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Re: #6: WOMEN'S WAYS OF KNOWING (final excerpt!)



Following up on Jane's postings on WWK, I would like to make the
following observations...and maybe to start a bit of a debate on the
rapidly expanding "constructivist orthodoxy" that seems to be taking over
the schools of "education".

I see no evidence of what I would call "constructivist" taking over the
schools of education.

First, I want to challenge the assumption that the primary reason
for the low participation of women in majors like engineering, physics,
and math is because of the way these disciplines are taught. If this were
so, then we would expect to see similarly low rates of participation in
these majors everywhere that they are taught. However, it is not
universally true that there is a low participation by women in these
majors. In some countries, such as France and Hungary, the participation
by women in these majors is much higher than it is in the United States.
In France the percentage of women who are professional physicists is about
25% and in Hungary the percentage of women who major in math exceeds 50%.

I would agree that there are societal issues, but I would suggest that it
is not necessarily the case that science/physics is taught the same way
everywhere either.

This suggests that the low percentage of women majoring in these
disciplines in the U.S. (and many other countries) is the result of the
way young women are socialized before they reach college. While I would
agree with Jane that better teaching and a more supportive atmosphere in
our college level courses will help to attract more women to physics, I
also feel that to a large extent the game has been lost before this cohort
of the population ever reaches college.

Very true, the 'game being essentially lost'. But then how can you make
the argument below?

Our schools of "education" do an excellent job of instilling
atrocious attitudes about mathematics and science in prospective K-12
teachers here in the U.S. These teachers in turn do an excellent job of
killing interest in math and science for most students by the time they
are out of middle school. In addition, they are very effective in letting
young women know that math and science are not careers for them.

They do not need schools of "education" to convince them of this. For the
most part the schools of "education" and the A&S faculty in colleges merely
ice the cake baked in the grades before this.

It is my contention that these problems of socialization are
completely independent of pedagogical philosophy. All the constructivism,
objectivism, or instructivism in the world will not change things until we
start to instill "can do" rather than "can't do" attitudes in our young
people.

My two-cents-worth.

I agree with this last $0.02 very strongly, but it'll never happen as long
as science and math education are practiced as filters and vocational
indoctrination from the earliest grades all the way up. The whole focus
can be seen from the earliest grades up as an attempt to entice as many as
possible and then filter out all but the best. How can this _not_ result
in a majority of the population deciding they "can't do?"

....another $0.02 worth.

Dewey

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Dewey I. Dykstra, Jr. Phone: (208)385-3105
Professor of Physics Dept: (208)385-3775
Department of Physics/MCF421/418 Fax: (208)385-4330
Boise State University dykstrad@bsumail.idbsu.edu
1910 University Drive Boise Highlanders
Boise, ID 83725-1570 novice piper

"Physical concepts are the free creations of the human mind and
are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external
world."--A. Einstein in The Evolution of Physics with L. Infeld,
1938.
"Every [person's] world picture is and always remains a construct
of [their] mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence."
--E. Schrodinger in Mind and Matter, 1958.
"Don't mistake your watermelon for the universe." --K. Amdahl in
There Are No Electrons, 1991.
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