ABSTRACT
The specific origins of this topic for me lie in a question I am asked all the time, which is whether feminist pedagogy is, at bottom, simply another version of progressive pedagogies: “Isn’t what you are writing about just good teaching?” (Maher 1987c; Maher and Tetreault 1994). I want to look at this question of “good teaching” in relation to the treatment of girls and women in classrooms and the specific role and authority of the teacher in Dewey’s work and in progressive and feminist pedagogical theory. It is often assumed that the broadly inclusive and consistently student-centered nature of progressive education, laid out by John Dewey and others in a number of works and sworn to by successive generations of “progressive” teachers, solves contradictions of differential power and authority in the classroom. If progressive educational theories, and the practices based on them, are benign or neutral when dealing with the diversities represented by girls and boys, or by students from different backgrounds, then theoretical silences about gender, race, class, and cultural “difference” and oppression may not be significant. However, feminist and other contemporary theorists have taught us to suspect such universalizing narratives. Is progressive educational theory another “regime of truth” whose practices silence some students and teachers in the name of including everyone under a universalized rhetoric of social and educational progress? If so, blind spots in the theoretical assumptions themselves may translate to classroom practices of inequality.
