JAC Volume 13 Issue 1

This book provides an important milestone in the journey in English education from gender-blind to gender-sensitive approaches to teaching. Along the way it reveals the extent to which the "process" approach and collaboration may already be tipped in favor of women's learning styles as they are popularly stereotyped. While remaining moderate, generally practicing "soft" empirical methodologies and avoiding "esoteric" theory, this collection of language arts essays shows that considering gender in English studies classrooms tends to promote discursive values and forms that demand radical social and political as well as academic change. However, the authors here generally stick to discussions of teaching rather than politics.

Edited by Kent State's Nancy McCracken and Southern Illinois Bruce Appleby, the book aims for a difficult audience spanning secondary and postsecondary teachers. The implied reader is a high school English teacher or a college teacher who works in English education or with inservice teachers, and each section includes articles on both college and high school students and contexts. Taking a language-arts approach, the book divides into four sections: language, literature, composition, and professional issues. Appleby's interdisciplinary bibliography at the end, strong on sociolinguistic and psychological-developmental material, provides a valuable resource.

In the preface, McCracken and Appleby emphasize that gender is a social construct and cite McConnell-Ginet's definition of gender as "the complex of social, cultural, and psychological phenomena attached to sex." Appleby writes of the "welcome and needed changes" for men in reconsiderations of gender roles as presently constructed, and many of the citations in his bibliography are "masculinist" in orientation. The metaphor of voice is strong, with McCracken in the preface citing Tillie Olsen's Silences as an early formative influence.

Overall, the book seeks to perform its feminist values using the model of a conversation, with friendly, personal voices in a dialogic approach with summary questions and prompts for activities at the end of each section. This format may remind some readers too much of the questions at the end of student anthologies, making the authorial voice a bit "teacherly" and unequal. This is not a problem with most essays, which generally succeed in constructing accessible yet complex discourses which challenge and reward, such as the enjoyable and important personal accounts by Claudia M. Greenwood ("Voiced and Voiceless Findings") and Janet L. Miller ("Gender and Teaching") in the final section. Other essays teachers will appreciate include David Blakesley's theoretically sophisticated perspectives on gender bias in language and Lois Stover's helpful review of current young adult literature.

One of the primary "issues" referred to by the title is a call to reform the field's false "gender-blindness," especially as expressed in composition in the period of the 1970s and early 1980s. What most authors offer to replace it is a gender-sensitive or gender-balanced approach. For composition, the repeated message is that composition's past effort to eliminate sexism by ignoring gender has failed, and it is time to pay attention to differences caused by students previous socialization.

Although this review focuses on the composition section, the literature section does provide some disturbing—and change-motivating—examples of traditional sexist teaching of literature in essays by McCracken (she writes of "Greasy Lake" by T. Coraghessan Boyle) and Nancy Comley ("Father Knows Best: Reading Around Indian Camp"). In introducing the literature section, McCracken sums up the problem and calls for a "re-gendering" of the reading of literature:

In introducing the composition section, McCracken could have used the same reasoning, because she ultimately proposes the same feminine-centered solution for the composition classroom. However, here she calls for a "gender-balanced" or "gender sensitive" approach: "It seems clear that the teaching of composition should be reviewed in the light of gender sensitivity if all our students, males and females, are to fully develop the potential to use their own voices strongly and to hear the voices of others clearly" (119). What she proposes are principles for structuring a composition class to incorporate recent gender research that essentially teaches "girls and boys to write as girls" by structuring the classroom to encourage intellectual development of women students. Not surprisingly, this composition classroom reflects invention-heavy "process" and collaborative approaches. Unlike the literature classroom, McCracken cannot call for a re-gendering of composition because most currently favored approaches are already tipped in favor of women's values and learning styles as described herein.

However, the structure of our composition courses is not the only component to our teaching. Also in the composition section is Duane H. Roen's provocative essay "Gender and Teacher Response to Student Writing." This piece opens by reviewing and critiquing previous studies showing higher achievement in writing by females of various grade levels over forty years. Roen's own study based on readings of gender-coded persuasive letters raises compelling issues. He finds that male and female secondary English teachers respond differently to as-yet-unidentified linguistic and rhetorical features of discourse, with male teachers giving significantly higher scores to males on the persuasive letters and female teachers to females, regardless of the labeled gender of the papers. He also finds that teachers bring powerful gender stereotypes to reading student papers. Roen concludes that "reading and evaluating student writing may be more hazardous than we usually consider it to be."

Jean Sanborn's "The Academic Essay: A Feminist View in Student Voices" points out difficulties women and some men have with the linear form of the academic essay. This is a valuable essay, but I am wary of a polarizing and identification of "good" organic forms as feminine and constructive of knowledge, and the "bad" linear academic essay as masculine, authoritarian, and no more than the unnatural "forms, the mold into which one pours thoughts and actions." Sanborn's own production of a linear essay for this collection seems at odds with her teaching values. She ends, however, with a call for teachers to recognize difference as "multiplicity rather than dominant/other" in order to empower students.

The note of "difference" often sounds throughout this collection, and that difference is most often linguistic difference as posited by U.S. linguists, with Deborah Tannen's popular work You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New York: Morrow, 1990) perhaps cited most frequently. Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow are also important sources for many of the articles, beginning with Appleby's solid review of developmental psychological and sociolinguistic research. But the use of these sources sometimes seems to lead to a discourse where some boys and men but all girls and women have certain essential (even if socially constructed) traits. These sources may also contribute to the books white, middle-class orientation, with Chodorow especially universalizing what may be a culture-specific family pattern. McCracken and several of the contributors make strong efforts to include African-American writers in their discussions, but altogether different gender issues would perhaps be voiced by members of other cultural groups.

Despite these reservations, I believe this book should be on the shelves of prospective and current secondary and college English teachers. It will provide solid resources, sound perspectives, and practical action strategies for re-gendering English classrooms, an educational transformation of historical significance.