social and personal desires shaped the scientific enterprise and the knowledge it produces? [End Page 212] While feminist philosophers of science have clearly articulated responses to these questions and university-level courses have incorporated these issues, what makes them interesting is Howes's application of them to teaching high school science. The remaining chapters recount Howes's journey to connect feminist theory and pedagogy with teaching high school science content.

Two chapters explore the role of the teacher and student in creating a classroom environment that allows "student talk" to guide the inquiry process. Studying Prenatal Testing provides a useful introduction to how girls, when encouraged to talk about infants, pregnancy, and childbirth, allow "for more connecting pathways for engagement with the content of science" (68). Howes frames her approach to this topic in "difference feminism" and ultimately illustrates an important limitation—in trying to provide girls with a topic that would relate to their "everyday experience," the unit reproduced the very gendered understandings feminist theory seeks to undermine. That is, the unit provided "visions of women that are either stereotypical or essentialist [and] place us within a scheme that overdetermines our lives as caring and relationally focused" (67). In Genuine Conversation Through Studying Bioethics, Howes explores a primary tension inherent in feminist pedagogy: How can one maintain a student-centered classroom while simultaneously expressing one's [the teacher's] own thinking and beliefs to support and challenge students' ideas? Howes describes in detail how she and her students navigated this tension through their discussions of bioethics. She concludes that feminist pedagogy does not translate well into classroom comfort and is often messy and uncomfortable. Although student-learning outcomes of this unit are not discussed, the reader can gain valuable insights about the shifting and often contradictory roles that both students and teachers play out in a feminist classroom.

Two chapters are predominantly concerned with what Howes calls "Kidmarks" or the science standards that her students set for themselves as markers of understanding science as a social enterprise. Here, Howe recounts how students explored, examined, and began to question both commonly held and their own beliefs about objectivity and science, the role of empathy in doing science, and science and social responsibility. Although not convinced that her students fully developed an understanding of how science is deeply implicated with social...

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