Kathleen Weiler

The feminist imagination and educational research

This article discusses the impact of second-wave feminism on educational research with a focus on developments in the USA. It expands on the themes raised in the other articles in this issue of Discourse by considering the political nature of feminist educational research questions beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the contemporary world. The guiding theme of the article is to consider the meaning of the second-wave claim that the personal is political in its manifestations in the womens movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, and its application to educational research as feminist concerns were translated into the academy. It then considers the ways that feminist poststructural research both continues the political concerns of second-wave feminism and troubles them.

Women and Rural School Reform: California, 1900-1940.

Rural school reform in California in the period 1900-1940 was motivated by many of the same concerns that underlay the national movement to reform rural education. As was true throughout the country, reforms in this period in California led to the expansion of state regulations and control over the work of teachers. But while these reforms emphasized the need for greater scientific and bureaucratic control, they were also framed in terms of gender, since the majority of rural teachers were women working in relatively autonomous oneand two-room schools. Some educational reformers, influenced by ideas of scientific management and control, argued for the need for supervision of rural women teachers because of womens presumed weaknesses; they argued for expert, usually male, control and supervision. However, this view was not uncontested; other reformers, much more frequently women who had experience working in rural schools, celebrated the capabilities and potential of rural women teachers.1 This more positive view was particularly strong among California educators, who were influenced by both progressive politics and conceptions of Deweyan progressive education. Increased state control over rural teaching did in fact occur in California, but the

Betsey Holsbery's school: place, gender, and memory

Historical memory is constantly being reframed though images and objects presented as capturing the past. In the USA, the nineteenth-century country or one-room school has come to symbolize an authentic American experience and seen as evidence of the lost pure and simpler time. Central to the work of the rural school was the teacher, and in the nineteenth century, this was almost always the woman teacher. This article explores the work of one woman teacher, Betsey Holsbery, and the ways in which memorials to her help construct a picture of an idyllic and unchanging past in one rural town while ignoring the profound cultural and demographic changes the town underwent.