Getting Smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York: Routledge, 1991.

by Patti Lather

Review by Norma Lundberg

Patti Lather's Getting Smart provides a rare insight into the thinking of a feminist researcher struggling with the research process and the myriad questions it raises for her about her work as a feminist, researcher, and teacher, and the uses and confusions of what is called "postmodernism". I shrink from the word postmodernism because it connotes nothing substantive for me. I suspect it of being a catch-all, intended to criticize all the other currently fashionable "isms".

The welter of literature concerning postmodernism is overwhelming. Most of it is European and /or North American and male. There is also a "body" of writing by feminists which, according to Meaghan Morris (1), "has acted as one of the enabling conditions of discourse about postmodernism." All of the writings refer to numerous other writings, and the references, interconnections, and proliferation of footnotes and bibliographies relating to postmodernism and its cousin "isms" create a knotty, tangled web. But the references seldom incorporate the lived experience of women, which is the attraction that Patti lather's book initially had for me. I expected to gain an understanding of the struggles in her classroom.

Lather acknowledges the difficulty of coming to terms with the unwieldy concepts associated with postmodernism. She is aware that, in dealing with postmodernism, her writing is actually much like the material she is criticizing: "it does not break with [the tendency towards] a profusion of references and footnotes in its creation of textual authority" (p. 10). She confesses her ambivalence towards postmodernism, her own difficulties in defining it exactly, and prefers to think of it as "postmodernisms" because it resists easy categorization.

The first portion of Getting Smart is her effort to sort out the usefulness of some of the ideas of Postmodernism for the particular work she wanted to do. Broadly, she wanted to explore how teaching and research could be used to challenge and change the power relations in the classroom and ultimately liberate her students. More specifically, she wanted to find out if the students in her introductory women's studies classes were resisting her teaching and, if so, how. Her groundwork in the first chapters includes the issues surrounding research and emancipation, issues in feminist research, and theories about resistance. But it is not until page 76 that readers find the first description of her project as "a three-year study of student resistance to liberatory curriculum." She writes that she wanted "to explore what these resistances have to teach us about our own impositional tendencies," that is, replacing old "conceptual maps" in the students' minds with the teacher's "improved" maps .

For Lather, the experience of teaching is useful for the insights it am provide for resolving the theory/ practice problem she sees as central to doing feminist research, and for relating her research and her teaching to the empowerment of her students. She is focused on raising the consciousness of her students for she sees learning as potentially transforming. She is both critical of "liberatory pedagogies" because of their stance (the teacher is liberated while the student is powerless and needs to be liberated) and confesses to similar practices. How, she asks, can we avoid characterizing "the student" as somehow victimized but able to see the world clearly enough to free herself, and potentially transformable through knowledge, through "getting smart"?

Her "data" includes journals kept by her students during the courses, interviews done later, research reports, and her own responses to their writing. Lather and a number of doctoral students sifted through all the material to construct a number of stories. These stories give the reader a glimmer of the initial unhappiness and discomfort of some of her students at having their world view overturned, as some learn to see themselves differently. But the stories comprise a very small portion of the book.

I suspect that those interested in Getting Smart will be primarily feminist academics teaching women, particularly in women's studies courses , and feminists concerned with women's representation in language and textuality who have the time and patience to untangle the theories. Lather is aware that the audience for her kind of critical and academic work is "estranged ", and that this kind of work often does not appeal to grassroots feminists who resist being told by me "experts" about their own lives. But despite her best efforts to involve her students in the research, and to ask hard questions, the resulting text reveals deeper problems. It does not prescribe, true, but it does not succeed in making the struggle of her students clearly visible. The chasm between practice and theory is not, to my mind, resolved.