Constructivism: Epistemological Pluralism and "Women's Ways of Knowing"
Strategies of teaching and methods of evaluation are rarely examined by faculty to see if they are compatible with women's preferred style of learning. ... We believe that connected knowing comes more easily to many women than does separate knowing. We have argued ... that educators can help women develop their own authentic voices if they emphasize connection over separation, understanding and acceptance over assessment, and collaboration over debate; if they accord respect to and allow time for the knowledge that emerges from firsthand experience. (Belenky et al., 1986; pp. 5, 229)

Several intellectual perspectives suggest that women would feel more comfortable with a relational, interactive, and connected approach to objects, and men with a more distanced stance, planning, commanding, and imposing principles on them. ... Epistemological pluralism is a necessary condition for a more inclusive computer culture. (Turkle & Papert 1990; pp. 150, 153)

Constructivist accounts of equity provide a qualitative leveling model both of "the two genders" (different but equal - vive la difference!) and of optimal strategies for equalizing access to, and usages of, educational technologies. That is, biological sex is no longer taken as determining gender; rather, gender is posited as socially constructed and historically contingent. The problem is construed as women's lack of access to a computer culture that could accommodate a diversity of "styles." The goal is to figure out how to accommodate female users and eliminate their problems in relation to new technologies by promoting and supporting "diversity."

Papert's ongoing research on technology and "at-risk" students' learning processes focuses directly on the relationship between certain thinking styles (exhibited by minority and female students), such as "narrative" or "concrete" thinking, and low levels of educational achievement (10). The direct linkage by Turkle and Papert, Belenky et al. among others, of the constructs of "thinking style" and "gender" constitutes essentialist ontological categories. Though these accounts begin with an analysis of gender as socially constructed, no argument is provided for why women (or other minority groups) might have different learning styles than (white) men. One is left with - again - an equation of biology and difference, when what is far more plausibly the case is vastly unequal access to power in school and in society (and in school because in society).

What is required is greater emphasis on the ways in which differences are produced through social relations and institutional practices, rather than on how to create, reify and to consolidate differences - perceived somehow as either "natural" or desirable - by liberalizing curricular options or by increasing the number of legitimated "ways of knowing" from one to two. The complete absence of an analysis of institutional power or oppression, or of the existing hegemonic organization of social relations and practices within the context of formal schooling, makes the prescription of "epistemological pluralism" both politically naive and potentially quite debilitating for all members of minority groups-ostensibly admitted through the front door but quickly escorted to their "proper place."