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Identity, diversity and teaching for social justice, edited by Juliet Perumal

This book grew out of a study of six women language teachers in South Africa and their self-identification as feminist teachers, and the authority and power they wielded in the classroom. Through a mixture of life histories (including the author’s own) in that particular context and observation of teaching in South African classrooms, group discussions and interviews, the author has set out a discourse of teaching which reaches much further than the field of feminism. A very large amount of conceptualisation is going on in these pages – identity theory, socio-linguistics, authority (seen as opposed to nurturance, as authorship, and as power), power (Foucault), and Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field all find their place somewhere in this study. However, the title of this work is misleading: instead of talking more widely about how education can promote social justice, the book concentrates on one aspect only, feminism. Wider concepts of social justice lie unexplored. And so too do many other good things in these pages – for there is no index. Many valuable statements about power, authority, identity and identification cannot be found for lack of a simple tool to help the reader. I cannot recommend this book to my research students saying that it contains a useful discussion of one or other aspect of teaching, since they will not be able to find it in nearly 400 pages. And it is not an easy read, either – not just because it is a converted PhD thesis but also because of the author’s chosen style of writing: long sentences with the piling up of nouns or verbs in an attempt to be as inclusive as possible. All of which is a great pity. For the book contains a great deal of wisdom about teaching and the role of the teacher. The focus of the feminism here is the possible tensions between the concept of ‘woman’ (genericised rather than localised) and the identities of ‘teacher’ (to some extent locally constructed). Not everyone will agree with everything in this book: for example, the statement that ‘schooling is administratively and procedurally patriarchal’ (p. 43) raises many questions: is this meant to be ‘factually true’ or is it a widely held perception? It may feel true in many parts of South Africa but does not seem to me to be universally valid either in reality or perception. The book concentrates on pedagogy, especially the classroom roles of the ‘teacher’ seen as ‘demonstrator’, ‘facilitator’, ‘formal authority’, and delegator (explained as implying that ‘the teacher must assess the current beliefs and abilities of students and arrange experiences that allow them to become more fully human ...’, p. 282). Unpacking the role of a teacher is necessary, for ‘teacher identity is too often treated as an unproblematic and unitary monolith’ (p. 61). Much of this unpacking concentrates on women teachers: ‘while women are required to assume authority in educational and social spaces, traditional conceptions of women render notions of authority incompatible with the role of women as nurturers and care-givers’ (p. 176); despite the fact that in many societies, both authority and nurture roles are fully combined in the conceptualisation of motherhood. Compare Vol. 38, No. 3, June 2008, 370–371