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"[These] courageous stories encourage me to believe that democratic methods of education are feasible and that we may yet turn aside the great wave of coercion that now engulfs our schools."
–From the Foreword by Nel Noddings
In Pedagogies of Resistance, we see how building a career in education served as leverage for six extraordinary women to live their lives as agents of change–change for themselves, for schools and universities, and for society at large. By profiling women as educational activists, this book challenges historical interpretations that have cast women as passive in the face of educational change.
In this book, you will meet:
• Jane Addams, founder of Hull House, and Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching advocate, who worked together in Chicago to enact their own vision of democratic education.
• Two New Jersey women: Elizabeth Almira Allen, who proposed a plan for the first statewide teacher pension system in the country, and Marion Thompson Wright, who promoted school integration.
• Helen Heffernan and Corinne Seeds, both of whom advocated the child-centered approach of progressive education for all children in California.
All of these women resisted the conventional wisdom of their day–including gender roles–to make education and society more equitable and humane.
Margaret Smith Crocco is Associate Professor in Social Studies and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Petra Munro is Associate Professor of Education and Women’s and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University. Kathleen Weiler is Associate Professor of Education at Tufts University.
