Rose-Marie Weber
Involved in a field in which the majority of professionals are women, faculty in the five departments of the Graduate School of Education are engaged in a wide range of projects with a primary focus on women and gender. With research interests ranging from feminist theory to classroom practice, and from the psychological dimensions of AIDS to the reading habits of early 20th-century farm wives, these faculty are inspiring new ares of inquiry among colleagues and graduate students.
Feminist Theory
IROW Associate Linda Nicholson (Educational Administration and Policy Studies/Women's Studies), among the leading scholars of gender in the School, has written extensively on theoretical aspects of feminism. From her first book, Gender and History, that traced the implications of the public/private division for women's lives, Professor Nicholson went on, in her edited collection Feminism/Postmodernism, to explore the implications of postmodernism for gender issues and the construction of knowledge. Her present work focuses on the genealogy of gender - the presuppositions involved in the creation of the idea of gender.
Birth Order, Health and Literacy
Taking a more empirical tack, Joan Newman (Educational Psychology and Statistics) recently completed a study of how families socialize children for leadership. By investigating the backgrounds of town supervisors in New York State, she found that first-borns are overrepresented among both women and men holding this position. This evidence led her to substantiate the conclusions of other studies emphasizing the importance of birth order and to conclude that factors other than early socialization lead to differential levels of political achievement.
An interest in the behavioral and psychosocial aspects of women's health has motivated the work of Bonnie Nastasi (Educational Psychology and Statistics). In her research on AIDS-prevention on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, Professor Nastasi is part of a research team that has been gathering qualitative and quantitative information on matters such as sexual practices and attitudes in relation to ethnic and religious differences.
With a more historical focus, IROW Associate Rose-Marie Weber (Reading) recently published a study of literacy practices among farmers' wives in New York State early in this century. She found a rich source of information in the bulletins sent to farm women as part of extension education. While these publications specifically recommended what to read and how to read in order to make farm life more esthetically and intellectually fulfilling, Professor Weber found that the farm women themselves held more prosaic ideas about the value of reading: they tended to enjoy the activity as respite from the demanding physical work on the farm.
Gender and Schooling
Several other lines of faculty research have raised gender issues with respect to schooling. When IROW Associate Judith Genshaft became dean of the School of Education in 1992, she brought with her the experience of participating in an investigation of how girls' entry into a traditionally all-boys school brought about psycho-social changes among students during the transition year. Richard Allington (Reading) and colleagues, as part of their study of literacy acquisition in schools located in poor communities, have explored the instructional and programmatic factors that tend to be more successful for girls than for boys.
In work with a more international focus, David Chapman (Educational Theory and Practice) recently took part in a study of teachers' receptivity to change in Botswana and Lesotho, Although gender was among the variables analyzed, the study showed insignificant differences between women and men.
These interests have strongly shaped both the masters and doctoral programs in the School, generating student theses on such topics as women in therapy, how discrimination affects women's sense of efficacy and the influence of parents on college women's choice of nontraditional occupations.