If men speak more than women in the classroom, there is every reason to suspect that men exercise greater control over "the classroom agenda." Dale Spender describes how boys' behaviour (and misbehaviour) in the classroom works to shape the curriculum in primary and secondary schools (5). At the college level, we have no evidence to suggest that there is any fundamental shift in the balance of power. However, it is probably fair to say that in the sciences, all students enter a learning situation which is ever more ruthlessly driven forward by content, and the need cover material takes ever more precedence over students' demands and needs.

And so, when we enjoin teachers to "listen to the women's voices", we are, in a very real sense, asking them to enter the fray and to work against some very powerful forces in classroom life. In truth, teachers are right when they complain that young women in their classes are unresponsive to cajoling, seem to prefer whispered conversations with friends to larger and more public exchange. In order to listen to the women's voices, we need to render these voices more audible.

Our experience suggests that this apparently simple task becomes the basis for transforming the structure of interaction in the classroom. Our work has involved the search for alternative paths of communication between students and teachers and among students. We have encouraged teachers to experiment with the use of personal and collective journals, question and answer boxes, brief free-writes, and personal self-disclosures--all designed to allow students to use their voices and have them heard without raising them in a large classroom situation. We have also experimented with collaborative partnerships.

It is significant that all of the successful feminist strategies with which we have worked involve integration of subjective experience in learning. Students are asked to express what they feel and what they believe as well as what they think and know as they work through course material. Our pedagogy insists upon a connection between the knower and what is to be known. We are increasingly convinced that this connection more accurately reflects the psychological reality of women in patriarchal society than do the traditional distinctions of the academic world. We have found a good deal of evidence in support of the importance of connection and of relationship in women's lives, suggesting that the developmental paths traced by Nancy Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Carol Gilligan, and Mary Belenky are important for us to consider.

As connection between the emotional and the rational, between the knower and the known, seem to characterize the learning situations in which women find comfort, it is particularly disturbing to explore the dominant imagery of the scientific disciplines. Here, distinction rather than connection holds sway. Objectivity is assured by the creation and maintenance of distance between the investigator and the object of his investigations. And in the history of science, the object of investigation has been almost invariably female. Nature has been variously tortured, raped, or seduced in order to gain access to her secrets. The scientific method is considered value-free; research is pure, facts are hard. Evelyn Fox Keller suggests that the masculine identity, defined through separation, may have a vested interest in maintaining the concept of objectivity, finding safety in the rigid boundaries which such objectivity implies (6).

We are now preparing to bring a range of feminist pedagogical strategies into two college- level physics classes. In doing so we are reminded that pedagogy and curriculum are and should be related. Much of what we do, as feminist teachers, flies in the face of what students expect from the sciences: we emphasize integration rather than separation, collaboration rather than competition, ambiguity rather than truth. And as we enter these physics classes, we have been intrigued to discover that the contradictions central to the place of women in the sciences must also be addressed.

As researchers, we have shifted from large - scale research designs involving thousands of students to small, more "clinical" studies. This too has been related to the desire to "listen to the women's voices," to attend to these individual , experiences. The overall hypothesis of our research is that feminist pedagogy, introduced into post-secondary physics classes, can produce more active, confident, and committed female learners. Our methodology involves in-depth interviews with students in both experimental and control classes, in both French and English. We are interviewing young women and young men because it seems important to explore the reactions of both women and men to feminist pedagogy.