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NWSA Journal 17.3 (2005) 189-194



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Orienting, Disorienting, and Reorienting:

Multiple Perspectives on Poststructuralist Feminist Pedagogies

The Play of the Personal: Psychoanalytic Narratives of Feminist Education by Alice J. Pitt. New York: Peter Lang, 2003, 142 pp., $24.95 paper.
Between Femininities: Ambivalence, Identity, and the Education of Girls by Marnina Gonick. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003, 225 pp., $49.50 hardcover, $16.95 paper.
Gendered Futures in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives for Change edited by Becky Ropers-Huilman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003, 206 pp., $62.50 hardcover, $20.95 paper.
Reconsidering: Feminist Research in Educational Leadership edited by Michelle D. Young and Linda Skrla. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003, 305 pp., $68.50 hardcover, $22.95 paper.

As Women's Studies has grown into a discipline, feminist scholars have revisited and revised issues of pedagogy in conjunction with theoretical perspectives. According to Coffey and Delamont (2000), as feminist theoretical perspectives have changed, feminist pedagogies followed suit. When feminist scholars began to take up postmodernism, feminist theories were characterized as having no universal truths; women grounded in human society could produce only partial, local, and historically specific insights. These were disorienting theoretical perspectives for the form of radical feminist pedagogy that could no longer make the claim that the classroom was a place for organizing political feminism. Specifically, as feminist scholars began to take up poststructuralism, which was characterized by plurality and diversity in social relations, feminist pedagogies were forced to contend with the theory that the discourses in the classroom that were supposedly empowering were actually limiting the experiences women could articulate. Each of these 2003 books I have reviewed brings these poststructuralist theories into education by focusing on the instability and plurality of several diverse educational sites: current trends in research into educational leadership, higher education both inside and outside of the classroom, the schooling and lives of adolescent girls, and the personal stories of students and teachers in women's studies classrooms. These writers are also concerned with their own positioning in [End Page 189] their research and strive to bring feminist theories of educational research into their work by discussing the instability and plurality of their own identities during the processes of research.

The two edited collections both examine the need to reconsider aspects of higher education as the result of poststructural theories. Michelle D. Young and Linda Skrla's Reconsidering: Feminist Research in Educational Leadership acknowledges that educational leadership has had recent periods when progress in the field has become stagnant, and researchers have explored old ideas but have been slow to make the move into new ideas. Thus, the editors see this collection as a response to the concern that "consider[s educational leadership's] past and contemplate[s] its future" (2).

Reconsidering: Feminist Research in Educational Leadership is divided into three sections: four chapters devoted to methodological dilemmas in research, six chapters offering alternate feminist epistemologies of educational leadership, and three chapters that serve as examples of current uses of reconsidered methods and epistemologies mentioned in the previous chapters. It is pretty clear from the introduction how these sections fit together and what the overall goals of the volume are. It is not clear, however, how all of the chapters within each section fit together. In Part II, "Reconsidering Feminist Epistemologies in Educational Leadership," there are three chapters on various independent epistemologies: Cynthia Dillard's endarkened feminist epistemology, Sylvia Méndez-Morse's Chicana feminist epistemology, and Julie Liable's loving epistemology. What is confusing is that instead of presenting other epistemologies, following chapters in the section present responses to Liable's loving epistemology as a tribute to her work because of her recent death. While a tribute to Liable's significant work on epistemology seems appropriate given the circumstances, the placement of it does not seem to fit together cohesively with the other chapters in the section.

Perhaps what this volume does best is consider a diversity of current issues related to educational leadership. Michelle Young's chapter offers...

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