Women believe that there are some things they know about how women learn, and how they work alone and in groups. They also know what they have been told about women.

• I remember growing up, hearing this thing of "Get a bunch of women together and they're a bunch of cats." So, you go through life believing this for a long, long time-even though you personally have experiences with groups of women where that isn't true. And it takes you like 10 million experiences to realize that that's just a bunch of baloney. That was somebody else's bias.

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• Because [women] have been nurturers and caregivers they are also very sensitive within a classroom environment. They're very co-operative, sensitive to other people's feelings, co-operative in terms of helping other people toward self esteem and feeling good about themselves...I also find that women like to work together, they like to have fun together, they befriend each other. It becomes an emotionally-involving, emotionally-charged as well as intellectually-charged environment.

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• I think [women] are less passive. I think maybe they know more about how they learn. They comment more on what they've noticed about how they've learned. Whereas I get more often from the male students things like, "Well, you decide what we'll do. You're the teacher." The women students more often don't say that to me when I say "What do you want to do." Something open like that. They'll say "You know what really works for me..." or "I had this book and it was really good" or "My tutor did this and I really liked it" or "Once we did this, let's do that again." They're much less passive. They're much more, they know more about what works for them.

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• [The men] just do academic stuff...When they're on the computers upstairs, we're down here doing our classroom stuff which is based on discussion and projects. When they're down here, they're studying things outside of themselves. Like, we study things inside of ourselves and inside other women and they study geography. They did science experiments, mechanics. No discussion of self at all. It's like women are expected to be concerned about themselves. Men manipulate things.

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• When you get a group of women, it doesn't take very long before the socialization starts to happen. Whereas with a group of men, if you don't make it happen, it's not going to happen.

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• I know that from what I can see the women students that we have here are very happy to be here. They are happy with the way that [the women instructors] run things because they know that they are getting a fair shake. And they feel as though they can do some- thing and progress.

  And the men students who understand that, are good students. The male students who don't understand that, who have more of a typical male model, have a bit more of a time adjusting. Because they see women as different than what [the women] are trying to show us.

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• Women have such a capacity to be intimate. There's something very positive about being the caretakers and the nurturers of the world because it also provides us with the nurturing and caring nature. So we also have a lot of unseen and unsung benefits.

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• My own experience ... is that working across an ability range is easier. I can imagine myself taking 0-3 and 4-6 without any difficulty if it is all women...My experience is that it's easier with women because of a natural tendency to be patient and to work with each other-their style, mostly. And, mostly, to be less directly demanding of a certain definable academic result. They have a bigger view often of what they're doing here.

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