the particular and the feminine: gendered accounts in educational theorizing

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THE PARTICULAR AND THE FEMININE: GENDERED ACCOUNTS IN EDUCATIONAL THEORIZING

Deborah Hicks

College of Education University of Cincinnati

Penelope Fitzgerald’s historical novel, The Blue Flower, evolves around the love of a German philosophy student, Fritz von Hardenberg [later to become the poet, Novalis), for a girl who was only twelve years old at the time of their first meeting. About midway through the evolving narrative, Fritz is introduced to the older sister of his beloved Sophie, the Frau Leutnant Mandelsloh. Taking advantage of an occasion when he is alone with Frau Leutnant, Fritz presses her about his chances for engagement with Sophie (these being totally dependent on the consent of the two fathers involved - in Sophie’s case a stepfather). The Frau offers her view of things, evoking a scenario in which the two male guardians would sit and enjoy a “good pipe of tobacco,” hopefully settling things in a congenial manner.’ Fritz’s response to her suggests the ways in which such reasoning through particulars is viewed as a womanly trait: The Frau’s response to Fritz embraces this role, though not without irony:

”I thank you for your advice,” said Fritz. “I think, indeed, that women have a better gasp on the whole business of life than we men have. We are morally better than they are, but they can reach perfection, we can’t. And that is in spite of the fact that they particularise, we generalise.” “That I have heard before. What is wrong with particulars? Someone has to look after them.”2

This novelistic exchange between two fictionalized [albeit historical) characters evokes the problematic central to my own purposes. In historical and contemporary writing about reasoning, acts of knowing in relation to lived worlds of experience, there has been an association of the particular (namely, intimate relations, felt experience, and the gendered body) with femininity as opposed to masculinity. Reason has been posed as oppositional to passion, or to what is “felt” rather than cognitively ”known” in a rationalistic sense. Intimate knowledge between persons in relation, the paradigm case being the compassion or “loving gaze“ of non- strangers, has been posed as the basis for a moral philosophy that is more typical of women.3 The lived worlds of intimacy and relationship, bodies and passional knowing, have in a variety of literatures been affiliated with the feminine, in counterpart to the generalizing tendencies of male rationality and moral rea~oning.~

1. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 19951, 100. 2. Ibid. 3. Lawrence Blum, Moral Perception and Particularity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (New York Schocken Books, 1970). See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) for a classic discussion of such issues. 4. Genevieve Lloyd, TheMan of Reason: ”Male” and uFemale”in Western Philosopliy, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

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I want to press these arguments a bit further, and to explore how they have become implicated in certain rhetorical forms that rely on notions of particularity. The use of narrative to represent the particular experiences and meaning perspec- tives of subjects has a rich history in the social sciencesand, with the growing acceptance of qualitative-interpretive research methods, in educational research as well.’ The rhetorical possibilities offered by narrative texts have more recently begun to be linked to an epistemological project of valuing the practical and personal knowledge of teachers (who are generally female). What Kathleen Casey has referred to as the “new narrative research” is also strongly indebted to feminism.h Some of the new “storied” genres of educational research and theory draw specifically on the voices of women teachers and students, voices that contest the validity of generalizations that can omit, even suppress, them as subjects. The lived experience of women teachers has been especially crucial to an effort to bring to light the lives and voices of those who have sometimes been silenced by discourses of science and rationality.

In this essay, I want to build on existing arguments about the richness of such particularistic accounts of knowing, foregrounding ones that draw explicity on feminist theorizing. I want to move toward a dialectic between considerations of rhetorical form and considerations of epistemological valuing. The autobiographical texts of French writer Annie Ernaux will serve as a case study. Ernaux’s memoirs portray vividly one woman’s struggles between social class identities. In my interpretive study of Ernaux’s texts, I set her narrative writing in dialogue with constructivist accounts of knowing and learning in social context. Drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum and Jane Miller, I argue that discourses constructed through the particulars of narrative texts have the potential to “disrupt the steady male gaze” of theorists who assume a universal (and thus gender-less) subject and mind.’ The critical weaving of complex particularity into accounts of learning can enable alternative accounts of what it means to know as gendered subjects in moral, passional, and cognitive relation to a lived world. Thus, what Miller refers to as hybrid discourses also have the potential of contesting the epistemologies that shape contemporary educational theory and research (SW, 263).

~~~~

5. See Natalie Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford Stanforduniversity Press, 1987) andRenato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989) for particularly cogent dlscussions of narrative.

6. Kathleen Casey, “The New Narrative Research in Education,” in Review of Research in Education, ed. Michael Apple (Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association, 1995-961, 21 1-53. 7. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Phhilosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Martha Nussbaum, School for Women [London: Virago Press, 1996); and Jane Miller, Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture (London: Virago Press, 19901, 10. These last two books will be cited as SW and S S in the text for all subsequent citations.

DEBOMH HICKS is Associate Professor of Literacy Education, College of Education, University of Cincinnati, 608 Teachers College Bldg., Cincinnati, OH 45221-0002. Her primary areas of scholarship are literacy education, narrative inquiries, and feminist theory.

HICKS The Particular and the Feminine 253

STORIED EDUCATIONAL INQUIRIES

Social scientific accounts of knowing and learning typically assume that the writer/theorist has no gendered authorial relationship to the texts being written about education.* This mirrors the ways in which educational theory is usually stated as if there were no content-form relationship, so that there is an implicit assumption that rationality is distinct from rhetorical style. Some feminist educational researchers argue quite a different view of things. Miller makes the point that reading and writing are cultural activities, embedded as are all cultural activities in relations of gender, race, and social class (SS, 158-59). The link between storied forms of educational inquiry - such as autobiography, life history analysis, and collaborative teacher-researcher inquiry - and feminism stems from a dissonance between the lived experience of educators, and theory and research that frequently omit this complex particularity. As Madeleine Grumet poses the problematic, “If you are engaged in expressive work but find that the symbols and content of expression that dominate your field, as well as the conditions and relations of its work, are alien to you, what do you For Grumet and other feminist educational theorists, a turn toward story and autobiography as method, a valuation of personal experience and particular relations, has been critical for the development of educational theory and practice:

Entering the field of cumculum theory as a grown-up woman, deeply involved in the care of our three children, I was somewhat astonished to discover that only the public activities and interests of men were being studied as significant sources of contemporary education. Despite my identification with the Left’s interest in social justice, somehow their serenade to society left mc no part to sing. The experiences of family life, of bearing, delivering, and nurturing children, were absent from this discourse. Silent too was the language of the body, the world we know through our fingertips, the world we carry on weight-bearing joints, the world we hear in sudden hums andgiggles. Many of us turnedawayfrom thegeneralizationsandmethodsof socialscience as we sought a method and a language to draw these worlds into curriculum theory. We turned to literature, to theater, to history to recover specificity and contradiction, evidence that education was a human project that we all actively sustain.1°

The experience of having “no part to sing” within the mainstream discourses of educational work has been an impetus to the writings of feminist educational theorists. This has also been the experience of many teachers, as Miller points out. Classroom teachers are held responsible for the enculturation and socialization of children, along with the imposition of the standards being devised for nearly every school subject. And yet, teachers are under “constant surveillance” and there is an insidious lack of trust in their judgments and practices (SW, 9). In her book, Miller describes the conditions of teachers’ professional lives among working-class students in England. These conditions evoke teachers’ professional lives more generally in many educational contexts:

8. Kathleen Carter, “The Place of Story in the Study of Teaching and Teacher Education,” Educational Researcher 22, no. 1 (1993): 5-12.

9. Madeleine Grumet, Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 89.

10. hid., xv.

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“Basics” and a “stiffening” of standards are opposed to a presumed laxness. Frugality replaces prodigality. The curriculum is reduced, classroom practice standardised, assessment forms and procedures multiplied. “Pleasure” becomes a duty word, and all that is “hard,” “demanding,” will be set against the ”informal,” the “progressive,” and thc “popular” ISW, 51 I . Storied forms of inquiry have become a means of rhetorically valuing the

historically specific relations that constitute classroom practices and the lives of women teachers and theorists. Thus, feminist educator Sue Middleton embeds her study of women teachers (themselves feminist educators) in what Miller refers to as the ”autobiography of the question” (SW, 259) - her own life as an educator in relation to the life histories of other feminist educators, the subjects of her research. Her life history analyses evolved out of narrative and dialogue- the sharing of stories of experience that arose with other women educators.” As Middleton describes the links between her own life history, her relations with the feminist educators whose lives she studied, and her research methods, “The origins of my methodology were the ways we women related to one another - the ways we made knowledge about our lives as women. There was no split between my personal and intellectual dilemmas. I lived my feminism.”1z

How the world of educational practice and theorizing would be changed i f women teachers and researchers could ”live their feminism” is an important problematic for feminist educators like Middleton. Many who draw on feminist theorizing would argue that things would be quite different indeed. Highlighting the personal histories and particular relations of educators and students, conveyed through narrative form, could be a means of contesting the uncontested assumptions held about women teachers, and theories of teaching and learning that are divorced from the lives of persons who feel and desire as well as cognitively know. The insertion of women’s narrative texts into educational discourses about teaching and learning could be a rhetorical starting place for this political and theoretical project. Narratives of lived experience convey the complexities of life inside and outside the classroom, lives that in their complex particularity call into question certain generalizations about teachers and the students they teach.

Inserting the narratives of classroom teachers into mainstream educational discourses has the potential not only of contesting theories that distance and silence the particularity of women’s lives andvoices; narrative inquiries can also be enabling of alternative epistemologies, epistemologies of the particular. In their writing about storied forms of educational inquiry, Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly weave arguments in and between methodological and epistemological concerns. Their focus is on the stories of experience told by practitioners, narratives that reveal what they term the professional knowledge context of teachers‘ classroom practice.13

11. See Carol Witherall and Nel Noddings, eds., Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dialogue in Education [New York: Teachers College Press, 1991).

12. Sue Middleton, Educating Feminists: Life Histories and Pedagogies (New York: Teachers College Press, 19931, 65.

13. Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly, “Teachers’ Professional Knowledge Landcapes: Teacher Stories -Stories of Teachers - School Stories - Stories of Schools,” Educational Researcher, 25, no. 3 [1996): 24- 30.


Stories garnered through collaborative dialogue and classroom observation are also part of a theoretical project of valuing personal and practical knowledge. Clandinin and Connelly identify as their key epistemologcal concern the “study of personal knowledge in the narrative unities of practitioner^."'^ In such narrative texts, they argue, there is a unity of subjective and objective knowing, and of the moral, emotional, and cognitive aspects of teaching and learning. The textual form of narrative conveys a sense of professional teaching contexts composed of “relationships among people, places, and things.”l5 In this way, narrative texts are more ideally suited to a mode of theorizing educational practice that is ultimately grounded in the particularity of context. As Clandinin and Connelly state, “It always ‘depends. ” l6

Jo Anne Pagano echoes such assertions in her writings about the role of fictions, or the deliberate rhetorical shaping of events, in educational theory and practice.17 Narrative texts are suited to the task of describing and theorizing the interpretive practices of teachers and students. Pagano goes further, to suggest that all educational theories are stories about the world. Both teaching and theorizing about teaching are interpretive textual practices:

Teaching is, among other things, a discursive and interpretive practice, just as the writing of autobiography is. Teaching is textual. When we teach, we tell stories about the world. Some stories are scientific, some historical, some philosophical, some literary, and so on. Educational theories are stories about how teaching and learning work, about who does what to whom and for what purposes, and most particularly, educational theories are stones about the kind of world we want to live in and about what we should do to make that world. Stories obey a narrative logic and, like mythologies, help us to find our place in the world. The stories we tell in our disciplines are faithful to certain narrative conventions that define those disciplines. What separates philosophy from literature is narrative convention and presumed cpistemological status.L8

Pagano‘s remarks allude to an important point that I will explore in greater depth: the relation between the textual form and epistemological status of theorizing about teaching and learning. If all educational theories entail certain kinds of textual and interpretive practices, then it makes sense to examine what kinds of moral valuations, or moral fictions, are constructed through differing rhetorical acts.I9 In this sense, the implications of the “new narratives” of feminists and others could be viewed as having important, far-reaching consequences for theorizing about teaching and learning. It might make sense, then, to ask what sorts of moral valuations are conveyed by the narrative representation of complex particulars. What do such fictions convey to the reader? What might be their import for mainstream, dominant discourses about how teachers teach and students learn?

14. Michael Connelly and Jean Clandinin, “On Narrative Method, Personal Philosophy, and Narrative Unities in the Story of Teaching,” Iournal of Research in Science Teaching (1986): 24.

15. Clandinin and Connelly, ”Teachcrs’ Professional Knowledge Landscapes,” 25. 16. Ibid, 29.

17. See Davis, Fiction in the Archives. 18. Jo Anne Pagano, “Moral Fictions: The Dilemma of Theory and Practice,” in Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dialogue in Education (New York: Teachcrs College Press, 19911, 197.

19. Ibid.


It is toward such questions that I now turn in my critical readings of one woman’s memoirs. I juxtapose Emaux’s narrative texts with considerations of their value for social constructivist accounts of learningm I choose this focus because of the extremely high “presumed epistemological status” afforded social constructivist accounts of how teachers facilitate students’ construction of academic discourses and disciplinary knowledge.2’ Emaux’s autobiographical texts about her own life, and the lives of her mother and father, would not seem the most likely candidate for a text about the social construction of knowledge - and yet, I find them to be extremely provocative texts with which to engage such theoretical accounts of learning and knowing. The narrative complexity of her writings allows the discerning educational theorist to question such analytical constructs as “identities” and “discourses” which have more recently begun to penetrate accounts of how learning occurs in social context.22 Carmen Luke argues that an understanding of women’s identities and femininities “cannot be articulated in universal principles, but must come from women’s individual voices articulated from specific social and cultural locations.”w Ernaux’s narrative account of growing up in a working class setting reveals the particular sets of relations that were constitutive of her coming to know, be, and value in certain ways. These memoirs help to reveal what is typically unspoken in social scientific accounts of how discourses and social identities are constructed or “internalized.”

I also want to demonstrate through this narrative exemplar the merits of the argument made forcefully by Grumet, that “knowledge evolves in human relationships.”24 A stronger assertion than stating that narrative texts convey the professional knowledge contexts of teachers, this argument seems fundamental to the kind of disruption that Miller advocates as a task for gendered theorizing in education. It assumes that not only is the educational theorist, the reader and writer of certain kinds of texts about teaching and learning, a subject working within sets of lived and felt human relations. Such an assertion assumes as well that practical knowledge is the attunement to actual, lived relations in the world. This might, and erroneously in my view, be assigned to a kind of knowing, “narrative knowing,” which concerns itself with contingency and moral value, passion and aesthetics - unlike the rationalistic activity of scientific reasoningz5 Such siphoning off of passions from

20. Annie Emaux, A Woman’s Story, trans. Tanya Leslie (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 1991 ) and Annie Emaux, A Man’s Place, trans. Tanya Leslie (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 1992). These books will be cited as WS and MP in the text for all subsequent references. 21. Pagano, ”Moral Fictions.” 22. James Paul Gee, “What is Literacy?” Journal of Education 1, no. 171 (1989): 18-25; Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideologies in Discourses (New York: The Falmer Press, 1990); and Jean Lave, “Learning as Participation in Communities of Practice.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, April 1992. 23. Carmen Luke, “Feminist Pedagogy Theory: Reflections on Power and Authority,” Educatjonal Theory 46, no. 3 (1996): 283-302. 24. Grumet, Bitter Milk, xix. Similar arguments have also been made by Barbara J. Thayer-Bacon, ”The Nurturing of a Relational Epistemology,” Educational Theory 47, no. 2 (19971,265: “Like John Dewey, I view knowing as an activity, like dancing, singing, or loving, that is done with others.” 25. For instance, as in JeromeBruner, ActualMinds. Possible Worlds (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1986) and Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).


intellectual rationality, and contingency and historicity from goal-directed activity, wouldbe anunfortunate move against the concerns of feminist accounts of knowing. For as Genevieve Lloyd argues, the lminished halves of pairs like Reason and Passion are associated with the voices of women.26 The silencing may be theoretical, but it is just as fully embodied as any act of knowing.

I adopt the stance of Grumet, and assume as a foundation for my inquiries that human knowledge is practical knowing, and that all acts of knowing are embedded in webs of meaning that can be depicted as moral, passional, and cognitive?’ Different kinds of rhetorical texts convey different “arts of life” in relation to subjects’ passional, moral, and cognitive commitments, and in relation to the commitments of theorists as The critical reading of narratives written by women and girls is invaluable as a means of unveiling the moral complexity of their lives as teachers andstudents, as the “new narrative’’ research has suggested. It is also invaluable as a way of constructing new theoretical discourses in education, ones that bear the imprints of discerning readers, writers, and theorists in search of practical wisdom about knowing in social contexts.

READING AND WRITING LIVES

Emaux‘s autobiographical writings present a fine case for the value of reading and writing lives as a means of constructing critical arguments about learning. Her writings evoke a view of constructed knowledge and social identity embedded in complex particulars. Her narratives defy easy generalizations, as she relates her movement within and between social class identities growing up as a girl in a working-class family in Normandy, France. Notions of identity and discourse are presented as lived and felt relations in the world. School learning is depicted as inseparable from passional and moral commitments, some conflicted. I draw on her memoirs as an empirical means of arguing the value of hybrid theoretical discourses in educational theory - ones that bring to light the ”nether world’’ of moral particularity, intimacy, and f e m i n i n i t ~ . ~ ~

Ernaux’s memoirs about her mother ( A Woman’s Story) and father (A Man’s Place) relate the autobiographical narrative of lived relations involving social class, gender, and discourse. The two memoirs chronicle her experiences growing up with Norman worhng-class parents, and then moving through education (first a convent school, later a university) into a middle-class, even bourgeois set of identities and values. Throughout the two narratives, Ernaux is deliberate about the ways in which she represents her parents. Her feelings toward her mother and father are complex, at times conflicted. Yet, she strives toward a “neutral” languagc, though one hardly divorced from particularity and feeling. She searches for a rhetorical style that can

26. Lloyd, Man of Reason. 27. For wonderful philosophical arguments about similar issues, seeMikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy ofthe Act, ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993) and James Garrison, Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the AIL of Tenching (New York Teachers College Press, 1997).

28. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 280-84.

29. G.W.F. Hegel, as discussed in Lloyd, Man of Reason, 80-85.


convey the complexity of her parents’ lives as themselves embedded in social class and historical relations. At the same time, her texts maintain a commitment to feeling and moral valuation, as she moves between the stories of her parents’ lives, and the story of her felt relation to their lives. Difficult to categorize in disciplinary terms, Ernaux’s memoirs cross boundaries betwcen autobiography, literature, and history:

For me, my mother has no history. She has always been there. When I speak of her, my first impulse is to “freeze” her in a series of images unrelated to time - “she had a violent temper,” ”she was intense in everything she did” -and to recall random scenes in which she was present. This brings back only the fantasy woman, the one who has appeared in my dreams, alive once more, drifting ageless through a tense world reminiscent of psychological thrillers. I would also like to capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who &ed in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris. The more objective aspect of my writing will probably involve a cross between family history and sociology, reality and fiction. This hook can be seen as a literary venture as its purpose is to find out the truth about my mother, a truth that can be conveyed only by words. [Neither photographs, nor my own memories, nor even the reminiscences of my family can bring me this truth.) And yet, in a sense, I would like to remain a cut below literature (WS, 131.

In writing of the “truth” she is seehng through writing about her mother’s life and her own relation to it, Ernaux attempts to write a straightforward and historical text, rather than to focus primarily on images, metaphors, and tropes. Nevertheless, her relation to her parents’ historicized lives is interwoven with the narratives of their existence. As the narratives evolve, what is evident are the complex ways in which her education has emerged within these histories, at times in opposition to them. Though seemingly objective in style, her biographical portraiture is filtered through the lens of her own particularistic relation with the lives she attempts to record in words:

On the train journey home that Sunday, I tried to keep my son entertained so that he would behave himself. People travelling first-class have no taste for noise and restless children. I suddenly realized with astonishment: ”Now I really am bourgeois,” and “It’s too late now.” Later that summer, while I was waiting for news of my first job, I thought to myself ”One day I shall have to explain all this.” What I meant was to write about my father, his life, and the distance which had come between us during my adolescence. Although it had something to do with class, it was different, indefinable. Like fractured love IMP, 13).

The ”fractured love’’ that Ernaux describes emerges as part of a web of intimate relations involving social class, gender, language, and education. As she begins to define herself as a girl who succeeds at and values middle-class schooling, she becomes aware of differences in the hscourses and social identities of home and school. Her relations with her father become more strained with the realization of the “broadness” of his language, even though he took pains to speak “proper” French. Tones of voice and forms of language evoking certainvalues and sorts of relationships become for her associated with a growing separation from the forms of life expressed by her father. Growing up with him, Norman French was part of a difficult intimacy made more complex by differences in gender - such as her father’s male authority and aggressiveness, refracted through language:

At home, when we spoke to one another, it was always in a querulous tone of voice. Only strangers were entitled to polite behavior. The habit was so deep-rooted that my father - who applied himself to spealung properly in front of other people - would automatically revert to Norman French and to his broad accent and aggressive tone whenever he told me not to climb on to the heap of rubble in the yard. This ruined his efforts to create a good impression. He always


used popular speech when he scolded me. Besides, if he had spoken properly, I would never have taken seriously his threats about slapping me IMP, 60).

Emaux writes of her mother’s social class existence somewhat Ifferently. Though working-class and rural traditions were no less an issue in her mother’s life, Ernaux writes of her mother’s aspirations toward middle-class social conventions, especially education. She forged a close relation with her mother around learning and her mother’s quest for bettering one’s existence, for becoming a cultivated member of society:

She longed to learn the rules of good behavior and was always worrying about social conventions, fearful of doing the wrong thing. She longed to know what was in fashion, what was new, the names of famous writers, the recent films on release -although she didn’t go to the cinema, she hadn’t time -and thcnames of the flowers in the gardens. She listened attentively when peoplc spoke of something she didn’t know, out of curiosity, and also because she wanted to show that she was eager to learn. In her opinion, self-improvement was first and foremost a question of learning, and nothing was more precious than knowledge. (She would often say: “One must occupy one’s mind.”) Books were the only things she handlcd with care. She washed her hands before touching them.. ..I thought her a cut above my father because she seemed closer to the schoolmistresses and teachers than he did. Everything about my mother - her authority, her hopes, and her ambitions - was geared to the very concept of education. We shared an intimacy centred on books, the poetry I read to her and the pastries in the teashop at Rouen, from which he was excluded. He took me to the funfair, to the circus, and to see Fernandel’s films. He taught me how to ride a bicycle and recognize the garden vegetables. With him I had fun, with her I had ”conversations.” Of the two, she was the dominatingfigure, the one who represented authority [WS, 45-47).

What might within contemporary educational theories about learning and the social construction of identities or discourses be described as the revoicing, learning, or internalization of social class identities, emerges here as intimate, lived rela- t i o n ~ . ~ ” These are passional and moral kinds of relations, as much as they can be described as the interweaving of gender, class, discourse, and education. In her stark narrative prose style, Emaux depicts her coming of age and education as an evolving relation with her parents, and with formal schooling. It is thus that the possibilities of her rhetorical choices allow her to convey what Grumet offers as a central argument for theorizing educational processes: that knowledge evolves in human relationships.”’ The relations themselves, the particulars of feeling, reflection, intimacy, and embodiment, are part of what the knowing is.

As the two narratives unfold, Ernaux relates the conflicted nature of her evolving relations at home and at school. Her school successes provoke both admiration and hostility from her parents, contributing to the emotional distance she feels when with her father:

In the evening, when1 spread out my homework on the lutchen table, he would leaf through my books, especially the ones about history, geography, and natural science. He liked to be tested on these subjects. One day he insisted that I give him a dictation, to prove that he could spell properly. He never knew which form I was in. He would say, ”She’s with Miss So-and-so.” My school-areligiousestablishment choscn by mymother-wassecn byhimasa terrifyingworld whichdictated thewhole of my behavior, floating abovemelike the islandof LaputainGulliver’s Travels (MP, 61).

30. Discussed in James Paul Gee, “What is Literacy?” Journal ofEducation 1, no. 171 (1989): 18-25; James Paul Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideologies in Discourses (New York: The Falmer Press, 1990); and James Wertsch, Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991 J. 31. Grumet, Bittcr Milk, xix.

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Ernaux also writes of a certain kind of “fracturing” that occurred with her mother, as she in her adolescence began to embrace the femininity and educational values of middle-class girls and women:

I stopped trying to copy her. I felt drawn to the feminine ideal portrayed in L’Echo d e In Mode. The women one read about were slim and discreet; they were good cooks and called their little girls, “darling.” They reminded me of the middle-class mothers whose daughters were my companions at school. I found my own mother’s attitude brash. I averted my eyes when she uncorked a bottle, holding it locked between her knees. I was ashamed of her brusque manners and speech, especially when I realized how alike we were. I blamed her for being someone who I, by moving into new circles, no longer wanted to be. I discovered there was a world of hfference between wanting to he educated and actually acquiring that knowledge. My mother needed an encyclopaedia to say who Van Cogh was. She knew the classics only by name. My school curriculum was a mystery to her. Because of my strong admiration for her, I couldn’t help feeling that she - much more than my father - had let me down, by not being able to lend me her support and by leaving me defenseless in a strange, new world, where the other girls’ drawing- rooms were lined with books (WS, 52).

Writing of the sometimes bitter exchanges that occurred, Ernaux notes that her mother at times “saw her own daughter as a class rival” (WS, 53).

Still, Ernaux writes of an intimacy with her mother centered around discourses ~ f f e r n i n i n i t y . ~ ~ A s her studies progressed during a time when other girls around the age of seventeen would have had jobs, Emaux continued to experience emotional distance from her father - she was a learner, not a worker (MP, 68-69). With her mother, however, she could share conversations about “monthly pains, beauty products, and choosing the right bra” (MP, 69). Later, after Ernaux completed her university studies and also married, her relations with her parents acquired new meanings. On visits with them, she was reminded of her conflictual movement between social class identities, love, and belonging as she heard the “real voices” again of her parents:

It was always [my mother] who came to meet me from the Paris train. She waited for me by the barrier and insisted on taking my suitcase, “lt’s too heavy for you, you’re not used to carrying things.” In the shop there would probably be a couple of customers whom [my father] stopped serving while he kissed me in his usual brusque manner. I sat down in the kitchen while they remained standing, she by the stairs, he silhouetted in the doorway that led through to the cafe. At that time of day the sun played upon the tables and the glasses on the counter; sometimes a customer listening to us was caught in the beams of sunlight. Away from home, I had stripped my parents of their speech and mannerisms, turning them into magnificent people. Now I was hearing their real voices again - loud and booming - and their broad Norman pronunciation, saying “a” in place of “elle.“ I realized they had always been like this, without the “decorum” and the language which I now considered to be normal. I felt tom between two identities IMP, 84).

Later, Ernaux writes poignantly as she deals with the death of each of her parents (the story of her mother is written in part as a way of dealing with her grief and loss upon her mother’s death). Throughout these two sometimes interwoven narratives, identities are portrayed as relations of feeling and often love, fractured as these might be.

Emaux’s autobiographical texts provide an interesting case study of what it means to embrace new identities - an integral part of education for all students, and

32. Dorothy E. Smith, “Femininity as Discourse,” in Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture, ed. Leslie G. Roman, Linda K. Christian-Smith, and Elizabeth Ellsworth (New York: The Falmer Press, 1988), 37-59.


especially for students from non-middle-class backgrounds. The fine detail of her narrative prose allows Ernaux to convey a valuation of things that might otherwise be lacking in theoretical statements about appropriating new discourses and identities. The educational theorist could write her movement between identities and values in constructivist terms, perhaps drawing on intellectual links to Marxist philosophy - the socially distributed performance of activities and discourses that are later appropriated by the individual. Such a description would be lacking, however, if it omitted the moral complexities and passional commitments constitutive of her coming to know within conflicting social class identities.

It is not only that empirical and theoretical descriptions of the social construction of knowledge would be lacking in the rich detail that elucidates how learning occurs for agentive subjects. (Such a statement would be a weaker form of what I am attempting to convey through exemplar.) More than this, accounts of knowledge devoid of reference to moral particularity miss an integral part of what knowing is, in the sense that human knowledge is embedded in distinctions of value that are both relational and particular to context. As Nussbaum writes, “TO grasp either a love or a tragedy by intellect alone is not sufficient for having real human knowledge of it.”33 Her statement might be extended to education in general, which has been fraught with conceptions of rationality as an intellectual (if social] achievement.

Why has the work of educational theorists, especially in the case of studies of learning drawing on social constructivism and situated cognition, maintained a distinction between reasoning and passion, rationality and moral valuation? Why has the intuitive and felt discernment of particular relations been linked to women’s ways of knowing, most saliently in the realm of moral reasoning? And why should the writing of narrative texts be so closely linked with feminist frameworks? Are not the lives of both women and men defined by such particular sets of relations as those described by Ernaux? Why should such things be the special concern of feminist theory?

I turn to questions like these in a final bit of commentary, in which I explore the possibility of constructing hybrid theoretical discourses in education, ones with wide potential sigdicance for studies of teaching and learning. In these final comments I focus on epistemological issues, as I look at the pernicious consequences of divorcing the embodiment and passional lives of persons from their knowing and learning in social context. If moral particularity is denied epistemological value in theories of education, it tends to be women’s particular voices that are discounted - while the “steady male gaze” remains hidden, inarticulate. However, such omis- sions are educationally detrimental for men and boys as well; both girls and boys in classrooms, as well as their teachers, can be silenced by educational discourses that split off their particular lived and felt experience from what they come to “know” in school.

33. Martha Nusshaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck andEihics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (New Y o r k Cambridge University Press, 19861, 45.

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The myth or moral fiction (to use Pagano’s phrasing) that intellectual learning occurs as passionless activity, disconnected from embodiment and feeling, is a story that has been harder for women to swallow than men. As Miller points out, women’s bodies are constant reminders of how knowing is inseparable from embodiment and feeling, She narrates her own experiences as a young mother reading Proust. In this scenario from her life as a reader, the act of reading (surely an example of the construction of knowledge) is integrally bound up with her gendered body:

Ayoungmotheris sucklingher son. As hewrigglesfromher into sudden, heavy sleep, milkspurts from her breast and on the pages of Volume W of Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. She dabs the book with a muslin napkin, buttons herself, reads on, while her son sleeps.”

The unfortunate thing is that the worlds of intimacy, bodies, and feeling have historically, as Genevieve Lloyd argues, been associated with a philosophical dichotomy that pits rationality against irrationality, reason against passion. Women have across centuries of phlosophical inquiry been traditionally affiliated with the latter member in each of these pairs. Recent scholarship on the emotions has thoroughly contested the notion that emotions and felt attunement to others are “irrational” when compared to beliefs.35 Feminist philosophers have argued particularly strongly that knowing integrally entails feeling, embodiment, and intimate c ~ n n e c t i o n . ~ ~ Nonetheless, there has been a persistent devaluing in educational research discourses of what is not controllable in a rationalistic, goal-directed sense - what is contingent, vulnerable, relational, and felt; in short, much of human knowledge. This is a source of trouble for educational theory and practice, which in an age that seems focused on standards of achievement can easily omit the passions that would lead students to want to achieve in the first place.

As some feminists would argue, the insertion of narrative texts - biography, autobiography, memoir - holds the possibility of disrupting the epistemological valuing of a rationality that is divorced from our lives as embodied persons. If moral and passional commitments are for a variety of reasons (including historical ones) more salient in the writings of feminist educators, they are nonetheless integral to the rationality that we all achieve in a world of human relations. The textual weaving of particularistic accounts (namely narrative texts) with other kinds of rhetorical

34. Janet Miller, “Autobiography and Research.” Paper presented at the Annual Mectings of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, Illinois, March 1997.

35. For relevant discussions in the philosophical literature, see Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge; also Amelie Rorty, ed., Explaining Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Israel Scheffler, In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Education (1974; reprint, New York: Routledge, 1991); and Michael Stocker and Elizabeth Hegeman, Valuing Emotions (New York Cambridge University Press, 19961. For recent and relevant discussions in this journal, see Megan Boler, “Disciplined Emotions: Philosophies of Educated Feelings,” Educational Theory 47, no. 2 11997): 203-28 and David Dewhurst, “Education as Passion,” Educafzonal Theory 47, no. 4 (1997): 477-88.

36. For instance, Lorraine Code, What Can She Know! Feminist Theoryand the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991 1; Allison Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” in GenderlBodylKnowledge: Feminist Reconstruction of Being and Knowing, ed. Allison Jaggar and Susan Bordo (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992); and Thayer-Bacon, “The Nurturing of a Relational Epistemology.”


forms (such as argumentation or critical analysis) could foster richer educational inquiries - ones that move beyond the limitations of a rationality that often omits bodies, passions, and intimacy from depictions of “knowing.”

Miller describes this kind of theorical project as much more than simply “tacking women on” to existing accounts of teaching and learning processes ( S S , 133). In the same vein, the project I am describing goes further than “tacking narrative texts on” to existing methods for studying how teaching and learning occur in social context. This would be missing the point that narrative texts convey certain “arts of life,” rhetorical valuations, that have in many cases led a shadowy existence on the fringes of mainstream educational theorizing?’ What is particularistic, contingent, historicized, and feminine has often been subsumed under the guise of a techne of theory and policy making that can leave women educators feeling they have “no part to sing.” Miller uses the metaphor of seduction to describe how women have sometimes been complicit in embracing academic modes of thought and writing that have tended to ignore them, and more generally to ignore sexual difference, intimate relations, and personal experience. Throughout her studies of reading and culture, Miller draws on varied rhetorical forms to present critical reading and theorizing as historicized and particular engagements with texts. Her writing of educational theory uses biography, literary interpretation, autobiography, and argumentation as a means of resistance, and for creating new theoretical “vantage points.” This is a difficult task, she notes, for it involves the construction of new forms of theorizing. Creating such new forms can involve struggles between oppositions:

Perhaps one of the deadliest and least resistable of seductions for feminists is their seduction by theorists, by theories, by the theoretical. This book bears witness to my ownvulnerable interest in the kinds of intellectual project whose vaporous abstractions and purest distillations encourage a soaring-off from the grit and distraction of womenand their irritatinglyunabsorbable condition. But the alternative inspires terror too: anti-intcllectualism, the comforts of an unprincipled empiricism, of injunctions to turn for real wisdom to the anecdotal, the personal and the private, to narrative, to fiction. Wary, buffeted, we look for compromise, scttlement and, of course, for ways out, new forms, reconceptualized vantage points (SS, 8).

Such a wary search for new forms and reconceptualized vantage points strikes me as a brazen undertaking, and an immensely promising one. The ”grit” of women, their lived and felt experience, is only one of many stories that needs to be inserted into theoretical discourses about teaching and learning. Social and critical issues spanning a wide range of educational questions and problems might be similarly addressed through their complex particularity, as well as more general commentary. Hybrid texts that confront issues such as racial diversity, class differences, and democratic access can reveal different aspects of those issues by immersing the reader in the ethical complexity of lives. The social commentary that might emerge through such engagement with particulars would be more attuned to the moral complexity and richness of students’ and teachers’ lived experience. Reductionisms about difficult and compelling dilemmas in education might be avoided through a deliberate movement between rhetorical forms that focus the reader’s gaze on

37. Nussbaum, Love‘s Knowledge.

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particulars, and those that invite her to embrace general arguments. Consider, for instance, Mike Rose’s powerful critique of reductionist responses for providing access to poor and working class ~tudents.3~ Immersing the reader in the complex particularity of lives, and weaving critical social commentary from narratives conveying the “grit” of lived experience, Rose’s text invites a different way of theorizing relations between social class and schooling. Stories, metaphors, and imagery are set in hybrid dialogue with essayist commentary and critique in order to evoke the complex relations between institutional literacies and personal lives.

Such rhetorical expressions of the complex particularity of lives could be construed among some critics as a form of anecdotal description that does not attain the analytical rigor of social scientific theorizing. Rather, my argument in this essay has been that such efforts are a worthy rhetorical and epistemological project, an opportunity for the compassionate mingling of languages and forms of life. For the moment these efforts seem most salient in the writings of feminist educators, along with those influenced by the convergence of feminist theory and narrative inquiries. However, my emphasis has been on the weaving of particularistic accounts into the discourses and analytical methods of the social sciences, as a means of more richly portraying what knowing is within a lived and felt world. Men and women, teachers and educational theorists, could benefit from such rhetorical valuations. As the fictional Frau Leutnant Mandelsloh in Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel says about particulars, “Someone has to look after them.”

~ ~ ~- 38. Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary [New York Penguin Books, 1989).

I AM INDEBTED TO Sandra Harding, whose seminar on feminist theory (taken while she and I were both teaching at the University of Delaware) afforded me the space to reflect on how feminist frameworks could impact educational theorizing; and also to the Educational Theory reviewers and editor for their extremely helpful comments.

the particular and the feminine: gendered accounts in educational theorizing

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