Hayes, Elisabeth : University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Elisabeth Hayes is professor of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Flannery, Daniele D. : The Pennsylvania State University-Harrisburg

Daniele D. Flannery is assistant professor of Adult Education at The Pennsylvania State University-Harrisburg.

Women's learning, and our search to begin to understand it, are like kaleidoscopes: an endless variety of patterns.

This book had its origins in our personal experiences as learners as well as in our professional interests as adult educators. Perhaps one of the earliest experiences that drew us into the study of women's learning was our first encounter with Women's Ways of Knowing by Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule (1986). We both read the book when it was first published, more than a decade ago, and we each found it both moving and intellectually exciting, telling stories of women's learning in a way both familiar and new to us. Many of our students, friends, and other women still identify with Women's Ways of Knowing. Some of them say, "This book is talking about me," "This is how I know," or "I can't believe there is finally someplace where my story is told." Others, who question the portrayal of women's learning in the book, still find the book powerful simply because the authors give central importance to women's learning in particular.

In our professional lives, as professors of adult education, we each began some years ago to focus much of our research and reflection on women. We found it surprising and troubling that so few scholars in our field made women's learning a central focus (recently this has begun to change somewhat as more new scholars enter the field who have embraced feminist perspectives). In higher education, the ideas from Women's Ways of Knowing created considerable discussion among educators and, along with other feminist writings, formed the basis for women-friendly instructional approaches and even curricular reform in some institutions (Goldberger, Tarule, Clinchy, and Belenky, 1996). However, most of this work has taken place in the context of formal postsecondary education, which represents only a small aspect of adult education. Adult education as a field of scholarship and practice is concerned with the learning and education of adults in multiple settings, such as adult literacy education, vocational education, continuing education for professionals, training in business and industry, religious education, and labor education. Our field is also concerned with how adults learn in settings not specifically designated for education, such as in the home and in community groups. We found that much of the mainstream literature on adult education in these contexts continued to offer limited attention to women's learning.

To compensate for this lack, we pulled relevant literature from other sources for our own teaching and scholarship. For example, from education scholarship we used literature on the learning and education of girls and adolescent young women. In this relatively random and haphazard way, we gained some valuable insights but were left with quite a few unanswered questions; certainly, we gleaned only fragments of knowledge, some bright pieces for our kaleidoscope, but not enough to create meaningful patterns. Finally, about five years ago, we decided to work together in an effort to locate, synthesize, and critique literature on women as learners from a wide variety of source material. We hoped to make existing scholarship more accessible to our students, to other adult educators, and to anyone else who might have an interest in the learning of adult women. This book represents the results of that effort.

The rest of this chapter provides a foundation for the book. We provide a rationale for the particular focus on women's learning and address the question "What about men?" We explain our basic assumptions about women and learning and describe how these assumptions relate to our personal histories, as well as how these assumptions reflect particular feminist perspectives. We describe the process we used to gather information for the book, as well as issues that arose in this process. We conclude by acknowledging both what we have been able to accomplish and what remains to be done.

Why Women's Learning?

Changing social norms and roles for women, combined with other social and economic factors, have led to a tremendous growth in the number of adult women who are participating in formal educational programs and informal learning activities. Over the last decade, it has become increasingly important to educators in almost all adult and continuing education settings to improve learning opportunities for women, and yet actual practice in adult and continuing education shows a limited understanding of women's learning, or it is based on outdated information and perspectives. For example, it is common to find women described simplistically as "collaborative" learners, a characterization that seems to reinforce dominant stereotypes about women's orientation toward others rather than providing more nuanced insights that give attention to diversity among women and to the particular kinds of relationships that might be beneficial.

More specifically, the significance of gender has been given little attention in adult learning theory, and yet women and men are products of social and cultural beliefs about what it means to be a gendered being. As authors, we share the perspective that "gender is not a natural fact, rooted in anatomical sex differences" (Baber and Allen, 1992, p. 10), nor does gender represent the opposition of male to female (Baber and Allen, 1992; Flax, 1987). Judith Solsken (1993, p. 123) writes, "The analysis of how gender (or any other social category) figures in learning does not depend upon identifying consistent patterns of differences between groups of males and females but rather upon tracing the patterns in [individuals'] learning biographies back to sources in the system of gender relations." We view gender as a type of social relation that is constantly changing, created and recreated in daily interactions as well as on a broader scale through such institutions as school, work, and the family. As gendered persons, we learn who we are as girls and women; we learn how to act, how to interact with others, how we are valued because of our gender, and what place and power we have as women in various groups and societies.

Sandra Harding (1996) writes about the effects that gender, as a system of social relationships, has on knowledge and learning. She describes the existence, within the broader cultures of society, of "gender cultures," such as the "masculine" cultures of the military or sports and the "feminine" cultures of the fashion world or elementary schools. Women and men can be found in both cultures, but these cultures shape women's and men's experiences in different ways, giving them the opportunity to acquire different sorts of knowledge and abilities. As stereotypical examples, Harding notes that women may have more opportunities to interact with babies, whereas men have more opportunities to interact with car motors; and, moreover, the system of gender relations can give women and men different interests and concerns even when they are in similar situations, and so the knowledge they have about similar situations may be different. To use another stereotypical example, when a woman who has primary responsibility for childrearing is seeking a job, she may gather detailed information about potential employers' policies with respect to maternity leave and provision of childcare; by contrast, a man who has primary responsibility for financial support of his wife and his family may seek more knowledge about employers' healthcare plans and life insurance policies. The system of gender relations may also lead women and men to develop different ways of creating and sharing knowledge, and Harding provides examples of how women scientists seem to use skills, resources, and forms of interaction that are different from those used by men.

These gendered knowledge systems, like gender relations, may differ by society, culture, ethnic group, locality, and so on, and so may produce different knowledge systems within the cohort of all women as well as between women and men. For example, women of Color's knowledge about racism will be different from that of White women. One of the coauthors (Elisabeth Hayes) became quite aware of this kind of difference after shopping in a women's clothing store with a Black woman friend: her friend was ignored, whereas the coauthor was repeatedly approached by saleswomen offering assistance. Her friend was quite familiar with this type of racism, but the experience of observing it gave the coauthor a completely new insight.

Inattention to gender is linked to a broader philosophical stance in adult learning theory that assumes the universal relevance and applicability of dominant learning theories to all adult learning settings and participants in adult education. Although diversity among learners (including differences between women and men) has often been acknowledged, it is frequently characterized in terms of learning styles, personal experience or background, and self-concept or is otherwise put in very individualistic, psychologized terms. Until quite recently, the fundamental assumptions on which theories of learning and teaching have been based remained largely unquestioned. Such theories have significant biases toward certain values and cultural norms, which are often inconsistent with the experiences of women and many men alike. For example, a dominant theory of self-directed learning posits that the "development of self-directed individuals," that is, "people who exhibit the qualities of moral, emotional and intellectual autonomy," is the "long term goal of most, if not all, education endeavours" (Candy, 1991, p. 19). However, as Nell Keddie (1980, p. 54) has argued, "the notion of individuality as a desirable personality goal is not universal, but is culturally specific and tends to be found in those cultures (such as ours) where high status is obtained by competitive individual achievement." Self-direction and autonomy as learning goals are "elitist by nature" (Cunningham, 1988, p. 133) and reinforce a Western, middle-class, White masculinist value system.

In fact, self-direction is neither valued nor practiced even by all people in our own society (Flannery, 1994, 1995). Generalizations about groups must be interpreted with caution, to avoid stereotyping, but the example of culture is nevertheless instructive. In Navajo culture, commitment to family can be considered more important than individual achievement. This kind of commitment is particularly important for Navajo women because traditional Navajo culture is matriarchical, and women play a particularly key role in ensuring the continuity and strength of families. These values lead some Navajo young women to leave school because the orientation of the dominant educational programs toward individual success is at odds with these young women's own orientation toward the future and an emphasis on contributing to the common good of their kin (Deyhle and Margonis, 1995). It is important to acknowledge not only that such differences do exist but also that these values are not inferior to the values of the dominant culture, as reflected in theories and assumptions about adult learning.

Our commitment to write a book specifically about women as learners is a commitment to political and social justice. As Harding (1996, p. 437) and many others have stressed, "gender relations are always power relations." Women make up more than half the population of the world, more than half the learners in formal and informal learning institutions and settings. Women, women's thoughts, women's writings, and research specifically about women's lives and learning have been absent, subsumed, ignored, and misrepresented. We work to include, distinguish, attend to, and more accurately represent women's lives and women's learning. This goal includes the goal of acknowledging the contributions of other women scholars to our own work. In each chapter of this book, we introduce authors of different sources by their first and last names, in an effort to make more visible the role of women as producers of knowledge. We support the assertion of other scholars that "feminist scholarship is for women, not about women" (Baber and Allen, 1992, p. 18). Scholarship for women is not simply an issue of pursuing scientific "truths"; it is a question of challenging the inequitable relationships of power and authority that continue to pervade educational scholarship and practice.

We would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge our own personal interest in seeking greater understanding of women as learners. We each wanted to look for our own learning stories and those of our relatives and friends, sisters and mothers, grandmothers and nieces. Where were they? Could we find them reflected in the literature we might be able to identify? Where is Aunt Margaret's learning story of struggling to manage with a husband who drank too much, and of coping with the death of a teenaged son? Where is her story of learning to live with the frailties of age and continuing to be a Scrabble champion and a volunteer at the local historical society, of returning to swimming at the age of seventy-eight, and finally of learning how to adapt, as an intellectually bright woman, to an acute-care nursing home where most of the people around her are no longer intellectually flexible? Where is the story of Miz Johnson, who taught herself to read by using soup cans, and who, as the wife of a minister, learned to preach from the pulpit, be the "other mother" for a host of children, organize church affairs, and manage a church congregation, and who ultimately, at the age of sixty-five, enrolled in an adult education program to earn her high school diploma? We asked ourselves whether we could discover ways of better understanding and celebrating their experiences while at the same time gaining more insight, perhaps, into ourselves, beyond the often limiting images from dominant adult education literature, such as the images of so-called reentry women-"reentering" from where? from someplace beyond the known world?-and the images of barriers to women's participation: in other words, beyond perspectives that, in general, show women as deficient, marginalized, or simply invisible (Hayes and Smith, 1994).

What About Men?

When we tell people we are writing a book on adult women's learning, some ask, "Is it true that men and women learn differently?" We reiterate as clearly as possible that our purpose in writing this book is to center our inquiry on women, to fill a void where data and synthesis are lacking. We do not imply comparison and contrast by what we write; when we describe women's learning, readers should not assume that men's learning is necessarily different or characterized by the opposite of what we say applies to women. One problem with this orientation toward difference, all too often, is an assumption embedded in such comparisons: that one way of learning is better than another. We do believe that women can be different from men. Our previous discussion of gender relations suggests that women and men are quite likely to have different opportunities for learning, different learning experiences, and different approaches to learning. Nevertheless, such differences do not mean that women's learning is inferior to men's learning, nor does it mean that women's learning is superior to men's.

We also do not believe in making generalizations about all women or all men. Understanding the significance of gender in relation to learning is more complex than saying, "Women are like this, and men are like that." Such generalizations may represent the preferences and values of a particular group while marginalizing and making invisible all people (women and men) who do not fit the generic description. Assumptions of universality box all men into stereotypes as well. For us, there is a kaleidoscope of ways of learning, which overlap at times but are unique because people are of different races and genders and because people's histories, cultures, and life circumstances also differ. We place value on appreciating the nuances of learning by making diversity more visible. We believe that an understanding of women's learning, with particular attention to how, more recently, feminists have struggled with issues of diversity, will provide new ways of thinking about the learning of both women and men. In this way, we hope that both women and men will benefit from our discussion. Furthermore, we believe that our long-term goal of contributing to positive social change for women will improve the lives of men as well.

Multiple Feminisms and Women's Learning

We are feminists, and our feminist perspective will be used throughout the book as a lens through which we view women's learning. Feminism can mean many things to many people. For some, the mere hearing of the term creates a negative reaction, prompting images of hostile, militant women burning bras and rejecting all men as oppressors. For others, the term feminist means nothing. For yet others, feminism is sweet music to the ears-not just a comfort but also a strong identifying image of beliefs and values and commitment. Our purpose here is not to proselytize but rather to explain concepts so that, first, our readers can understand what we are saying and the context for our own perspective and, second, so that we can be clear about how and why we analyzed and selected the material for this book. For now, we want to note the following aspects of feminism that have been important to us in our lives and in writing this book.

As feminists we make women the focal point of our discussion, in order to understand and value women's learning in its own right rather than in relationship to men's learning. We recognize that to be women is to be gendered, that is, to be products of social and cultural beliefs and practices that surround our daily lives. Therefore, we place gender at the center of our analysis, choosing to understand women's learning within a broader social context, which includes attention to the social determinants of gender roles and norms.

We believe in the need to acknowledge the diversity of women's lives and learning-to recognize the multiple realities of women's learning across race, culture, and class, as well as the similarities that exist. We acknowledge that racial and economic oppression may have greater impacts than gender oppression, but we also believe that they are not separate from gender oppression. We have social and political goals for our work. We assume that many women lack voice, visibility, and power. We seek to identify and challenge the limitations constantly placed on women's learning, learning opportunities, and learning outcomes.

We have, as women, some historical experiences in common, but our individual experiences as females are not identical to those of any other women. We acknowledge the differences that accompany differences in race, class, ethnic group, religion, nationality, culture, age-graded expectations, and combinations of these and other circumstances. We try, with and in spite of our backgrounds, to portray women's learning with all the similarities and diversity that exist.

In addition to identifying the broad feminist principles that guide our own work, we must locate these beliefs more specifically within the current range of feminist theoretical perspectives. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss feminist theories in detail, but we identify here some key ideas associated with different feminisms. We have found the three broad frameworks described by the feminist adult educator Elizabeth J. (Libby) Tisdell (1995), author of Chapter Seven of this volume, to be useful as a starting point for representing similarities and differences among feminist theories (she elaborates on these frameworks in her chapter, with respect to feminist pedagogies). Like any other approach to categorization, this representation imposes somewhat artificially neat and static distinctions among feminisms that in reality are interrelated and continually evolving. Nevertheless, these three frameworks provide a means of understanding the different perspectives that inform the literature on which we drew for our review, and they further clarify our own beliefs and viewpoints.

Psychological Feminist Theories

Feminist scholars who draw on this type of feminist perspective tend to emphasize an understanding of the differences between women and men, using such constructs as gender-role socialization. Women's Ways of Knowing (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule, 1986) is a prominent example of research associated with this framework. The goal of that work was to develop a theory based on women's experience and, in doing so, to establish women's ways of knowing as legitimate and as valuable as those of men. These authors explain women's orientation to knowing primarily in terms of relationships with male authority figures and patterns of family interaction in childhood. The authors ultimately use their findings to argue for an approach to education that they call "connected teaching," which they claim would benefit men as well. Underlying this kind of feminist perspective is a liberal political perspective that seeks to achieve equality for women and men within the existing social order. In terms of education, the emphasis is more on achieving equal educational opportunities for women than on developing a critique of the educational and social structures that oppress women.

What do feminist theories that focus on the individual contribute to our understanding of women's learning? Perhaps their most important contribution is that they challenge the invisibility and marginalization of women's experience in the knowledge-building process. They show us how it is possible to look at women's learning from a new perspective, one that treats women's ways of being and knowing as valuable in their own right.

This framework also has its limitations. In earlier work, women were viewed as a generic and unitary category; and, typically, the experience of White middle-class women became the basis for generalizations about women. Race- and class-based differences among women have been recognized more recently by theorists working within this framework, but these differences usually are not analyzed in any depth. Studies associated with this framework have also been criticized for not discussing women's behavior and experiences with respect to structural causes of women's oppression. For example, Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986) might also have explained women's orientation toward what they call "connected learning" in terms of women's subordinate position in society, which requires them to be dependent on meeting the needs of others, rather than explaining it as a reflection of women's "natural" preferences. Further, there is the danger that the liberal goal of achieving equity for women within existing arrangements can still foster the perception that women are individually deficient and that they need remedial support in order to become, ultimately, more like men. Theory informed by this framework seeks to change women's status in society, but it does not question the nature of the social order.

Structural Feminist Theories

Feminist theorists working within this framework have focused on understanding the social structures that contribute to women's oppression. They have attempted to explain how patriarchy (which leads to gender-based oppression) and capitalism (which leads to class-based oppression) affect women's status and experiences. More recently, other forms of oppression (such as racial oppression) have become objects of concern within this framework. A key issue, frequently unresolved, is the question of how to understand the relationships among different forms of structural oppression. The goal of work undertaken within this framework tends to be change in social structures rather than individual change. On a more individual or interpersonal level, this framework draws our attention to the reproduction of power relationships in settings like the classroom, the family, and the workplace.

An example of a study related to women's learning within this framework is Wendy Luttrell's (1989) analysis of the influence of gender, race, and class on the way in which a group of working-class women defined and claimed knowledge. Luttrell uses an analysis of class differences to explain the women's distinction between "common sense" or "real intelligence," which affirms the value of working-class abilities, and the "schoolwise intelligence" that is associated with schooling and that may often be in conflict with working-class culture. Luttrell uses structural gender oppression to explain the women's conceptions of their knowledge as affective and intuitive rather than cognitive and learned-a reflection of society's devaluation of women's intellectual abilities. Finally, she points out how race made a difference in the women's views of their knowledge: Black women tended to place more value on the intelligence that they themselves demonstrated in their ability to provide for their families and deal with racism, whereas White women tended to place value primarily on the intelligence demonstrated by men in their ability to perform skilled manual labor (but women's labor in the home was not equated with "real intelligence").

The structural feminist framework helps us locate women's learning in light of social structures. It draws our attention to the concept of power as central to an understanding of women's learning experiences. This framework also helps us begin to understand how groups of women may have different experiences, given the additional effects of class- and race-based oppression. Through social explanations for gender-related differences, it challenges assumptions about women's natural or essential attributes.

Typically, however, this framework offers only limited explanations of how multiple oppressions intersect and are experienced differently in the lives of individual women. In addition, there is a danger within this framework of viewing women as passive victims of oppressive social forces.

Poststructural Feminist Theories

Theorists working within this framework attempt to recognize and understand how each of us is at once oppressed and privileged and how this experience continually changes according to the contexts in which we find ourselves. Rather than focusing on the effects of one or two forms of oppression, poststructural feminist theories place emphasis on understanding the intersections of multiple systems of oppression and privilege. There is also attention to individual resistance and agency in the face of oppressive social forces; there is more stress on understanding how individual women respond to their unique and particular experiences of oppression than on developing theories about how broad types of oppression affect groups of women. Attention to language as a means of constructing reality is another hallmark of poststructuralist feminist theories. (Libby Tisdell includes in this framework those feminist theories that are influenced by postmodern thought. There are certain differences in the origins and assumptions of poststructuralism and postmodernism, but we will follow her lead by combining them in this way.)

An example of work within this framework is that of Elizabeth Debold, Deborah Tolman, and Lyn Mikel Brown (1996). These authors provide a new reading of Women's Ways of Knowing (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule, 1986), in which they highlight how individual women have varied experiences of voice and self that are not fixed and that do not develop along a predictable continuum. They use their research on adolescent girls of different class and cultural backgrounds to illustrate how these young women both struggled against and learned to conform to oppressive cultural notions of women's idealized behavior. The diversity of these girls' experience is noted, for example, in the working-class girls' more open hostility and resistance to the authority of their middle-class female teachers. Using several case studies, the authors illustrate how the girls encounter and come to internalize society's dualism of mind and body, thought and feeling, and how they may accept, in the process, an oppressive rationality that divorces them from their bodies and emotions-their full range of experience-as a legitimate source of knowing.

This framework helps us connect individual experience and social structures in new ways. For example, it can show us how our ways of naming our experiences are not neutral but are instead based on assumptions that can reinforce privilege and oppression. Its attention to individual agency helps us see the possibility of resistance and change, even though the social forces that affect women's lives are powerful. Poststructural feminist thought gives legitimacy to the particularity of each woman's experience, helping us recognize the complexity of our identities and our differences as well as our similarities.

Nevertheless, the focus on diversity and particularity of experience can leave women with no apparent basis for either common knowledge about their experience or unified action. The concern with language and thought as representations of experience can also become excessively abstract and theoretical, and this can make it difficult to draw concrete implications for women's everyday lives and learning. It can be difficult to articulate a political agenda-what sort of individual and social change is needed to overcome oppression-on the basis of the poststructural feminist framework.

Use of Feminism in Women as Learners

As already noted, we believe that all types of feminist theories have made contributions to our understanding of women's learning. Throughout this book we have incorporated the findings and perspectives of authors using diverse feminist perspectives; the development of our own thinking has been influenced by all of these frameworks. Nevertheless, our current thinking is most closely aligned with the poststructural feminist framework. This perspective is reflected in how we conceptualize gender as a system of social relations that are continually renegotiated, both at the level of daily interactions and at the level of the broader social structures. It is also reflected in our attention to the sociocultural context of women's lives, our attempts to make the social forces that influence women's lives more visible, and our emphasis on understanding how women are active agents in resisting oppressive forces and shaping their own lives and learning. It has informed our desire to recognize not only similarities among women but also differences related to such factors as age, race, class, and sexual orientation. In turn, these beliefs have influenced how we approached our discussion of the topics and literature in each chapter.

Locating Sources of Information

Gathering source material was not an easy task; it was certainly more difficult than we anticipated at the outset of our project. We began with what we intended to be a rigorous and systematic search of academic literature on adult women's learning. Our initial intent was to focus primarily on literature that described research or theory about the actual process of women's learning, women's attributes as learners, or the outcomes of their learning experiences. It is important to note that we did not want learning, for our purposes, to be confined to traditional settings of formal education because most learning for adults takes place in many other settings of everyday life. We sought out information about learning that ranged from the pursuit of formal education to such experiences as learning to be a mom, recovering from alcoholism, and becoming a business executive.

Defining learning for so-called adult women was not a clear-cut task. Following the normal practices of adult education scholarship, we excluded most of the literature on young women (those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one) in traditional postsecondary undergraduate degree programs (this is typically considered to be a continuation of preparatory education rather than adult education). Nevertheless, such a distinction is to some extent arbitrary, and we have drawn selectively on certain influential studies of this age group and setting.

Our search encompassed a wide variety of literature (for more details about searches, see Hayes and Flannery, 1995, 1997; Flannery and Hayes, 1996). Our source material was primarily academic, consisting of books and articles in professional education journals as well as scholarly journals in such disciplines as psychology, sociology, and women's studies. With a few exceptions, we confined ourselves to research and theory about women's learning and education in the context of North America. Our dissatisfaction with the source material that we identified in this way led us also to search in doctoral dissertations, which, although frequently difficult to obtain, yielded some useful material. We even flirted with the idea of reviewing more popular kinds of books, biographies, autobiographies, and even fiction, to gain more insight into women's learning beyond formal education, the focus of most academic work. We quickly realized, however, that this would have meant a completely different type of analysis (and probably a lifetime project), and so we kept largely to our original conception of a book based on a more academic body of literature. We did make some selective use of other literature, both fiction and nonfiction, as well as our own personal narratives, to overcome some of the limitations of the academic literature. In the next section, we briefly describe, from a more academic perspective, some of these limitations.

Issues in the Literature on Women's Learning

At least initially, we were quite disappointed in what we found-or didn't find-in the literature. Perhaps our major disappointment was that, in terms of sheer quantity, there turned out to be a relatively limited amount of scholarship specifically focused on women's learning in adulthood. At the outset, when we searched the databases with such conventional descriptors as learning and women, we identified what seemed to be a vast body of literature. Unfortunately, we quickly found that learning is such a broad term that it was almost useless in helping us locate appropriate material. In many instances, we found that journal articles identified by the descriptor learning are actually descriptions of educational programs designed for women, teaching methods advocated for women learners, strategies to increase women's participation in formal education, and so forth. Moreover, much of this literature is based on assumptions about how women learn that do not have any obvious support. We were also disturbed to find that a number of authors make unsubstantiated statements about women's learning.

Even when authors do provide some kind of support for their assertions, that support is often questionable. Some authors make assertions about adult women's learning that are based on research with schoolchildren; apparently these authors assume that women's characteristics as learners do not change from childhood to adulthood. There were instances of overgeneralization and of other types of sexism, both in research designs and in interpretations (Eichler, 1988). For example, many discussions of leadership in adult education and other settings make generalizations about women leaders as caring and men leaders as firm and aggressive. Such discussions create a simplistic dichotomy that reinforces traditional stereotypes about women and men, and they gloss over any diversity in leadership styles. (Chapter Nine, by Elisabeth Hayes, describes some weaknesses of the literature in more detail.)

Our old inspiration, Women's Ways of Knowing (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule, 1986), was cited time and again in support of various educational approaches for women; unfortunately, we found that those four authors' ideas were commonly misinterpreted or misapplied. For example, some of these approaches seemed to equate a "way of knowing" (or an epistemological stance, as described in that work) with a learning style, such as a preference for "concrete experience." We were surprised to find that few researchers had sought to pursue further research that might elaborate on, confirm, or challenge Women's Ways of Knowing (see Goldberger, Tarule, Clinchy, and Belenky, 1996, for further discussion of such issues and examples of scholarship that addresses this lack).

For us, a key concern that emerged is researchers' frequent failure to move beyond mere descriptions of women's learning, and toward a more theoretical or conceptual level of analysis. Related to this concern is the fact that there is scant research informed by feminist theories, and what little there is tends to draw primarily on psychologically oriented feminisms. Sociological perspectives are neglected, and so there is an obscuring of issues related to the social construction of knowledge, learning, and learning situations and to the social determinants of gender roles and gender norms. For the most part, then, researchers have failed to look at issues of sexism in the power relationships involved in learning, and they have neglected to conduct wider social, economic, and political analyses of the constraints under which the process of learning actually takes place for women.

There is also a notable lack of racial, cultural, and economic diversity among the women who have been studied for much of this literature. Issues related to sexual orientation and to mental or physical disabilities are rarely addressed. Generalizations about groups are sometimes made on the basis of the experiences of a mere handful of women, with little attention to differences within such groups. We found enough literature for us to feel justified in suggesting that it is important to consider, for example, how culture intersects with gender to affect women's learning experiences, but we did not find enough to allow us to draw many conclusions about particular groups or influences.

Emerging Themes

From a scholarly perspective, much of what we found was problematic, but our concerns prompted us to move in new directions with our own work. In retrospect, we see that as we began our original search, we were using a masculine model of science that mirrored our formal training as researchers. We assumed that we could gather a body of evidence, evaluate it with traditional forms of academic analysis and critique, and draw conclusions about women's learning that could be applied by other researchers and educators. To put the matter simply, however, that model didn't work for us. There is a dearth of literature, and what does exist frequently offers very limited insights. Moreover, some of the more academically rigorous work is in fact the least helpful because it reduces learning to a set of seemingly isolated experiences or attributes. Often it seems as if researchers are more concerned with the interests of educational institutions than with women learners themselves (Edwards, 1993). Much of the literature fails to go deeply into what women as women are saying about their learning.

Despite these limitations, we ultimately did gather a body of literature that began to offer us more useful insights. In particular, we concentrated on studies that emphasize the use of women's narratives and personal stories of learning. We were inspired and intrigued by selected stories of women's learning in formal educational settings but even more so by isolated studies conducted in settings other than formal education. These hint at the richness of women's learning in other contexts and often challenge the dominant portrayals of women in more formal academic situations. For example, there were studies of the learning of working-class Appalachian women active in community organizations, of Latina women's learning in study circles, of working-class White women's learning as trade apprentices, of women in a religious order learning to change as their church changed, of older widowed women learning to make significant life decisions, of learning in connection with life events (marriage, separation and divorce, childbirth), and of women's learning through play. Women's learning began to reveal itself in myriad ways and settings, and among women with varied backgrounds and characteristics (although these were not as diverse as we would eventually like to see).

Our focus on women's narratives allowed us to see that women's stories were not just about learning to do something, such as selling a home or mastering algebra. These stories were more fundamentally about women trying to learn new gender roles at the age of sixty-five or older, about women trying to figure out who they were, because they had been taught that girls and women were to obtain their identities from their relationships with others. The stories were about women learning together in ways that joined their spirits as well as their minds. Women learned and were empowered in caring study circles; they learned at play and while singing; they learned through meditation. Affective and emotional components of learning; intuition; learning in and throughout life; connections between personal and social influences on learning; contexts of learning; historical, social, ethnic, and economic influences on the learner-all these multiple, interconnected themes were vital to these women's learning and could not be separated from their lives.

As researchers and authors, we learned we were too structured in our own conceptualizations. We needed to move away from our linear approach to gathering information and go in multiple directions at once. We needed to think differently, to be more creative in our reflections, to look at what we were learning upside down and sideways, to allow ourselves to see as we hadn't seen before. We threw out our initial outline, which had been based on traditional topics associated with adult learning (such as "cognition and learning" and "why women participate in learning"). We sat down together with large sheets of paper and drew maps of important ideas about women's learning that were emerging from the women's narratives as well as more formal scholarship. These maps helped us conceptualize the connections among the ideas, and this exercise led to the inductive creation of the themes that became the chapters of the book. In this way, the significance for women's learning of social contexts, self-esteem and identity, voice, connection, and transformation became key themes and chapters, to which we added chapters on feminist pedagogies, perspectives on practice, and the creation of future knowledge.

Once we identified the chapter themes, it became apparent to us that several of our colleagues had expertise in themes we did not. We shared with them our overall vision for the book, as well as the particular literature and ideas we had found in the area of their expertise, and asked them each to write a chapter, drawing on their own knowledge but fitting it into the overall framework of the book.

With the themes as our guide, we set out to pull together whatever disparate sources would help us understand the depth of women's learning. We went wherever we were led by our sources, our ideas, our intuitions, and our desire to understand. We went back to the scholarly literature with new lenses, looking for new patterns and ideas. We also drew on other sources, some not overtly concerned with learning, such as books about communication patterns between men and women, autobiographies, and poems that helped us understand what it was to be, for example, a woman in Alaskan Inuit culture. Both of us developed and taught university-level courses on women's learning, and with our students we explored women's learning through art, popular culture, meditation and yoga, and more formal avenues of study. We learned to allow the coexistence of links among women's learning, social contexts, identity, self-esteem, voice, connectedness, and transformation, as if our explorations were a weaving in progress. For us, this meant learning to learn in a completely new way.

We adopted the kaleidoscope as a visual image for our work, and each of us kept one on her desk while working on this book. We saw the kaleidoscope as a metaphor for this writing. The kaleidoscope's collection of items, such as bits of glass or beads held loosely at the end of a rotating tube, continually change forms as they are reflected in mirrors set at angles to each other-interacting, complex, teeming, varied. Our attempts to articulate the themes in this book may appear as symmetrical as the discrete forms seen in a kaleidoscope, but in reality these themes are never completely discrete from one another, and they vary for different women in different circumstances. Moreover, as the transition from one visual design to another is often cloudy and indistinct in a kaleidoscope, so are the interconnections among the themes of women's learning. Some images are distorted in the process of turning the scope as are some of the aspects we found. In this book, we have tried to understand, as well as we can, these themes and their subtle nuances. We hope that this work provides a beginning from which others will continue to seek an understanding of adult women's learning, to keep rotating the kaleidoscope's images, looking upside down and sideways, through indistinct and distorted pieces in order to better present an understanding of adult women's learning and our learning.

"This thorough and up-to-date exploration of women's learning is a much needed addition to the field of adult education. The authors' refreshingly engaging style renders complex theoretical material accessible to scholars and practitioners alike. While theories and research on women's learning are situated in the broader context of adult learning, the authors never lose sight of what it all means for the teaching/learning transaction."

--Sharan B. Merriam, Department of Adult Education, The University of Georgia

"An impressive case for why women's experiences of education should receive the attention of educators, developmental psychologists, social theoreticians, and policymakers. In the process of making their case, the authors challenge many of the assumptions that underlie popular gender-blind adult learning theories. They demonstrate how often social context, culture, and the politics of power are ignored in educational theory and practice to the detriment of women learners. They delve into personal narratives to 'give voice' to the fears, aspirations, rebellions, and transformations that accompany women's educational journey.... In an era in which women constitute the majority in higher education, we sorely need a comprehensive map such as Women as Learners to broaden our horizons. I applaud this book!"

--Nancy Goldberger, psychology faculty member, The Fielding Institute, and coauthor of Women's Ways of Knowing

Submitted by the Publisher, September, 2000

Here, at last, is a volume that explores and analyzes learning as a distinctive experience for women. The authors are all established adult education professionals and recognized authorities on women as adult learners. Together, they examine and compare the importance of such factors as sense of identity, self-esteem, social world, and power in what and how women learn. Drawing from extensive research and scholarship, as well as from personal stories, they reveal the numerous ways in which women experience the learning process. They explain, for example, how women often become personally connected to the object and process of learning. They also analyze these different experiences to show education and training professionals how to better design and conduct programs for women. Women as Learners offers specific recommendations to improve all types of formal and informal adult educational programs, including literacy education, counseling and support groups, workplace training, and professional development activities. Concise yet comprehensive, this long-awaited book provides the most current principles for practice.

Shifting standards and roles for women--combined with many economic and social factors--have increased the number of women who participate in adult learning activities. Yet most literature on adult learning barely touches on the subject of women's learning. This limited understanding of how women learn is too often reflected in the practice of adult education. Here, at last, is a volume that explores and analyzes learning as a distinctive experience for women. The authors are all established adult education professionals and recognized authorities on women as adult learners. Together, they examine and compare the importance of such factors as sense of identity, self-esteem, social world, and power in what and how women learn.

Drawing from a comprehensive review of research and scholarship, as well as from personal stories, Women as Learners reveals the numerous ways in which women experience the learning process. It explains, for example, how women often become personally connected to the object and process of learning. The authors explore these different experiences to show education and training professionals how they can better design and conduct programs for women.

1. Women's Learning: A Kaleidoscope
2. Contexts of Women's Learning
3. Women's Self and Learning
4. Talk, Identity, & Power: Voice and Silence in Women's Learning
5. Women's Knowing and Learning
6. Transformative Learning in the Lives of Women, Ann Brooks
7. Feminist Pedagogy in Three Movements: Stories from the Field, Elizabeth J. Tisdell
8. Re-Searching for Women's Learning
9. Re-Vision Learning Opportunities for Women, Jane M. Hugo
10. Creating Knowledge about Women Learners