Sounds from the Heart: Learning to Listen to Girls

Sounds from the Heart is about girls-their learning, their social dilemmas, their dreams, hopes, and fears-and one teacher's struggle to help them reach their full potential.

Maureen Barbieri's book takes a careful, deliberate, and often disturbing look at the experiences of a group of adolescent girls as they are nudged into meaningful literacy. Drawing on the work of Nel Noddings, Carol Gilligan, Myra and David Sadker, as well as the theories of Donald Murray and Donald Graves, she asks tough questions about the role of literacy in girls' lives. Do we know what our girls are thinking? Do we make room for their questions in our classrooms? How can we support risk taking at a time when the need to feel safe, secure, and accepted seems uppermost in their minds?

We hear about the obstacles Maureen faces, times when she stumbles along the way and contributes to the "voice training" that women so often inflict on girls. Because she recognizes in herself a desire to avoid conflict at all costs, Maureen must work hard to take on the specific needs of girls. Her students collaborate with her to become curriculum builders as they explore such loaded issues as duplicity, vengeance, and homophobia in their literature and especially in their writing and talking.

Maureen invites readers to ask new questions about curriculum, evaluation, co-education, choice, risk, and conflict. In a final chapter, she examines the more common classroom situation- boys and girls together-and suggests innovative ways to ensure that girls' voices continue to be heard.

Sounds from the Heart is essential reading for any teacher, administrator, or student concerned about the ways girls learn.

MAUREEN BARBIERI has taught middle school in New Hampshire, Ohio, and South Carolina. Since coming to New York, she has been a staff developer in District 2 and a divisional head at Marymount, an all girls' independent school. In addition to frequent consulting, she now teaches literacy courses in the Department of Teaching and Learning at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education, where she co-directs the summer writing institute. Her book, Sounds from the Heart: Learning to Listen to Girls (Heinemann, 1995), received the James N. Britton Award for Inquiry with the English Language Arts from the National Council of Teachers of English as well as the International Educator's Award from the Delta Kappa Gamma Society.