Education can help students to find their voice.

Feminist teaching methods help students discover and express their own voice. That isn't easy for teachers or students. It's radically different from the ways many of us learned-and from what students expect, based on other classes and their high school experience.

In classic feminist fashion, participants sat around the table for give and take in a roundtable discussion of feminist pedagogy at the Organization for the Study of Language, Communication and Gender (OSCLG) annual conference in St. Louis in October.

Insights emerged from the collective wisdom of the group led by Dr. Cynthia Berryman-Fink, professor of education at the University of Cincinnati OH, and Dr. Barbara Werner, associate professor of speech communication and women's studies coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

Teaching in a feminist style involves:

* Constructed knowledge. Other classes are all about "received knowledge," where the professor and textbook are the experts and content passes unchanged from teacher to learner. Feminist teaching assumes everyone has ideas and experiences to contribute as each student constructs knowledge for herself.

* Freedom of expression. In classroom discussion and in what they write, students express their own understanding. It may not match that of the teacher, whose job is to guide the students to a deeper, richer process of reaching their own conclusions.

* Courtesy. Feminist teaching respects different viewpoints from working class and foreign students, not just conformity to white upper-middle-class attitudes and behaviors.