Learning From Our Lives: Women, Research, and Autobiography in Education, and: Common Ground: Feminist Collaboration in the Academy, and: Beginning in Retrospect: Writing and Reading a Teacher's Life (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Learning From Our Lives: Women, Research, and Autobiography in Education, and: Common Ground: Feminist Collaboration in the Academy, and: Beginning in Retrospect: Writing and Reading a Teacher’s Life Phyllis Palmer (bio) Learning From Our Lives: Women, Research, and Autobiography in Education edited by Anna Neumann and Penelope L. Peterson. New York: Teachers College Press, 1997, 261 pp., $46.00 hardcover, $21.95 paper. Common Ground: Feminist Collaboration in the Academy edited by Elizabeth G. Peck and JoAnna Stephens Mink. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998, 298 pp., $65.50 hardcover, $21.95 paper. Beginning in Retrospect: Writing and Reading a Teacher’s Life by Patricia A. Schmidt. New York: Teachers College Press, 1997, 191 pp., $46.00 hardcover, $19.95 paper. Here are three books to sustain the hope that feminist teachers, scholars, and administrators may still make a difference in higher education. In modeling the new academy, each book relies on some form of autobiography to detail the personal process by which one becomes an inspiring teacher, an innovative researcher, or a non-officious administrator. They emphasize that all learning, including the curiosity and passion that inspire research, is personal. All worthwhile and memorable activity grows from the self’s making sense of the world within which the self develops. Though the level of personal detail varies from Schmidt’s life account to the collaborative encounters recounted briefly in the Peck and Mink collection, each book tells stories of faculty women who have struggled to integrate their women’s lives, professional careers, and political values. Situating oneself as a learner is the primary requirement for good teachers, Patricia Schmidt argues; “teachers need to actively participate as learners, readers, and writers when [in this instance] they teach ‘English’” (158). Amplifying the early reader-response work of Louise Rosenblatt of New York University, Schmidt argues that the teacher’s role is not only to aid students to clarify the personal meaning of a work, as Rosenblatt suggested, but also that [t]eachers need to clarify, to extend, to elaborate on their own personal evocations of a text with their students in a classroom setting. To be able to do this in our classes, we need to be open and honest about ourselves first, and we need to have experienced reading, teaching, and learning in open, supportive, critical, collaborative ways ourselves. (1983, 159) Patricia Schmidt has traveled a great distance from her rural California childhood and upbringing in a family that struggled to survive and could afford only a community college for her first two years of higher education. [End Page 202] A recent recipient of an NYU doctorate in English Education, she tells well-chosen stories and gives critical readings of her early school papers and teaching experiences. Her book recounts how she made the journey from traditional teacher as transmitter of information and rules—grammar rules in her early classes—to teacher as co-learner and coach. She contrasts her youthful pleasure in reading with her desire to be a “good girl” and a “perfect teacher,” and reveals a chronic tension between her love of talking about texts in a classroom and her fear that she could not measure up as a teacher, literary critic, or scholar. The dynamism of the book comes from her struggle to confront these fears and to become a full member of a community of English education scholars and practitioners. During the first fifteen years of teaching, Schmidt was eager to inspire students with her own love of reading. Nevertheless, she gave assignments and marked papers for correct grammar, transmitting the idea of an authoritative teacher passing on information and standards to unformed students. Her perfectionism at work carried into leadership in the local teacher’s association and pushed her marriage to near dissolution. Dropping out to work freelance for a time, she faced and survived breast cancer. When she returned to the classroom in the mid-1980s, she felt she had to take new risks, to find ways to experience, to understand, and to teach the joys of literature and language. The second half of the book opens with Schmidt’s acceptance into the California Literature Project (CLP), a...