ABSTRACT
Recent work has considered the relevance of changes in Higher Education for staff/student relationships, including the specific implication for women who have to juggle institutional demands, political commitments and personal lives. This chapter looks at men's experiences and activities, as well as women's, to give a fuller picture of the importance of gender in structuring understandings and expectations of roles within academic and other institutions. This involves addressing issues of the particularities of work in the academy, as well as more general problems of power and gender. The teaching styles that different academics adopt in the classroom are likely to lead to different responses and behaviour from students. Silverstein characterises the 'masculine model' as involving the requirements of a 'traditional' university education i.e. reading texts, writing essays, doing examinations are so designed that students succeed or fail according to their ability to understand, interpret and work within the teacher's definition of reality.
