David Griffiths of Reed College said, in his Millikan Medal lecture at the
1997 AAPT Summer meeting about declining enrollments (AMERICAN JOURNAL OF
PHYSICS, Dec. 1997, p. 1142):
"...As a group, physicists are notoriously harsh on one another and
arrogant toward others. There is a nasty competitive quality to much of our
professional discourse -- a kind of school-yard ranking -- that is as
demoralizing, to some, as it is distasteful...."
Below is a description of the third stage of intellectual development found
by the authors of the book WOMEN'S WAYS OF KNOWING in their 5-year study
where they interviewed 135 women aged 16 to 60. Much of it parallels male
intellectual development, so it's valuable for understanding your female
AND male students (and your daughters, mother, mother-in-law, etc.!).
Furthermore, "separate knowing" helps us understand why few women become
physicists.
cheers,
Jane Jackson
---------------------------------
Synopsis: WOMEN'S WAYS OF KNOWING
STAGE 3: PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE: THE VOICE OF REASON
Women at this stage "argue that intuitions may deceive; that gut
reactions can be irresponsible and no one's gut feeling is infallible; that
some truths are truer than others; that they can know things they have
never seen or touched; that truth can be shared; and that expertise can be
respected." They "engage in conscious, deliberate, systematic analysis.
They have learned that truth is not immediately accessible, that you cannot
'just know'. Things are not always what they seem to be. Truth lies hidden
beneath the surface, and you must ferret it out. Knowing requires careful
observation and analysis. You must 'really look' and 'listen hard'."
Women at this stage are "absorbed in the business of acquiring and
applying procedures for obtaining and communicating knowledge. Some were
passionately involved in this process, while others treated it primarily as
a game; but the emphasis on procedures, skills, and techniques was common
to all."
They "conceive of knowledge as a process. They believe that each of
us looks at the world through a different lens, that each of us construes
the world differently. They are interested not just in WHAT people think
but in HOW people go about forming their opinions and feelings and ideas."
"As these women become increasingly skillful at executing
procedures for obtaining and communicating knowledge, many of them
experience an increasing sense of control. The world becomes more
manageable." "Procedural knowers are practical, pragmatic problem
solvers....They are trying,with more or less success, to take control of
their lives in a planned, deliberate fashion. As one woman said, 'I think
everything out, and I want to make sure I understand exactly what's going
on before I do anything'."
Who are these women? "Most of the women we meet in this chapter
are well practiced in the art of being students; they are attending or have
recently graduated from prestigious colleges, many from a women's
college..." "We know from earlier interviews with the women... that most
of them once relied on a mixture of received and subjective knowledge,
looking to feeling and intuition for some of the answers they needed and to
external authorities for others. But by the time of the final interview
they had abandoned both subjectivism and absolutism in some areas of their
lives in favor of reasoned reflection. We cannot be sure why some women
make this move and others do not, but we can identify some common sources
of challenge and support in the lives of the women who do.
First, all the women encountered situations in which their old ways
of knowing were challenged. The stories many women told began when
authorities [usually college professors] attempted to inflict their
opinions in areas in which the women believed they had a right to their own
opinions. The conflict was between the absolutist dictates of the
authorities and the women's own subjectivism. ...They struggled not to
move beyond their subjectivism but to defend it."
"The presence of fairly benign authorities may be critical to the
development of the voice of reason. The authorities ... were neither
vicious nor absent. They meant well...[The authorities] did not want to
tell her what to think....They did not offer answers, only techniques for
constructing answers...."
This led to a new insight: as one woman said about her professors,
'You're the one who's placing the judgment on it and as long as you're
substantiating your argument they're not going to disagree...They're
teaching you a method, and you're applying it for yourself.' "She realizes
that her teachers do not presume to judge her in terms of her opinions but
only in terms of the procedures she uses to substantiate her opinions. They
do not insist that she agree with them but only that she use the proper
procedures, and they are willing--indeed eager--to teach her the
procedures. They do not seek to silence her but to teach her a new
language."
And now for the surprise, something that is really important! The
authors found two different types of procedural knowledge, which they call
separate knowing and connected knowing.
SEPARATE KNOWING is what Perry found in his privileged Harvard men.
"In Perry's (1970) account of intellectual development, the student
discovers critical reasoning as 'how They [the upper case symbolizing
authority - here,the professors] want us to think,', how students must
think in order to win the academic game. The student uses this new mode of
thinking to construct arguments powerful enough to meet the standards of an
impoersonal authority.... Most of the women in this chapter tell a similar
story. Viewed from a distance, at least, these women might almost be men."
"Borrowing a term from Carol Gilligan (1982), we call this epistemological
orientation SEPARATE KNOWING."
"The voice of separate knowing is easy to hear. Developmentalists
like Piaget, Kohlberg, and Perry have tuned our ears to it, and it rang out
loud and clear in our interviews, especially with women from highly
selective, rigorous, and traditional colleges." "Separate knowers refuse
to play the conventional female role, choosing instead to play a game that
has belonged traditionally to boys - the game of impersonal reason."
"At the heart of separate knowing is CRITICAL THINKING, or ... the doubting
game...Presented with a proposition, separate knowers immediately look for
something wrong - a loophole, a factual error, a logical contradiction, the
omission of contrary evidence.
Separate knowing is in a sense the opposite of subjectivism. While
subjectivists assume that everyone is right, separate knowers assume that
everyone - including themselves - may be wrong. If something feels right
to subjectivists, they assume it to BE right. Separate knowers, on the
other hand, are especially suspicious of ideas that feel right; they feel a
special obligation to examine such ideas critically...."
However, the authors noticed that the women, unlike men, did not
enjoy the doubting game. "In general, few of the women we interviewed,
even among the ablest separate knowers, found argument -- reasoned
critical discourse -- a congenial form of conversation among friends. The
classic dormitory bull session, with students assailing their opponents'
logic and attacking their evidence, seems to occur rarely among women, and
teachers complain that women students are reluctant to engage in critical
debate with peers in cless, even when explicitly encouraged to do so.
Women find it hard to see doubting as a 'game'; they tend to take it
personally. Teachers and fathers and boyfriends assure them that arguments
are not between PERSONS but between POSITIONS, but the women continue to
fear that someone may get hurt."
"Separate knowing is essentially an adversarial form. If played
among peers, the game is fair; but in the 'games' the women described, the
woman was nearly always pitted against an authority, usually a professor
and usually male. These were unequal contests. The teacher wields very real
power over the student, although masked with genial camaraderie; and it is
dangerous for the relatively powerless to rip into the interpretations of
the powerful."
"Often, the primary purpose of their words is not to express
personally meaningful ideas but to manipulate the listeners's reactions,
and they see the listener not as an ally in conversation but as a
potentially hostile judge." ..."Ceremonial combat, to women, often seems
just silly. The exercise of rhetoric seemed to be experienced as especially
futile by undergraduates, who used it mainly to prove their worth to the
authorities."
[Next time: CONNECTED KNOWING, the other form that procedural knowledge takes.]
---------------------------------
Jane Jackson, Co-Director, Modeling Instruction Program
Box 871504, Dept.of Physics & Astronomy,ASU,Tempe,AZ 85287
480-965-8438/fax:965-7331 <http://modeling.asu.edu>
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is
our inability to understand the exponential function."
- Al Bartlett, Prof of Physics, Univ of Colorado