Weiler to Present Gail Paradise Kelly Memorial Lecture

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Kathleen Weiler, Ph.D., distinguished researcher in the field of women's education and associate professor of education at Tufts University, will present the 1997 Gail Paradise Kelly Memorial Lecture at the University at Buffalo.

Her talk will take place at 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 10, in Room 330 of the Student Union on the UB North (Amherst) Campus. The public is invited to attend.

It will be sponsored by the UB Graduate School of Education and the Women's Studies Program in the Department of American Studies in memory of the late Gail Paradise Kelly, a UB faculty member and pioneer in the field of comparative women's education. The endowed lecture is devoted to the exploration of feminism and education from an international perspective.

Weiler's lecture, "Reading Women Teacher's Narratives: Lessons from the Past," will reflect her research interests in the social and political context of education, particularly in relation to questions of gender.

The quality and importance of her scholarly work has been widely recognized and has been supported by fellowships from the Spencer Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation and the Bunting Institute.

Weiler recently completed an historical study of women teachers and administrators in rural California from 1850-1950 in which she explored the nature of teaching as "women's work" in relation to local communities, gender and race ideologies and rise of the education state. She is working on a comparison of Freirean and feminist pedagogies.

Kelly was professor of education at UB and chair of the Department of Educational Organization, Administration and Policy in the Graduate School of Education. She died in 1991.

At the time when the study of women was not considered an important topic, Kelly almost single-handily made research on women's education a central focus in the field of comparative education. Her co-edited volume, "New Approaches to Comparative Education," is now a standard text in graduate courses throughout the world and her earlier textbook, "Comparative Education" achieved status worldwide as one of the most widely used books in the field.