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Domains addressed:		Presentation:		Contexts:
•	cognitive	•	enthusiastic writing,	•	education
			with persuasive use	•	work
			of ‘Aunt Maud’ parable	•	citizenship
				•	recreation
Broad categories covered:		Theory base:		Pedagogical stance:
•	self-engagement	•	Piagetian	•	guru
•	reflective thinking	•	systems theory
•	productive thinking	•	constructivist theories
•	building understanding		of knowledge
•	information-gathering	•	Buddhist
Classification by:		Values:		Practical illustrations
•	stages of development	•	pragmatism	for teachers:
		•	spiritual elitism	•	few

Belenky’s ‘Women’s Ways of Knowing’ developmental model

Description and intended use

In Women’s Ways of Knowing Belenky and her co-authors presented a qualitative study of epistemological development in women (Belenky et al., 1986). They set out to explore women’s experiences and problems as learners and knowers through in-depth interviews with 135 female participants. Their informants were rural and urban American women of different ages, class, ethnic backgrounds, and educational histories.

The study is an attempt to identify aspects of intelligence and thinking that may be more common and highly developed in women. Belenky and others contrast their approach with those in previous studies of women’s intellectual competencies that sought to minimise intellectual differences between the sexes. The team acknowledge the importance of Perry’s scheme (1968) in stimulating their interest in modes of knowing and share his phenomenological approach, based on open and leisurely interviews that establish rapport with the interviewees.

When Belenky et al. mapped their data onto Perry’s scheme, they found that women’s thinking did not fit neatly into his categories. Building on his scheme, they grouped women’s ways of knowing into the five categories outlined below:

218 Frameworks for Thinking

Silence – a position in which women experience themselves as mindless and voiceless and subject to whims of external authority; Received Knowledge – a perspective from which women conceive of themselves as capable of receiving, even reproducing, knowledge from the all-knowing external authorities but not capable of

creating knowledge on their own;

Subjective Knowledge – a perspective from which truth and knowledge are conceived of as personal, private, and subjectively known or intuited;

Procedural Knowledge – a position in which women are invested in learning and applying objective procedures for obtaining and communicating knowledge;

Constructed Knowledge – a position in which women view all knowledge as contextual, experience themselves as creators of knowledge, and value both subjective and objective strategies for knowing.

On a priori grounds Belenky et al. ‘suspected that in women one mode often predominates’ (p. 16), namely that women tend to be:

process-oriented	rather than	goal-oriented
intuitive	rather than	rational
personal	rather than	impersonal
and to value:
discovery	rather than	didacticism
related	rather than	discrete approaches to
being with others	rather than	life/learning
breadth	rather than	being alone or on own
support	rather than	concentration
responsibility and	rather than	challenge
caring for others		self-concern
inner	rather than
listening	rather than	outer control and validation
		speaking

They believe that male-dominated conventional educational practice often treats women’s ways of knowing as deficient, so that some ‘women come to believe that they cannot think and learn as well as

Cognitive structure and/or development	219

men’ (p. 16). Belenky et al. argue that challenging women’s thinking does not necessarily lead to cognitive growth, as most women in their study found the experience of being doubted debilitating rather than energising. The metaphor for women’s intellectual development that Belenky and others most emphasise is that of ‘gaining a voice’.

Evaluation

Belenky and others argue for a change in education practices that allow women to experience what they call ‘connected’ teaching. They call for a move away from a model of teaching that is adversarial and authoritarian (male?) to one where teachers trust students’ thinking and encourage them to expand upon it (female?). It is hard to disagree with the argument that a supportive and trusting climate is needed if students are to expose their beliefs to critical scutiny in the interests of personal and interpersonal growth, but it is more difficult to find evidence that women are especially disadvantaged in the present education system in western countries.

Belenky’s ideas resonate with Knowles’ work on andragogy and Freire’s on education as a means of raising consciousness. Her argument for pedagogical change, like those of others who favour more personcentred approaches, can be ideologically supported for both genders.

Belenky and her colleagues acknowledge that the question of why or when women shift in their perspectives is not addressed well by their data, since they used only a cross-sectional design. They also acknowledge (and Fishback and Polson (1998) have subsequently confirmed) that similar categories apply just as well to men’s thinking. In their case studies, describing how people move from one perspective to another, no consistent influences seem to operate. Instead, each person studied had a story about what prompted a change in the way they ‘knew’, but nothing that provides remarkable insights for educators.

Neverthess, the central thesis that females differ from males in their ‘ways of knowing’ has subsequently received persuasive support from Baron-Cohen’s research on empathising as a biologically-influenced female strength and ‘systemising’ as a male strength (Baron-Cohen, 2003). Further support comes from Herrmann (1996), who reported a clear gender difference in interpersonal/empathetic as opposed to analytic problem-solving preferences and self-ratings. Belenky’s

220 Frameworks for Thinking

connected way of knowing can be equated with Baron-Cohen’s empathy, which ‘triggers you to care how the other person feels and what they think’ (2003, pp. 26–27). Her separate way of knowing resembles the way in which a detached systemiser tries to understand and control a finite, rule-governed system by systematically analysing ‘input- operation-output relationships’ (Baron-Cohen, 2003, p. 63).

Belenky’s belief that there is a need to reconcile both subjective and objective strategies for knowing suggests that both females and males are capable of integrating different ways of knowing. In this volume we argue for just this kind of integration (e.g. between reason and emotion; analysis and intuition; critical and ‘caring’ thinking) when critiquing other frameworks for thinking where a balance has not been achieved.

Summary: Belenky

				Relevance for teachers
Purpose and structure		Some key features		and learning
Main purpose(s):		Terminology:		Intended audience:
•	to make teaching	•	non-technical	•	teachers of
	less adversarial				non-traditional learners
	and authoritarian				as well as those in
•	to contrast female				universities
	with male approaches
	and values
Domains addressed:		Presentation:		Contexts:
•	cognitive	•	uses illustrative	•	education
•	affective		case studies	•	work
				•	citizenship
				•	recreation
Broad categories covered:		Theory base:		Pedagogical stance:
•	self-engagement	•	Perry’s	•	learner-empowerment
•	reflective thinking		Developmental		through co-operative
•	productive thinking		Scheme		learning
•	building understanding	•	feminism	•	learners construct
•	information-gathering				knowledge