Women's Learning Research Articles

Elissa B. Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women. Cambridge University Press, 2002

Elissa B. Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women. Cambridge University Press, 2002

Elissa B. Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women

"Elissa B. Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women." European Medieval Drama, 7(), pp. 162–163

Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women

List of illustrations Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Notes on texts and translations Introduction 1. Renaissance culture in Italian convents, 1450-1650 2. The convent theatre tradition 3. Plays and playwrights: the earliest examples 4. Spiritual comedies in the convents 5. From manuscript to print, from the convent to the world 6. Beyond Tuscany Conclusion Appendix Bibliography Index.

Gender-related influences in nursing education.

Issues around gender identity, self-concept, professional education, and women's learning preferences shape the socialization of nurses and nursing education. How gender issues influence learners and nursing education in relation to nursing education for registered nurses are explored and recommendations are made for nursing educators in two broad categories: self-awareness and helping learners learn. The exploration leads to three conclusions: first, it is timely for nurses to continue such explorations for their own practice, and to share how to help other nurses cope with visible and invisible gender-related issues; second, nurses can share strategies to address the influence of gender issues in nursing education, and, third, the nursing profession benefits from drawing on available resources to discuss gender issues. Although reflections on these issues have been shaped by working with registered nurse learners, they are equally relevant to basic nursing students and practicing nurses.

Documenting the Broad Character of Student Populations in Women's Higher Education

The three preceding articles identify the existence of a body of archival recordsof higher education institutions that can support historical investigation into the varied aspects of student life for women. Following a summary of those presentations, the author poses a series of historical questions relating to women's collegiate institutions and student life that scholars and students of women's higher education history might ask to gain a broader view of women's higher learning and “build meaningful contexts in which the evolution of women's higher learning can truly be appreciated.” An examination of the archival records of private, parochial, and public institutions of higher education for women may assist with answering specific and nagging questions and help arrive at a “fuller, more inclusive history of women's higher education.”

Lady, Inc.: women learning, negotiating subjectivity in entrepreneurial discourses

This paper presents an analysis of individuals' experiential learning through their work as entrepreneurs. 1In particular, it examines women's learning as a ‘working-through’ of discursive conflicts of subjectivity. The paper is grounded in a poststructural frame that understands subjectivity to be continuously constituted through engagement with cultural discourses and learning to occur at the interstices of negotiating positionality and identity amidst contradictory discourses. The data under analysis is drawn from a qualitative study examining the learning and development of women entrepreneurs across Canada. Interviews explored the process of work learning and personal change reported by these women after at least four years running their new business, their challenges and personal needs in work, the practices they chose to engage, and their meanings of both learning and success. This analysis focuses on the discursive contexts of entrepreneurship, examining the competing images and messages which implicate women, and the various ways women business-owners learn to appropriate or resist these messages to negotiate subject positions and craft their own meanings of success and work. Implications for educators are presented at the conclusion.

Gender and Women's Experience at Work: A Critical and Feminist Perspective on Human Resource Development

This study draws on critical and fenminist scholarship on the sociology of work- and gender relations in an exploration of women's workplace learning through human resource development initiatives. The study, informed by a critical ethnographic research paradigm, was conducted over a 6-month period at two workplaces. Two overarching themes are discussed: (a) women and organizational change and (b) disappearing boundaries among work, family, and community. The research points out serious flaws in many assumptions underlying mainstream training and development programs about why and how women work in the office or on the shop floor. For adult educators, questions of who defines "productive work," as well as how that work is rewarded, become central to understanding the workplace and its role in controlling workers and in shaping the production of knowledge.

A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama by Alison Findlay Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage by Viviana Comensoli , Anne Russell (review)

TES, 32, 2002 TES, 32, 2002 Guernsey is not, however, always well served by her publisher.The font is hard on the eye and, more damagingly, inappropriate to the stress-marksused by Guernsey. There is an irritatingfailure to distinguishbetween the hyphen and the dash. Most awkwardlyof all, the frequentlydigressiveendnotes takeup a fifthof the book, so that one is constantly flipping back and forth. The author might herself have cut down on the digressiveness,but it is surelyan editor'staskto deal with the mammoth note 33 to Chapter I, in which the author sets out her prosodic assumptions.I calculatethisnote alone at about a thousandwords:could it not have formedan Appendix, in view of itscentralityto the argument? VRIJEUNIVERSITEIT AMSTERDAM RICHARD TODD A FeministPerspective onRenaissance Drama. By ALISONFINDLAY.Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. I999. vi + 206pp. ?45; $49.95 (paperbound ?i3.99; $19-95)EnactingGender ontheEnglishRenaissanceStage. Ed. by VIVIANACOMENSOLI and ANNE RUSSELL. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. I999. vii + 270 pp. $49.95 (paperbound $I9.95). Renaissance drama, as Alison Findlaypoints out, is predominantlywrittenby men. Recognizing this, she arguesa strongcase for startingfrom a focus on the historical female audience and usingwomen's writingto supplementthe absence of any direct critical commentary from Renaissance women on the plays they attended. This seems a sound project. Subsequent chapters, however, do not consistentlycarry it out. Female spectatorship recedes from the discussion, and women's writings are used only intermittentlyas a perspective on that spectatorship. Findlay examines two plays by women, Wroth's Love'sVictorie and Cary's Mariam,but the study of female-authored plays offers a different trajectory from the one outlined in the introduction. Where the project announced really is pursued, as in the analysis of Measure for Measurealongside Mary Ward's writings for women in the early seventeenth century, or Epicoene alongside a selection of women's writings on the city and the market, the results are revealing;but elsewhere the approach is both less well documented and less gender-specific.The opening analysis of Dr Faustus, forexample, remindsus thatwomen read and sometimeswrotereligiousworks,and arguesthat the familiarEve/Mary binary can be used to suggestthat the play may be seen as 'a tragedy of knowledge which debates women's relationshipto learning as much as men's' (p. I5). While this may be true, it does not offer us any very strong sense of how women's responses may have differed in specific ways from men's, and uses the playtext itself, rather than any supplementary material, to mount the argument. The move into psychoanalytic territorywith the argument that Mephistopheles is 'a feminized figure in that he represents lack' seems to unhinge the connection with historical spectators altogether by simply setting out along a differentcritical path. Chapters on female self-fashioningand on revenge tragedyas 'a feminine genre' (p. 49) explore interestingterritory,but the argument is mounted primarilyvia the plays themselves. The book ultimately fails to bring enough evidence to maintain its proposed agenda; the women's writingscited are quite simply insufficient to anchor the readings of plays within a context of contemporaryfemale self-expression. The collection of essaysedited by Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell makes a more significantcontribution to gender studies in relation to Renaissance theatre. All the essaysare new, and together they illuminate a wide range of issues across a Guernsey is not, however, always well served by her publisher.The font is hard on the eye and, more damagingly, inappropriate to the stress-marksused by Guernsey. There is an irritatingfailure to distinguishbetween the hyphen and the dash. Most awkwardlyof all, the frequentlydigressiveendnotes takeup a fifthof the book, so that one is constantly flipping back and forth. The author might herself have cut down on the digressiveness,but it is surelyan editor'staskto deal with the mammoth note 33 to Chapter I, in which the author sets out her prosodic assumptions.I calculatethisnote alone at about a thousandwords:could it not have formedan Appendix, in view of itscentralityto the argument? VRIJEUNIVERSITEIT AMSTERDAM RICHARD TODD A FeministPerspective onRenaissance Drama. By ALISONFINDLAY.Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. I999. vi + 206pp. ?45; $49.95 (paperbound ?i3.99; $19-95)EnactingGender ontheEnglishRenaissanceStage. Ed. by VIVIANACOMENSOLI and ANNE RUSSELL. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. I999...

A New Look at Women's Learning

AbstractHow can we rethink some popular stereotypes about women's learning?

Change Agency and Women's Learning New Practices in Community Informatics

How can community informatics initiatives be sustained? This paper argues that, in the fast moving area of ICT and on the constantly shifting ground of community-sector practice, sustainability depends upon adaptability. We develop the concept of 'learning communities' – as developed by a women's ICT project – to meet the need for democratic, inclusive and on-going innovation in women's organizations and the wider community/voluntary sector. Reflecting on the Women Connect project, we conceptualize 'learning communities' as dialogic and 'playful' spaces within which members can draw creatively on their differences while constructing shared knowledge. This approach, it is argued, can lead towards a new way of conceptualizing knowledge, new approaches to learning, and new practice for community-based and women's organizations in relation to the use of ICT. The paper starts by describing the Women Connect project, and then introduces the idea of learning 'in community'. We analyse issues relating to the use of the term 'community' in relevant discourses, arguing for an approach which emphasizes agency in our use of this term – the 'doing' of community within a context of shared projects, obligations and goals. Weaddress some difficulties involved in working across social differences, while arguing that these differences – which may make the practice of community uncomfortable – can also facilitate their emergence in the new form of 'learning communities'. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of 'the Borderlands', Nira Yuval-Davis's concept of 'transversal politics' and Maria Lugone'sconcept of 'world-travelling', we analyse community-sector processes of innovation and change agency, as they have found expression within Women Connect. We conclude by arguing that the current, outcome-driven, model for funding voluntary sector organizations acts to actively inhibit the development of learning communities – and the sustainable innovatory practice they can produce.

Making sense of learning for work. Towards a framework of transitional learning

In this article a framework is presented to understand the changing character of individual learning processes and of educational practices related to work and employment. Based on two research projects - a research on women's biographical learning in relation to work and a European research on the socio-economic integration of young adults - a perspective of transitional learning is developed. It is argued that nowadays individual learning processes can be understood as processes of transitional learning aimed at creating meaningful connections between individual life and society via work and adult education. This interpretation, together with the changing educational landscape, calls for a reconsideration of the interventionist role of the adult educator. In order to stimulate and support these learning processes, guidance, training and counselling are becoming reflexive activities in need of interpretive professionals.

Estrategias para la enseñanza del autoexamen del seno a mujeres en edad reproductiva

To develop an effective strategy to inform Mexican women between 12 and 47 years of age about breast cancer (BC) and train them to perform breast self-examination (BSE). Between April, 1996 and July, 1998, two different strategies to teach BSE were designed and evaluated in Cuernavaca, State of Morelos, Mexico. These strategies included teaching materials and were based on opinions of women participating in the first stage of this study. Both strategies consisted of the presentation of a leaflet and a video. The first strategy was delivered by a public health nurse in charge of leading the session. The second one was presented by a BC survivor. This second strategy included slides and silicon breast models. These two strategies were then compared to a third one, consisting of a primary care nurse handling out a leaflet and showing a video, based on Health Secretariat's guidelines. In total, 149 women were trained. They were randomly assigned to any one of these three strategies. The effectiveness of the teaching strategies was determined by assessing the changes in the women's knowledge of BC and BSE, as well as in their ability to identify the largest number of lumps on a natural size silicon breast, before and after training. Statistical analysis included Student's t test, variance analysis, McNemar's chi 2, Pearson's chi 2, and multiple linear regression. With all three strategies, there was an increase of approximately 30% in women's knowledge of BC and BSE as well as in their ability to detect lumps. Although at the beginning of the training only one out of every 20 women were able to identify more than three lumps in the silicon model, by the end between 3 and 4 of every 10 women were able to do this, with values of p < 0.05. Some factors determine women's learning of both BSE and information about BC as well as their ability to identify lumps. Teaching BSE with any of the strategies evaluated could be included in an integral program to educate Mexican women on breast cancer prevention and early detection. The appropriate and monthly practice of BSE is linked both to a decrease in the amount of time elapsing between the identification of suspect signs and the demand for medical care, such as requesting a clinical breast examination, which entails identifying small tumors when BC is present.

Can a Self-directed Learner be Independent, Autonomous and Interdependent?: Implications for Practice

One of the most popular beliefs in adult education is the value placed on self-directed learning. Self-direction is assumed to be a desirable characteristic of adult learners and adult educators are encouraged to promote self-direction in their teaching. Self-directed learning usually implies that learners take responsibility for their learning processes, such as command of goal-setting, instructional design or evaluative procedures. Thus, on the teachers' part, the objective of conducting self-directed learning is to help learners become skillful in those processes independent of teachers. On the learners' part, in addition to attaining their learning goals, the objective of self-directed learning is to gain a sense of autonomy during and after their learning processes. Thus, the eventual goal of self-directed learning is the learner becomes a teacher of herself or himself. While scholars, such as Brookfield (1985), expand the technician-oriented process of self-directed learning as including changes in learners' consciousness (transforming perspectives on their experiences), at the core of self-directed learning are independence and autonomy of learners in their learning processes. Given that these two virtues, independence and autonomy, are valued as those idealized adults are expected to achieve -- along with rationality -- in North American culture, self-directed learning as an instructional design for adult learners seems to be a valid strategy for adult educators to perform with American adult learners. However, the essence of self-directed learning is not as highly valued in other cultures as in America: Not every culture promotes independence and autonomy as virtues. The learning processes of Korean women leaders suggest another perspective on self-directed learning, a perspective that gives more attention to interdependence as well as independence as a part of a self-directed learning process. Personally, I am a Korean woman and my own cultural background also informs my perspective. I interviewed five Korean women leaders in male-dominated professions such as the financial industry, governmental administration, architecture and the press. The purpose of the interviews was to understand these women's learning processes by which they became leaders, overcoming gender discrimination at work and to utilize the findings in leadership education for women. I analyzed their learning experiences in terms of self-directed learning theory. Above all, it is necessary to provide some background information about Korean society and culture. Korean people have survived wars throughout their history and are still facing a communist country In North Korea, collectivism and collaboration are taught from one's childhood as one of the most important survival skills and moral virtues. Independence and autonomy are not attributes one has to attain as she or he reaches adulthood. Rather, a person becoming independent of his or her parents, teachers or other people, tends to be considered threatening the stability of a community he or she belongs to. The virtue of independence and autonomy is not an indication of a person reaching an idealized adulthood in Korean culture. Instead, becoming independent and having others become dependent on her or him is one of the appropriate signs for a sound adulthood in Korean culture. Becoming independent without being interdependent passes for immaturity or self-centeredness. Thus, my Korean research participants' self-directed learning processes in becoming leaders illuminate different features of self-directed learners from those of American self-directed learners. These Korean self-directed learners articulated their awareness of others' well-being. Some might want to say these women's awareness of others' well-being is attributable to their so-called womanness that cherishes relationships with others. However, I think the following remarks are culturally-based rather than gender-based: I realized that I had to take my junior women into account . …

A Model of Executive Women's Learning and Development

Case study analysis was used to investigate executive women's learning and development in corporate culture. Eleven executives were interviewed. A model of their development is proposed, detailing learning tactics, negotiation strategies, and transition characteristics over the course of their career development.

Text or testament? A comparison of educational and literary critical approaches to research

This paper argues that a wholehearted acknowledgement of the fictionality of the research process creates scope for the development of different and challenging perspectives on experience. It is a reflective account of undertaking research which combined a qualitative analysis of women's learning experiences with textual analyses of the popular romantic fictions they studied on their course. The many parallels between literary critical research and educational research are acknowledged, but major differences between the two approaches are also identified. It concludes that the existence of these differences may restrict the construction of unusual and eccentric, but challenging and insightful analyses of fieldwork data.

Women and Learning in English Writing, 1600-1900 (review)

Women and Learning in English Writing, 1600-1900 is an attempt to provide an overview of the individuals, issues, and literary treatments of women's education and of learned women from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. While it includes some useful information, it is essentially a flawed work. For those unfamiliar with the leading authors on the education of women or the efforts of particular women to seek educational opportunities, especially at an advanced level, this work could be helpful. But scholars [End Page 680] familiar with the history of women's learning will find little that is informative, and much that is either inaccurate or tied to such a confused chronology that it is difficult to discern the work's organizing principle.

Learning Styles, Gender and Age as Influential Issues amongst Students of Theology

In order to determine whether men and women's learning styles differ, two samples of students undertaking formal theological educational programmes completed a questionnaire focusing on contextualised examples of global and analytic learning styles. This was followed by selective interviews. Whilst no significant correlation was found between learning styles and gender, a significant correlation was unexpectedly found between learning styles and age.

The examined life: women's liberatory learning within a locked-in society

Using Freirian methods a humanities model programme of education was conducted for women incarcerated in prison. This paper reports the findings of the project, indicating how the women assumed ownership of their learning, engaged in critical thought and became liberated whilst still in prison. It offers highlights of the way women learned and indicates how some continued to engage in formal learning.

Orthodox Feminists: What Do Our Numbers Mean?

As I look out on this scene, the feeling is one of appreciation and wonderment. We are now 1800 strong and growing every minute. What do our numbers mean? And why now? And what is the message that we take and that we give? First, I believe this great outpouring means that Orthodox feminists and their sympathizers are no longer at the fringes of our community. We are in and of the mainstream. Although we do not yet occupy the seats of power or hold the interpretive keys in our hands yet, we do have great leverage and influence and we have been and will continue to be a force for good in the Orthodox community. But why now, 25 years after feminism first began to take root in the Jewish community and next week there will be an event commemorating the 25th anniversary of the first National Jewish Women's conference that powerfully influenced so many of us even though we proceeded in different ways , why now do we have these numbers and this support, including that of so many individual rabbis whose presence we treasure, some of whom have been our partners on these issues for two or three decades, and some who are joining us for the first time? Because we have proven ourselves! During these past 25 years we have taken in from the host culture the new values for women, and have passed these values onto our daughters and our sons and our grandchildren, and all the while we have remained faithful to halakhah , not compromising an orthodox way of life. The critique that we were undermining the Jewish family, destroying Yiddishkeit, have proven to be noncredible. On the contrary, we now know more, daaven more, learn more, teach more, give more, celebrate more. We have built wonderful Jewish families and have enhanced and revitalized all of the communities and institutions that our lives touch and have stayed very close to the core of our communities. We have proven that feminism and Orthodoxy can live happily together. What else does it mean, this outpouring and enthusiasm? It means that we celebrate together many of the gains of the past two decades: the explosion of women's learning, women of all ages, the study of Talmud, the many institutions for women that have been

A Lesson from Our Elders

To investigate whether the incorporation of women's health into problem-based learning (PBL) cases affects students' tendency to identify learning issues related to women's health as they encounter patients in an ambulatory care setting. Students in the PBL curriculum at the Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, MCP-Hahnemann School of Medicine, participate in a nine-week primary care practicum at the end of their first year, during which they spend three half-days per week in an ambulatory setting examining patients and completing patient logs that include any learning issues identified. Patient logs from 23 first-year PBL students who had not been exposed to a new women's health education program prior to their practicum in 1993 and from 22 first-year PBL students who had been exposed to the program prior to their practicum in 1994 were reviewed. For each women's health learning issue identified, the sex of the student and the sex, specialty, and practice setting of the student's preceptor were recorded. Data were analyzed with several statistical methods. There was no statistically significant difference in the numbers of men and women students or preceptors between the two years. In 1993 an average of 59% of the patients seen per student were women; in 1994 the average was 61%. The mean numbers of total learning issues identified (including women's health learning issues) were similar in the two years, but the mean percentage of clinical women's health learning issues identified increased significantly between 1993 and 1994, as did the mean percentage of community/preventive health women's health learning issues identified. There was a significant student-sex-by-preceptor-sex interaction for the total number of women's health learning issues identified (p = .024): for both years, the students paired with a preceptor of the same sex identified a higher number of women's health learning issues than did the students paired with a preceptor of the opposite sex. The results suggest that PBL is an effective way to increase students' awareness of women's health issues in a primary care clinical setting. More studies are needed to define the effect of PBL on the kind of reading and learning students will do when they get to the clinical setting.