Doing Feminist Educational Theory: A post-modernist perspective

Abstract

This paper arises from my work as a teacher of courses in feminist educational theory in a New Zealand university. Students usually encounter educational theories as disembodied abstractions scattered in fragments in various, often seemingly unrelated, courses. In a crowded curriculum there is little space for them to create their own educational theories or to reflect on the processes of educational theorising. In this paper I speak with two voices as a means of modelling - for students and teachers of feminist courses - a process of doing educational theory. It is written in two columns. In the left-hand column I speak with an academic voice. I begin by reviewing some theoretical writings of post-modernist theorists who have drawn attention to the ways our educational and social theories are generated by our circumstances - biographical, historical, cultural, generational, and geographical. I then argue that post-modernists have seldom practised what they preach - their abstract, and often inaccessible,...