Legal Language and American Law 209data suggest there are not major sex-related behavior differences in the college class-
room.”^3 But what they in fact found was that there were no major sex-related be-
havior differences in a set of classrooms in one university. It seems obvious that
this does not mean that previous authors who found sex-related differences in other
settings were wrong. In many of these studies we have no detailed information about
key aspects of the schools’ contexts: their histories, status, or general cultures, for
example. In a refreshing, if unusual, attempt to acknowledge the potential impact
of such factors, a later study that did not find gender differences raised the possi-
bility that the school’s particular history and situation might be affecting its find-
ings: the school was Vassar, a longtime women’s college that had only recently begun
admitting men.^4 Similarly, in my discussion of the findings of the present study, I
have identified aspects such as school status, class size, and professorial style and
identity as potentially important factors.
There are additional difficulties with viewing studies conducted in different
schools as contradictory if they reach differing results on gender or race. Gender
or race may mean something different in different class settings, depending on
the particular configuration of the school and classroom settings; perhaps gen-
der may be salient in one arena but not in another. Indeed, even the same con-
textual features—small class size, for example, or a Socratic style of teaching—can
take on different meanings depending on nuances of context. Of course, some
form of essentializing of context is necessary in order to compare across class-
rooms, but the point here is that we must work toward more sensitive and fine-
grained understandings, while not abandoning the effort to step back and see
larger patterns.
Thus, the first lesson about context to be drawn from this research is that careful
delineation of the fine-grained aspects of context—school, class, teacher, students,
discourse style—is necessary if we are to understand what combinations of con-
textual factors help to produce more inclusive classrooms. We have seen that
smaller, more informal classrooms do not necessarily produce gender equality, and
that there are nuanced differences among Socratic teachers that can contribute to
quite different senses of context for students. In the move to a more complex view,
we can draw on the work of scholars who have written on race and identity, such
as María Lugones and Kimberlé Crenshaw. These writers have argued that the
experience of people at the margins of society can contribute to our understand-
ing of human experience in general, because certain aspects of the formation of
identity that are problematic for everyone are brought into still sharper relief in
the experience of those who must negotiate across more boundaries in our soci-
ety. If all of us possess a multiple sense of identity, if all of us must at times trans-
late across different worlds, then perhaps those for whom these processes are a
continuing, urgent necessity can be our best teachers about the way context and
identity shape human interactions. One lesson we can learn from these experts is
to listen more carefully for everyday forms of multilingualism, becoming more
aware that the same person can and often does speak differently in different con-
texts. Thus, if we observe an individual in only one context and imagine that we
have a complete picture, we will be mistaken. Again, there is a direct contribution
to fairly mundane empirical problems here, for this means that it is possible for