When I first read Mary M. Atwater's response to the Journal of Research on Science Teaching's focus issue on gender and feminism (Volume 35, Issue 8), I reacted defensively. Several automatic thoughts made up my initial argument: My research was based in a school that was overwhelmingly White-how could I consider race, when the great majority of my students were White? In the particular classroom in which I conducted my teacher-research study, 1 of the students was African American, 1 was Latina; the rest were White. Should I therefore single out Chantelle and Nina for study? Among other analytical problems, wouldn't that put them in the unfair and disrespectful position of representing all high school girls of color? There was within this classroom a considerable variation in socioeconomic class-given this, I may have been able to engage in a study based in class, if not race, language, and lifestyle. However, I found myself unable to pull myself out of the teacher role well enough to analyze this small group of girls as representative, rather than suggestive, of anything or anyone-they were individuals, and I was their teacher. Upon reflection, now I understand better my own teacher education students' reluctance to note the differences among their students: Their desire is to build community, and in their understandings of both difference and community, the former threatens the latter. In my research, I wanted to see what these young women brought to science by virtue of being women in community. It was there that I stopped.
By now, the reader is probably marveling at my lack of sophistication concerning race and individuality. I speak as though Whiteness were not a category but a given, a background against which all else must be measured; or, alternatively, as a lack, as an indication of no race and no culture. I do not believe this; I did not believe it when I wrote this piece. What I did not know how to do was analyze these students' relationships to science and biotechnology in terms of their race, culture, class, lifestyle, or religion. The study was, in a very real sense, exploratory. I wanted to see what I could find out by listening to these girls' talk around a prenatal testing assignment that would help me understand how they were or were not connecting to the science and the women's issues I perceived as intrinsic to the assignment. The study was neither comparative nor experimental. Indeed, I resisted the argument that I should include boys for com-