The task facing science educators is to construct a new form of scientific knowledge, a feminist science, that accounts for the social context for modern Western science and becomes resources for bettering the welfare of people around the globe (Mayberry, 1998).
The great value of this article for me as a nonscience feminist educator is its demonstration of the ways in which science and science education may be arenas for liberatory pedagogical practices, where socioeconomic power relations in the United States and globally can be challenged on behalf of women, working-class people, and people of color. Not only have all these groups traditionally been excluded from the practice of science, which is the thrust of the collaborative category of female-friendly approaches to science education reform. More important, the evolution and practice of scientific knowledge itself, which many think valuefree, operates to exploit and oppress people everywhere in the name of a dominant class, and it is feminist science, not female-friendly science, that may illuminate and challenge these patterns of domination.
In The Feminist Classroom (Maher & Tetreault, 1994), which is an ethnographic study of 17 feminist college teachers in six different colleges and universities nationwide, my coauthor, Mary Kay Tetreault, and I embarked on a similar journey, moving from a description of an ideal feminist teacher who was collaborative, nurturing, and inclusive of all viewpoints, to examining the multiplicity of complex issues our informants were dealing with in attempting to listen to the voices of students whose experiences had never been heard before in the undergraduate curriculum. We spoke of the integration of different perspectives on issues and topics in every discipline, and how the exploration of multiple voices, from multiple societal positions, enriches and deepens our understandings. Along with many others, we discovered how the traditional searches for scholarly universals in all disciplines, including science, masks their identification with dominant societal perspectives, typically those of white upper-middle class heterosexual males.
We began to interpret the complex issues our participants faced by making use of four themes of analysis, each of which illuminated one aspect of the dynamics of their teaching: are mastery, or what students are learning, or taking away; voice, or how the students fashion identities and perspectives for themselves through the classroom discourse; authority, or how the teacher reconceptualizes the grounds for her authority with students and over the subject matter; and, finally, positionality, or the ways in which peoples' gender, race, and class, and the shifting and dynamic relations among these and other variables, shape the construction of knowledge in each particular classroom.