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In our experience, scientists are likely to be newcomers to the scholarship that has arisen from the field of women's studies. This paper will examine one such area of scholarship, feminist pedagogy, and relate it to teaching and learning chemistry. As the term feminist has been known to invoke a variety of reactions from scientists (some of them unfriendly1), we begin by offering a rationale for the study of feminist pedagogy
It describes teaching practices that can benefit all our students;
It offers ways to make science classrooms more inclusive of women; and
It provides frameworks to help us theorize our current teaching practices.
Furthermore, a knowledge of feminist pedagogy can
Help us build "two-way streets"2 with colleagues from women's studies programs and
Allow us to bring an informed voice to the national and international conversations on gender and the sciences.
In short, feminist pedagogy can benefit both teachers and their students.
As no previous articles have appeared in the Journal on this topic, we begin by offering brief descriptions of the terms sex, gender, feminism, pedagogy, and feminist pedagogy. Next, a set of themes common to feminist pedagogies is outlined. The article concludes with practical suggestions and examples for those who teach.
Terminology
The terms gender and sex underlie any discussion concerning women and men. Sex usually refers to the biological category of male and female. While our culture recognizes only two sexes, some individuals are born "intersexed" (estimated as high as 2% of the population at birth) and are forced, often surgically, to adopt one of these two choices. Gender refers to the social meaning that we give to sex. For example, women may be viewed as caretakers with verbal skills and men as providers with mathematical ability. These associations represent our culture's construction of gender. Thus, our culture reduces the immense variation in human sexuality to two sexes with their corresponding gender roles. While not all men and women ascribe to these, they nonetheless set the tone in our culture and engender stereotypes that can shape and define our classrooms if we do not actively intervene.
While these are simplistic definitions of sex and gender, over the last two decades the field of women's studies has come to view gender as a...