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Articles

No. 13 (2003 Spring)

Conversation and Voice: Feminist Mentoring for Social and Political Change

  • Kathleen S. Sernak
  • Jill P. May
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21423/awlj-v13.a171
Submitted
June 19, 2017
Published
2017-06-12

Abstract

Although women have studied and written about their positions in the academy for some time, it is only through ground-breaking work of Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M., Goldberger, N. R. & Tarule, J. M. (1986), that we have formally acknowledged that women learn, construct, and process knowledge and events differently from men. They determined that women learned in relation to one another, that collaborative learning superseded competition, and that females perceived teaching and learning in relation to self. That research in turn has led to further understandings of power æ power in relation to what is valued as the legitimate construction of knowledge and what is valued as knowledge per se. Campbell (1997), Gore (1993), Lewis (1993) and others have commented articulately on the need to view women’s education as different in one way or another, yet recognize that such apperception, if accepted, concomitantly supposes a shift in power relations.