Conversation and Voice: Feminist Mentoring for Social and Political Change

Abstract

Although women have studied and written about their positions in the academy forsome 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 thatwomen learn, construct, and process knowledge and events differently from men.They determined that women learned in relation to one another, that collaborativelearning superseded competition, and that females perceived teaching and learningin relation to self. That research in turn has led to further understandings of poweræ power in relation to what is valued as the legitimate construction of knowledgeand what is valued as knowledge per se. Campbell (1997), Gore (1993), Lewis(1993) and others have commented articulately on the need to view women'seducation as different in one way or another, yet recognize that such apperception,if accepted, concomitantly supposes a shift in power relations