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Most College Students Are Women: Implications for Teaching, Learning, and Policy, Jeanie K. Allen, Diane R. Dean, and Susan J. Bracken, Eds. (Stylus, 2008, $29.95 paperback)
This compact but thought-provoking volume takes up an important and underexamined question: When more than half of all college students are women, what are the implications for teaching and learning? Tracing “chilly” educational cultures to their historical origins, contributing authors explore multiple pathways toward classrooms that are more inclusive of all students. With topics ranging from general pedagogy and psychology (Do women and men have different learning styles?) to specific troublesome areas (How are women socialized out of an interest in statistics, and what can be done to avoid this?), the volume explores ways to engage all students, and particularly women across races and ethnicities, as active participants in their educational development.
In part, the book is a reminder that although women may seem to have every opportunity, they continue to operate within cultures which can subtly and pervasively discourage their success. In response to this reality, the authors locate promising approaches at the intersections (and disjunctions) between feminist pedagogy and theoretically related disciplines, including civic, adult, and distance learning. In combining contributing authors’ suggestions for change, the editors advocate for holistic learning that connects students’ educational experiences inside and outside the classroom. They call for new approaches to teaching and learning that bridge the gap between student and academic affairs, valuing the talents of all students and maximizing their opportunities for success. The volume represents an important contribution to the scholarship on gender in education that moves the conversation beyond access to opportunity.
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The Gender Gap in College: Maximizing the Developmental Potential of Women and Men, Linda J. Sax (Jossey-Bass, 2008, $40.00 hardcover)
In this important new study of student development, Linda Sax analyzes data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the University of California, Los Angeles, to explore the differential impacts of college experiences on women and men. Sax finds that men and women enter college with differences across a range of indicators, from academic self-confidence to political values to leisure activities, and that college activities affect students differently across genders. In-depth analysis of the data suggests that such factors as faculty interaction, a student’s employment, and choice of major can affect men and women’s identity, values, and academic outcomes to different degrees and even in opposite directions. As Sax details, these findings have far-reaching consequences for student and academic affairs personnel, theories about gender and development, and future research on gender and education.
Sax’s study has extensive implications for research and practice, with statistically detailed data presented in a manner that is accessible to a broad audience. Sax looks beyond the numbers on college participation and success to explore how college affects students’ psychological development, and the result is a much-needed addition to the research on gender in higher education. Sax’s careful analysis of CIRP data not only identifies areas of considerable difference, but also raises important questions beyond the scope of her study, such as how college differentially impacts students of different racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic backgrounds. The volume is both a significant contribution to the literature on student development and a challenge to researchers and educators to do more to maximize the positive impacts of college on students of both genders.
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Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances, Aimee Carrillo Rowe (Duke University Press, 2008, $22.95 paperback)
Locating her analysis in the evocative image of power lines—“manmade circuits through which people are joined and power is transmitted”— Aimee Carrillo Rowe sets out to establish a framework for academic feminist alliances that acknowledges the complexity of identity (3). By analyzing interviews of twenty-eight self-identified academic feminists, Carrillo Rowe identifies the problematic disjunctions between different ideas of alliance. Her work surfaces latent points of potential conflict: for instance, one white woman suggests that she sees alliances as providing access to institutional power, suggesting that she is unconsciously disinclined to develop alliances with women of color, whose access to power can be limited. In another instance, a woman of color suggests the challenges that arise when her white women allies feel threatened by critique, which she views as key to a strong relationship.
By interpreting these and other incidents, Carrillo Rowe smartly illustrates how identity inflects not only one’s relationships to power, privilege, and peers, but the very way one conceptualizes these relationships. Carrillo Rowe weaves her observations about herself and her interviewees into a provocative and theoretically informed volume that encourages women across identity categories to examine their own connections to power and privilege in the interest of forming a “transracial feminist future anterior” (182). Acknowledging that interracial alliances can be difficult, Carrillo Rowe encourages readers to work through the challenges with self-reflection and renewed commitment to the belief that all people matter. Power Lines is essential reading for anyone hoping to create an academic feminism that is more inclusive of all women.
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