Wild Words / Dangerous Desires

The Author: Helen J. Harper is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario where she teaches courses in English, feminist and critical studies. She received her Ph.D. in education from the Ontario Institute. Her work is focused on issues of identity, representation, and pedagogy.

"Helen J. Harper will be to English education what Carol Gilligan has been to psychology and what Judith Fetterly has been to literary criticism: the fresh new thinker who inspires us to reconsider what we do with women in mind. Harper's personal accounts of teaching writing to teenage girls, who reject her feminism and her favorite authors, are fulll of painful insights, infused with humor, and framed with theoretical depth. As a feminist English teacher, I loved this book!"(Meredith Rogers Cherland, University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada; Author of 'Private Practices: Girls Reading Fiction and Constructing Identity')
"What is at stake when educators seek to challenge 'taken for granted' categories of identity? How do we work with students' - and our own - resistance to know uncomfortable truths about ourselves and the worlds we inhabit? In this courageous and important book, Helen J. Harper confronts these questions as she writes about her attempt to introduce avant-garde feminist reading and writing to a group of young women in a Canadian high school. Harper's compelling account of her 'failure' to persuade the participants in her study that many ways of being a 'woman' might be open to them is full of insight and reflection on what it means to practice feminist and critical pedagogy in today's schools. While we have seen a number of publications on feminist teaching in colleges and universities, Harper's new book is a welcome addition to the far smaller body of writing about younger women and their teachers. She writes with keen insight about how alternative ways of being and writing are not easily available to students simply by virtue of a teacher introducing them. A lot more is at stake as young women struggle to come to terms with who they are and who they might (want to) become. This is an evocative and moving book of great value to students, teachers, and researchers in education, women's studies, cultural studies, and beyond." (Kari Dehli, Department