Re(in)forming the conversations: student position, power, and voice in teacher education.

Sometimes I wish I could sit down with one of my teachers and just tell them what I exactly think about their class. It might be good, it might be bad, it's just that [I] don't have the opportunity to do it.

This high school student's words echoed my own thinking when eight years ago I became director of an undergraduate teacher education program. A former high school teacher myself, I missed the energy and insights of the high school students I had taught, and I didn't want to reenact the dominant model of teacher preparation -- and teaching -- that ignores the experiences and perspectives of those who spend their days in high school classrooms: students. Through conversations with a high school teacher friend I clarified this problem and worked with her toward a solution.

Our overarching goal was to interrupt in various ways the standard distribution of power in education. First, we wanted to disrupt the hierarchy according to which theorists and researchers generate pedagogical knowledge and pass it down to teachers, who labor under perpetual pressure to implement every new or recycled reform, with students simply waiting on the receiving end of this transfer. Second, we wanted to bring into direct dialogue those preparing to teach with those who are taught, and we wanted to alter the power dynamics that usually inform that teacher/student relationship. Finally, we wanted to bring into conversation high school students separated by the tracking systems, both acknowledged and implicit, that designate their schedules and in large measure their destinies.

As we talked through ways to effect these changes, we decided that by positioning a diverse group of high school students as teacher educators both in conversation with pre-service teachers and in conversation with one another we could enact and model a different approach to teacher preparation. We hoped that this repositioning of high school students would challenge how most teacher educators think about teacher preparation, how most pre-service teachers think about and interact with students, and how most students think about and enact themselves.

OUR APPROACH TO RE(IN)FORMING THE CONVERSATIONS

The project we developed and have maintained for the last seven years through the Bryn Mawr/Haverfrod Education Program is called Teaching and Learning Together. It is based in the undergraduate methods course I teach during the fall semester of pre-service teachers' senior year, prior to their semester of student teaching.(1) The pre-service teachers who participate in Teaching and Learning Together major in a variety of subject areas, most commonly social studies, biology, math, Spanish, and English. 75% female and 70% white, most of these pre-service teachers' education prior to college unfolded within the Honors and the AP tracks of their schools.

The high school students who participate in Teaching and Learning Together include roughly equal numbers of males and females (46% and 54%, respectively) who come from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds in about the same proportions that they constitute at their suburban public school (70% European-American, 10% Indian, 6% each of other Asian students, African-American students and Latino/a heritage students, and one Russian-American student). These students have been assigned to different tracks in the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades of their high school (45% labeled "Gifted," 37% labeled "Regular," and 16% labeled "Special Education"). The students placed in different tracks have had the least exposure to one another within the school. It was across this dimension of diversity, as well as the dimensions of ethnicity and gender, that we wanted to facilitate dialogue both among the high school students and between the high school students and the pre-service teachers.

The high school students who participate in this project are recommended by teachers with whom I have worked. They are not selected according to any standard measure of who the "best" students might be but rather according to who might be interested, engaged, and willing to speak their minds. We secure permission for their participation from the students themselves, from their parents or guardians, and from the school. These high school students are positioned in this project as authorities on teaching and learning alongside well-known theorists, practicing teachers, and me. Like other "experts," they are paid for their contribution to the preparation of future teachers.

Teaching and Learning Together consists of four components. In the following pages I briefly describe each component and how it works within the project. I also discuss how each component works against the larger power dynamics the project aims to disrupt. In addition, I address some of the complexities and challenges of this attempt to disrupt power dynamics.

COMPONENT ONE: AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS

We begin every year with a meeting at the high school, at which the pre-service teacher/high school student pairs establish a face-to-face connection. After this meeting, the pairs maintain throughout the semester a weekly exchange of letters. The high school students write the first letter, and many continue the conversation begun at the initial meeting--a discussion of the role of the teacher. As the correspondence unfolds, the conversations branch out into explorations of other subjects that the high school students and the pre-service teachers feel are relevant to teaching and learning. This letter exchange is a private correspondence between each pre-service teacher and his or her high school student partner; I do not read any of the letters. The reason for this is two-fold.

Thinking of the pre-service teachers, I am aware that learning to teach is a very public experience and I want them to have at least one private forum within which to interact with high school students and figure out how that interaction that will inform their teaching. Of course, if they have a concern or are not sure how to respond to something a high school student has written, they can consult me. But unless there is some danger either to the high school student or to the pre-service teacher involved, that consultation is their choice and not my requirement.

Thinking of the high school students, I am aware that they have been socialized to say and write what they think those in authority expect. If they knew I were reading the letters, I do not believe they would be as open and forthcoming as they seem to be. Writing to one pre-service teacher, who is still a student him or herself and has no formal power or authority as teacher, the high school students need not worry as much that what they write may have negative repercussions for them. Furthermore, the high school students know that they are positioned as teacher educators in this project, and they enthusiastically take up the power and responsibility of helping to influence how a group of teachers will think about teaching and learning.

COMPONENT TWO: WEEKLY MEETINGS AMONG THE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

The second component of Teaching and Learning Together is weekly meetings at the high school. (2) Each week the school-based educator with whom I collaborate on this project meets with the high school students for half an hour and discusses with them several critical questions that parallel the topics we discuss in the college-based methods course. The high school students share their views on these issues, and all of their meetings are audio taped, transcribed, and included in the pre-service teachers' required readings for my course. In this way the pre-service teachers hear the voices of their high school student partners in another context and can listen for the echoes and contradictions both in their own partners' voices and across the diversity of student perspectives that are articulated in these conversations.

Among the questions we pose are: How can a teacher create a classroom conducive to student learning? What kinds of pedagogical strategies work best for you? Should there be tracking or inclusion? What about multicultural education? The language of these questions is not familiar to many students, but they certainly have feelings, beliefs, attitudes, and experiences regarding these issues. Because the high school students are exposed to this language and the overarching analysis of educational practices that it names, they develop a different perspective on their experiences in schools, some new ways of talking about those experiences, and a new sense of agency in their own education as they speak and act on what they know.

COMPONENT THREE: WEEKLY MEETINGS AMONG THE PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS

The third component of Teaching and Learning Together is a focused conversation within the methods course devoted to a discussion of the exchange of letters between the pre-service teachers and the high school students. These discussions include explorations of how to relate and respond to the high school students and analyses of how the letter exchange informs the pre-service teachers' thinking about and plans for practice. In these discussions the pre-service teachers have an opportunity to voice their frustrations, excitement, uncertainties, and insights, and as a class we talk about the twin challenges of this project: how to listen to those who generally don't have a voice in conversations about education and how to learn from the actual suggestions that the high school students make about pedagogical practice. These meetings are audio taped, transcribed, and made available to the pre-service teachers.

COMPONENT FOUR: END-OF-THE-SEMESTER ANALYSIS PAPERS

The fourth component of Teaching and Learning Together is an end-of-the-semester analysis paper. Each pre-service teacher selects something he or she learned through participation in Teaching and Learning Together. Drawing on the exchange of letters, the transcripts of conversations, class discussions, and, where appropriate, other course readings, she or he writes a critical analysis of her or his experience. This analysis includes both reflection on the project and implications for future practice.

With this component of the project I aim to provide pre-service teachers with the opportunity to look back on the entire exchange of letters, reflect on the experience of learning to listen to high school students, and rethink that experience as they are on the brink of entering their own classrooms as student teachers the following semester. Not only do I aim to facilitate this kind of critical reflection, I also want the words of the high school students--spoken and written--to be included as legitimate sources alongside the published words of educational researchers and theorists and threaded throughout the pre-service teachers' own words. By requiring high school student voices as a source that pre-service teachers must cite, I strive to reinforce for the pre-service teachers that high school student perspectives need to be valued and attended to not only at the time that they are voiced but continually in the context of conversations informed by a number of voices.

Beyond these four formal components of Teaching and Learning Together, some high school student/pre-service teacher pairs interact more extensively. Some pairs talk on the phone to clarify and extend their understanding of the pedagogical issues they explore. Others visit each other's schools to get a sense of the culture and the experience of being a student in that context. Finally, each year we have an end of the semester party at which both high school students and pre-service teachers reflect on the project.

THE SOUND OF PREVIOUSLY ABSENT VOICES

Teaching and Learning Together shifts who can speak with authority and who must listen. (3) This project cedes the high school students' power: "the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter." (4) Speaking from within the doubly conservative contexts of traditional and suburban schools, the high school students who participate in Teaching and Learning Together articulate perspectives that are both grounded in their own experience and inflected with critical insight. These perspectives become "essential to action" as they directly inform the high school students' sense of agency and as they shape the pre-service teachers' choices as evolving practitioners.

Of the many issues explored through Teaching and Learning Together, one question--What are effective approaches to classroom management?--is particularly relevant to any discussion of power dynamics between teachers and students because a teacher's classroom management style reflects his or her underlying notions of the teacher/student relationship. The perspectives the high school students present in response to this question offer insights into how we might shift the generally deeply unequal power dynamics within particular classrooms.

One student stares: "Teachers should come into the class respectable and strict." Another student argues that "a teacher should be a friend. If you don't have a friendship relationship with a teacher, or at least feel that you can talk to them, then it's not going to be a good learning environment." Yet another student says: "I think discipline is partly the students' responsibility and partly the teacher's responsibility. Some teachers are so strict and you can't talk and you come in and it's like a prison. That's too much the teacher. [As a student] you need to be comfortable [and] to help decide the comfort level." And yet another student proposes how a teacher might achieve both discipline and comfort within a classroom: "[I]f you talk with the students [about classroom rules]--WJTH them I mean--like, 'If someone talks out in class, what are we going to do?' then they won't want to break their own rules." The multiple, and conflicting, assertions high school students offer embody the diversity of experien ces and perspectives pre-service teachers will encounter in classrooms.

Not only do these students' words contradict stereotypes of students as disaffected, they offer both theoretical and practical guidelines to teachers who want to redistribute power and responsibility within their classrooms. Furthermore, they illustrate the fact that students want different things and the only way to learn about those things is to ask each group of students. Conversations such as these give pre-service teachers access to what Freire argues is most important in teaching: "a comprehension of the value of [students'] sentiments, emotions, and desires." (5) Such comprehension requires the presence of student voices. And while "every expression of student voice [is] partial and predicated on the absence and marginalization of alternative voices," (6) it is only through eliciting as many student perspectives as possible that we can begin to get a sense of what students know, feel, and need. (7)

The way that these high school student voices re-inform the conversations in the context of the teacher preparation course have an analogue in the ways that they re-inform how high school students think about and interact with one another. I offer just one illustrative example. One particularly powerful exchange took place one year when an African American student came to the weekly meeting at the high school very upset about an experience she had had. She related to the group a story of how she had been told by a white adult that she should apply only to traditionally black colleges. The other students comforted the distraught young woman and supported her in thinking of ways both to repair her self-esteem and to pursue the range of college opportunities she wanted. For some students this was an eye-opening experience. For others it was all too familiar. New to all of them was that this forum of Teaching and Learning Together offered a supported and supporting space within which this diverse group could see and talk together through different expectations and experiences that this act of discrimination highlighted and to generate together ways to act, in turn, against it.

THE IMPORTANCE OF POSITION, POWER, AND VOICE FROM HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS' PERSPECTIVES

Each year at the concluding celebration of Teaching and Learning Together, and in some larger, more public forums as well, the high school students are asked to comment on their experiences of participating in the project. By having a chance to articulate their perspectives on this experience overall, the students not only offer further food for thought to the pre-service teachers, to my school-based collaborators, and to me. These forums afford high school students the opportunity to think meta-cognitively and critically about their educational experiences in general as well as in this project in a conversation with people who value what they have to say.

One form this critical thinking takes is improved self-confidence and sense of potential to succeed. At a presentation to the Pennsylvania Association of Colleges and Teacher Educators, one high school student explained:

This project has helped me in a lot of ways. I came from South America about four years ago, to this country, and I still, up to this date, I found myself at a lower level than I wish I would be in being a student, intellectual-wise. So this project, just having discussions and meetings after school every Wednesday, has helped me in my thinking process and my thinking skills. I think they've developed a lot.

The heightened self-confidence this student felt and her willingness to articulate it in a public forum and to an audience of teachers and teacher educators embodies the shift in power that Teaching and Learning Together aims to effect. Both within her own education and on a larger scale--in informing formal conversations about teacher preparation--this student has a stronger voice, a greater sense of power and efficacy.

Another student states succinctly a sentiment that many high school students express at the end of Teaching and Learning Together: "[Participating in this project] made me step back as a student and just look at how everything was going on in the classroom. It made me look at how I was being taught and how teachers worked." With a new perspective on what goes on in classrooms, high school students can help reshape it. The following vignette illustrates just such a reshaping.

One pre-service teacher had a former high school student participant in Teaching and Learning Together in one of his classes during student teaching. One day after class, the cooperating teacher overheard a conversation between the pre-service teacher and the high school student in which the student was giving the pre-service teacher feedback. The high school student started out with what he thought had gone well about the lesson and then segued into recommendations for improvement. The pre-service teacher sat at a desk beside the high school student listening to him and taking notes on what he said. This is a vivid illustration not only of "[taking] students' experiences and meanings seriously" (8) but also of shifting who speaks with authority and who listens. (9) It models for cooperating teachers as well what serious attention to students' perspectives can look like.

When high school students realize that many teachers are open to learning and improving, they can change their views of teachers and feel more inclined to participate constructively in school. As one high school student explains: "I never really thought that [teachers] wondered about some of the things that [my pre-service teacher partner] asked me. And just to think that they actually wondered about that or cared about that made me respect them a little more." Another student commented on how such an understanding changed her sense of her own responsibility "It made me think about how to be a better student 'cause it makes you think that a teacher is up there and they worked hard to come up with this lesson plan and if you're not going to put in a hundred percent then you're letting them down in a way."

As these excerpts illustrate, high school students care about their education and have important things to say about what teachers should know and be able to do to improve that education. If students are invited to think and talk about their perspectives, they gain a deeper understanding of the shared project that teaching and learning can be. And when they are engaged in this way, they are more invested in working to make their own and others' education more meaningful and empowering.

WHAT PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS LEARN IN A RE(IN)FORMED CONVERSATION

As is the case with many adults, it generally does not occur to pre-service teachers to elicit student perspectives on educational issues, and even when faced with those perspectives, many pre-service teachers are inclined to dismiss them. Listening to students requires "transcend[ing] the monotonous, arrogant, and elitist traditionalism where the teacher knows all and the student does not know anything." (10) It is just such traditionalism that many pre-service teachers bring to Teaching and Learning Together. The challenge this project poses to pre-service teachers is to rethink their overall attitudes toward student knowledge and perspectives.

The first step is uncovering assumptions. One pre-service teacher explains: "being in the Haverford [College] environment for four years, I just did not think that I could learn anything from [my high school partner]...at the beginning I came in to [Teaching and Learning Together] with the idea that she could probably learn something from me." This attitude is exacerbated by the fact that high school students speak a different language than pre-service teachers. One pre-service teacher was deeply frustrated with her dialogue until, as she explains:

I realized that I was expecting [my partner] to speak in my language. Amid our discussions of student voice and its value, I had neglected to realize that his learning, his method of articulation, was through experience and concrete examples. I had sought to give him voice while failing to hear the sound of his individual words.

Although the high school students are positioned as authorities in the pre-service teachers' preparation, it is a gradual process through which the pre-service teachers learn to listen to the students and then begin to learn from them. As one pre-service teacher explains:

The interaction between [my partner] and me was teaching me how to listen to a student, to analyze her thoughts, to apply them to the formation of my own teaching persona... The relationship we were building brought my reflections back to my own goals of being an effective teacher and interacting with future students.

After a semester of dialogue, most pre-service teachers have clarified and revised some of their notions about students. The initially skeptical pre-service teacher I quoted above explains during a final meeting of the methods course: "I learned SO MUCH from [my partner] and in my [analysis] paper, I put three main issues that I learned that struck me as, 'I'm not listening. I'm not listening, I'm just saying things to her, and not listening.' She was listening to me and I was not listening to her. You need to hear the student's voice; that's the reason for teaching."

Revisions such as this are achieved within the context of a course and project that foreground student perspectives and voices. Pre-service teachers have a hard time finding student teaching placements and jobs in schools that allow them to transgress the boundaries that "confine each pupil to a rote, assembly-line approach to learning" and that support their "will and desire to respond to [students'] unique beings." (11) But it is possible to make spaces for student voices, even in less than ideal circumstances. Many pre-service teachers persist in attending to student voice during student teaching and once they have their own classrooms.

One graduate of the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program reflected back on his student teaching experience. Having focused in his exchange of letters on "grading, how to make classes interesting, and the teacher-student relationship (responsibilities and expectations)," in response to my follow-up questions about how participation in this project affected his teaching, he wrote:

These were very important issues that came up while I was teaching. Grading was difficult because no matter what medium I used to test the students' knowledge of the subject, I always felt that there was a significant level of subjectivity on my part. Therefore, I agreed with my dialogue partner's advice to grade through different medium, letting each student display their knowledge in a way that they can best (even though their grade would also be lowered in the medium that they are not as good at).

In her first year of teaching high school French in a private school, another graduate of the program reflected back on the issues that stood out for her from her participation in Teaching and Learning Together. Also having focused on "the teacher-student relationship," she explains:

... the student-teacher relationship was THE issue that came up in my [first year of] teaching, because I truly believe that the success or failure of the class depends on this established relationship... [Teaching and Learning Together] started my thinking about concrete ways to establish trust in my classes, but in my own teaching I was able to troubleshoot such ideas and to create new ones.

During her first year of teaching, this teacher kept a journal, in which she recorded this entry in December:

My first semester is complete and I feel pretty good about it... I even received a more tangible piece of evidence from my 3 Honors class. The note that they left on my desk the other day was all I needed to know that I was indeed doing a good job of listening to their ideas... It was strange and exciting to see everything I learned come full circle in my own classroom, with me as the teacher and no longer the student.

And after reaching for two years in a public middle school language arts classroom, another graduate of the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program wrote that Teaching and Learning Together "taught me to value students' opinions on approaches to teaching. I don't think it always occurs to teachers to ask students about this. But, after my experience, I do it as a matter of course in my classroom."

Each of these teachers is evolving as what Paulo Freire calls "the democratic-minded teacher who learns to speak by listening." Such a teacher "is interrupted by the intermittent silence of his or her own capacity to listen, waiting for that voice that may desire to speak from the depths of its own silent listening." (12) Of course students do not always have helpful things to say. Sometimes they have nothing to say, sometimes they say things they have nor thought through, and always they speak from complex positions -- "not single but multiple...always located." (13) It is a challenge both to the students themselves and to those committed to listening to them to learn both to speak and to listen.

It is also important to acknowledge that we cannot ever learn, once and for all, to listen. We must continually relearn to listen -- in every context, with each group of students and with each individual student. The understanding that each time we will need to learn to listen anew should be as inspiring as it is daunting. It is our opportunity as teacher educators and teachers to meet the very challenge we pose to our students: to learn.

LESSONS ONE RE(IN)FORMED CONVERSATION HAS TO TEACH

Lisa Delpit suggests that real conversation calls for "a very special kind of listening, listening that requires not only open eyes and ears but also open hearts and minds." She explains: "We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs." (14) If we are to effect a conceptual change in teacher education--embrace a different view of teaching and learning and thus a different orientation to the preparation of teachers (15)--we must change our basic beliefs regarding who has authority on educational practice.

A change in belief is only the first step, however. We must also change the structures and the power dynamics that perpetuate and are perpetuated by what we believe. (16) The kinds of challenges that my colleagues and I faced in maintaining Teaching and Learning Together reflect those structures and the large and small ways that inequities affect learning. There is the logistical challenge of making sure that all high school students have access to computers to type their letters. There is the intellectual and social challenge of facilitating conversation among differently positioned people who speak different languages. (17) There is the political and emotional challenge of helping pre-service teachers unearth, examine, and revise their assumptions about and stereotypes of students designated in particular tracks. (18)

If, as teacher educators, we speak for students, we "do nothing to disrupt the discursive hierarchies that operate in public spaces." (19) If we are going to "make a difference with, not for, students," (20) each of us, in our own ways and in our own contexts, must embrace what Sharon Welch calls "a feminist ethic of risk" (21)--a willingness to take small steps toward changing oppressive practices even if complete or permanent transformation seems or is unattainable. We must reposition students nor with the goal of un-authorizing others but rather with the goal of facilitating conversations in which student voices can be heard and heeded as authorities on teaching and learning. We must use our power as teacher educators to make sure that students are among those with the ability to rake their various places in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have their multiple parts matter.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Shirley P. Brown, Jody Cohen, Alice Lesnick, Frinde Maher, Robyn Newkumet, Elliott Shore, and the reviewers at Radical Teacher for their thoughtful, critical responses to drafts of this manuscript.

NOTES:

(1.) This project was conceptualized in 1995 with Ondrea Reisinger with support from the Ford Foundation. Between 1997 and 2000 it was supported by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and since 2000 Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges have supported the project as an integral part of the teacher preparation program.

(2.) Creating this opportunity requires close collaboration with educators in schools. From 1995-1998, Ondrea Reisinger, English teacher at a suburban, public high school, co-facilitated this project with me. Since 1998, Jean McWilliams, Assistant Principal at another suburban, public high school, has co-facilitated the project.

(3.) Peter McLaren, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (New York: Longman, 1989), p. 180.

(4.) Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), p. 18.

(5.) Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 998), p. 48.

(6.) Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy" (Carmen Luke & Jennifer Gore, eds., Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy, pp. 90-119, New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 103.

(7.) Alison Cook-Sather & Jeffrey Shultz, "Starting Where the Learner Is: Listening to Students" (Jeffrey Shultz & Alison CookSather, eds., In Our Own Words: Students' Perspectives on School pp. 1-17, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001).

(8.) Timothy J. Lensmire quoted in Barbara Kamler, Relocating the Personal: A Critical Writing Pedagogy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 38.

(9.) Peter McLaren, Life in Schools, p. 180.

(10.) Paulo Freire quoted in Jennifer Gore, The Struggle for Pedagogies: Critical and Feminist Discourses as Regimes of Truth (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 101.

(11.) bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 13.

(12.) Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (Latham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Inc., 1998), p. 104.

(13.) Barbara Kamler, Relocating the Personal: A Critical Writing Pedagogy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 36.

(14.) Lisa Delpit, "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children" (Harvard Educational Review, 58, 3, 280-298, 1988), p. 298.

(15.) Sharon Feiman-Nemser, "Teacher Preparation: Structural and Conceptual Alternatives" (W. Robert Houston, ed., Handbook of Teacher Education: A Project of the Association of Teacher Educators. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1990), p. 212.

(16.) Alison Cook-Sather, "Authorizing Student's Perspectives: Toward Trust, Dialogue, and Change in Education" (Educational Researcher, May/June 2002, pp. 3-14).

(17.) Alison Cook-Sather, "Translating Themselves: Becoming a Teacher through Text and Talk" (Christopher M. Clark, ed., Talking Shop: Authentic Conversation and Teacher Learning, pp. 16-39, New York: Teachers College Press, 200la), and Alison Cook-Sather, "Between Student and Teacher: Teacher Education as Translation" (Teaching Education, 12, 2, 177-190, 2001b).

(18.) Alison Cook-Sather and Ondrea Reisinger, "Seeing the Students Beyond the Stereotypes: Three Pre-service Teachers' Perspectives" (The Teacher Educator, 37, 2, 91-99, 2001).

(19.) Linda Martin Alcoff, "The Problem of Speaking for Others." (L. A. Bell & D. Blumfeld, eds., Overcoming Racism and Sexism, pp. 229-254, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1995), p. 231.

(20.) H. Dickson Corbett and Bruce L. Wilson. "Make a Difference With, Not For, Students: A Plea for Researchers and Reformers." (Educational Researcher, 24, 5, 12-17).

(21.) Sharon S. Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990)

ALISON COOK-SATHER is an assistant professor of education at Bryn Mawr College and director of the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program. Her research interests include integrating the perspectives of high school students into pre-service teacher education, rethinking education through the metaphor of translation, and facilitating professional development for educators who occupy a variety of different positions in higher education. She can be reached at [e-mail].