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Theology Today, Princeton , Oct 1999

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Volume: 56, Issue: 3, Pagination: 319-335, ISSN: 00405736

Subject Terms: Theology // Feminism // Women

Personal Names: Mary (Virgin Mary)

Abstract:

Disagreement about Mary's role is in keeping with the history of marian devotion. In its long, complex diversity, marian piety has often diverged from official teaching and frequently changed it. Mary was, above all, a representative human woman, first in the community of saints, someone who challenges people to bring about the justice on earth that her compassionate God desires.
Copyright Theology Today Oct 1999

Full Text:

It is life today that gives life to Mary's life yesterday.1

Once again at my parish church on a marian feast day, I hear that Mary is the one woman who never had to say "I'm sorry." She is not only the mother of Jesus but our mother as well, able and willing to carry our petitions to her son and his heavenly father. It is traditional and comforting-deeply so for the powerless, ill, suffering, and dying-to turn to a compassionate mother who persuades God to forgive our weaknesses and honor our needs. But is this the woman of the Gospels? Is this what we need to know about Mary toda ?

I think not. Disagreement about her role, however, is in keeping with the history of marian devotion. In its long, complex diversity, marian piety has often diverged from official teaching and frequently changed it. Within traditional forms but stretching beyond them, it has responded to human spiritual needs that transcend intellectual definitions. Following the history of marian devotion is to re-member Christianity, to hear its good news as relevant to all human beings. In recent decades, a number of prophetic voices have suggested that Mary's role is not fully or accurately defined as that of perfect woman and mother. Whether we turn to a Catholic pope (Paul VI called Mary the first disciple and our sister), or a Protestant martyr (Dietrich Bonhoeffer called her Magnificat the most passionate, the wildest, the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung), we are told that she was, above all, a representative human woman, first in the community of saints, someone who challenges us to bring about the justice on earth that her compassionate God desires.

Many contemporary women, however, do not hear the voice Luke caught with such liveliness in his Gospel. As they strain to recover their own history, they do not even consider Mary as a model because her image has been so idealized and sentimentalized, often to keep them in their place. Like other women in history, Mary has been largely silenced, but hers is a more difficult case. For like a good child, she has been seen but not heard. She has been the beautiful background of powerful and influential voice-overs, usually clerical and male. The overemphasis on her physical virginity and her selfless motherhood has almost removed her from serious secular consideration in our hypercharged, sexually active culture, and from that of many Christian feminists as well.

Unlike Mary of Magdala, Hildegard of Bingen, Joan of Arc, or Dorothy Day, she is not yet prominent among Christian women being restored to mainstream history as viable models. Because Mary is a central symbol from a past that has divided her as well as separated her from other women, it takes time to disentangle her portrait from the projections of others and see her true function as one who connects, challenges, and empowers. Sarah has come out of her tent, Hagar is increasingly honored, and Eve is rehabilitated, yet only now are we beginning to rediscover the most influential woman in the history of religion. Though Marina Warner loved the marian art and legend she described so well in Alone ofAll her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, she insists: "The reality her myth describes is over; the moral code she affirms has been exhausted." Mary is given serious attention in historian Gerda Lerner's classic volume on The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, but only on the basis of the motherhood she shares with other women. Her creation of new life is related there to her connection with nature and to the goddess. While certainly important, her motherhood is not connected to her human life and message and her continuing religious significance within Christian tradition.

Fully aware of the dangers idealization and distortion of Mary's image have presented throughout history, a number of women are equally aware of the value Mary's complex "reality" has offered them. As Mary Gordon suggests,

One must sift through the nonsense and hostility that has characterized thought and writing about Mary ... one must travel the road of metaphor, of icon, to come back to that figure who, throughout a corrupt history, has moved the hearts of men and women, has triumphed over the hatred of woman and the fear of her. and abides shining, worthy of our love, compelling it.2

Most of us do not yet know Mary as well as we think we do. Though her life was exceedingly simple, she is surprisingly complex. Faithful Jewish woman whose son gave birth to Christianity? A "woman of truth" in Islam, related to Hagar and beloved by Muslims? A virgin who is a mother? A lowly peasant who is Queen of Heaven? Someone who keeps appearing to the least likely people? It takes serious historical, sociological, and psychological digging, as well as the ability to live with uncertainty, to unearth the connections between such seemingly contradictory elements of Mary's role and character. No superficial search could be faithful to the actual development of marian piety, nor would it in the end uncover the important insights of contemporary seekers.

To see both the nonsense and hostility that Gordon speaks of in the making of Mary, we must revisit the differing historical contexts in which her images arose, clashed, and seemed at times to represent those who disagreed violently with one another. Now for the first time we can do this with the added awareness that gender difference has always characterized marian piety. This is a relatively new assumption, though evidence for it is ample. In 1960, Protestant theological student Valerie Sawing explained how a mother could experience self-transcending love, but that she needed first a strong individual self if she were ever to act selflessly, something male theologians had not understood. In this groundbreaking essay, religious feminist thought began to express explicitly the view that gender experience determines perception, and that in theology women's experience had not been consulted or understood.3

Seeing the results of scholarship in many fields through an imaginative feminist lens that assumes such gender difference, we can catch glimpses of a mother who has challenged assumptions of power and hierarchy in every era. We also find evidence that women have probably always related to Mary in ways other than those officially suggested to them, and that their views are slowly being incorporated into mainstream understanding of her significance.

Anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner remind us that, from a Christian perspective, no marian symbol is adequate that does not see Mary as "a signifier meant to represent not only the historical woman who once lived in Galilee, but the sacred person who resides in heaven, appears at times to living persons, and intercedes with God for the salvation of mankind."4 It is necessary, then, that any true image of Mary should resemble the mother of Jesus as she appears in the Gospel stories, for there is no other historical evidence of her existence. Later objects of art and devotional practices should be evaluated according to their ability to reveal such a connection.

John Henry Newman was perhaps the pioneer thinker of marian piety to take such a developmental perspective, using the linguistic, textual tools of scholarship first available in the nineteenth century to survey her role. This was not a purely academic undertaking on his part; while still an Anglican, he found the sentimental devotions to Mary of his era a stumbling block. (Apparitions flourished on the continent, and a famous hymn written by his colleague Keble spoke of her as the "blessed Maid, Lily of Eden's fragrant shade ... whose name all but adoring love may claim.") In contrast, Newman discovered that Mary's figure was central in salvation history; although the definition of her as God-bearer at the Council of Ephesus in 431 best expressed the importance of the woman of the Gospels, her significance continued to expand over the centuries as the church grasped the meaning of its own doctrine:

She raised herself aloft silently, and has grown into her place in the Church by a tranquil influence as a natural process. She was as some fair tree, stretching forth her fruitful branches and her fragrant leaves, and overshadowing the territory of the saints.5

NEW VIEWS OF MARY IN THE GOSPELS

A century and a half later we are able to draw on the insights of women who share Newman's methodology but add an awareness of gender difference to his conclusions. New Testament scholar Beverly Gaventa, for example, tells us she writes about Mary as a Protestant and a feminist, if the latter term means being "committed to the realization of the full equality of women and men in life together." She also illuminates the feeling of generations of women, Catholic and Protestant, who have identified with Mary for a special reason:

I also write as a mother. My profound connection with my child makes it impossible for me to do otherwise, and I cannot pretend to distance myself from certain aspects of these texts. When Matthew's Gospel depicts the bloody Roman sword in Bethlehem and the threat to Jesus, a cold fear grabs me. When Luke describes Mary's puzzlement over the son who is both hers and not hers, I worry with and for her. Some may find this lamentably sentimental. For me it is simply a fact of life.

Gaventa's experience makes her sensitive to the emotional language Luke has deliberately given Mary; it made her retranslate the text she felt did not do justice to it. Only "anguish" is adequate to describe Mary's words to her son when she discovers his absence from the caravan heading home. Gaventa also points out that at the Visitation, in the "joyous exchange of Elizabeth and Mary the fulfillment of the promise already begins." The good news is announced first in women's words; the familiar scene takes on new significance, strengthening women's sense of their ability to image and preach God.

Mary's response to Elizabeth's greeting in her Magnificat is hardly proof of the self-abasement that contemporary women complain about in her. She tells us God has done great things for her and all generations will call her blessed. She sums up the Christian experience of a God who is (in our concepts) both paternal and maternal, echoing the powerful prayer of Hannah in 1 Samuel. It is possible that this prayer was said by Jewish women of her time when they first became pregnant, and so it relates Mary to all those pregnant with new life.7 It connects her to the powerless as well; what Mary calls her lowliness is a matter of class and lack of power, placing her (and her son) among those whom God protects. To a number of feminist biblical scholars-and third-world theologians, most notably Tissa Balasuriya-this prayer makes Mary a prophet whose social message is an important reminder to Christians today.

Mary's witness transcends ideology, creed, and gender because her life, even in the brief glimpses of it in the New Testament, is rooted in relationships that constantly demand creative faithfulness in the face of ever-changing conditions. That is why the mother of Jesus pondered events over and over, even at the Nativity when the shepherds were rejoicing. That is why in John's Gospel she is at Cana and under the cross, the only disciple to be present both at the beginning and end of her son's mission.

Mary is given short shrift in Matthew's account of the birth of Jesus, for he is attempting to connect Jesus with the history of Israel; she says nothing and is the subject of only one active verb in the whole Gospel, when she gives birth. But in Luke she is disciple, prophet, and thinker as well as mother. Her Magnificat reveals her intimacy with the Hebrew Scriptures, and its final lines recalling "Abraham our father" remind us that she is carrying on his tradition, answering God's summons. Mary was not called to be an ideal middle-class wife and mother. As Elisabeth SchOssler Fiorenza reminds us,

In the center of the Christian story stands not the lovely "white lady" of artistic and popular imagination, kneeling in adoration before her son. Rather it is the young pregnant woman, living in occupied territory and struggling against victimization and for survival and dignity.8

Remarkably, Newman appreciated Mary's reliance on observation and judgment as well as her ability to live with ambivalence. She became for him the model of each person's need to reflect on the presence of God within, to face doubts and still be faithful, always trying to reconcile faith and experience without forcing them together. Before he entered the Roman church, he concluded that she represented the necessary attitude to faith "not only ... of the unlearned, but also of the Doctors of the Church, who have to investigate, and weigh, and define, as well as to profess the Gospel."9

Nevertheless, the Mary of the New Testament is a figure singularly open to cultural and personal interpretation. Contemporary women find hidden dimensions in Luke's story prompted by their own experience. In the Annunciation, for instance, which might more accurately be called the Proposal (in both senses of the term), they see a brave young woman (of twelve or thirteen) willing to commit herself to an action whose consequences she cannot foresee. Aquinas saw the Annunciation as a kind of marriage between human nature and the Son of God. This lofty concept might best be understood today in a cosmological sense. From a psychological perspective, Mary's consent reminds me of Carol Gilligan's female adolescents and their passionate concern for justice. Unfortunately, most of these girls lose their fervor and confidence under social pressure. Despite scandal, religious disapproval, and extreme suffering, Mary did not.

To share just one other woman's view of the Annunciation, in her novel about a feminist desperate to have a child, Sara Maitland introduces a startling subjectivity into Mary's view of the virginal conception: "that purely conscious, unalienated woman who can so assent with the entirety of her person needs no biological intrusion between her desire and its fulfillment." She is "a slap in the face to anyone who wants to see the virgin birth as anti-sexuality. Her small, tired face. weary with trying to explain the obvious, says sexuality goes beyond the moment of genital receptivity."

She cannot explain. The neighborhood is filled with delighted scandal: this might teach her not to walk about ignoring men and acting so high and free. But she is not afraid. Not her, in her moment of pure assent. She uprooted her desire and carried it as far as it would go; carried it beyond mind and logic higher and higher to the throne of the living God, to the source of light, to the infinite word ....

Assent becomes the moment of conception. 10

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH

Eve, Mary, and Other Women

If the Bible itself opens Mary's story to so many potential elaborations and interpretations, popular devotion and legends begin to add their own almost from the beginning, filling in the Gospel gaps, but often changing the evangelists' emphasis. Mary is the true heroine of the second-century Protevangelium of James, a narrative purportedly written by the brother of Jesus, widely translated and circulated down through the Middle Ages. The stories it told of Mary's parents Anna and Joachim, of her early education in the temple, her marriage to a widowed older Joseph and her triple virginity (before, during, and after the birth of Jesus), all found their way into art and church teaching, mingling seamlessly with details from the New Testament. As Beverly Gaventa points out, when it comes to the subject of Mary, one cannot distinguish sharply between popular literature and the teaching of patristic writers.11

The tendency of popular assumptions to trickle up and merge with church teaching is particularly clear in the hardwon unity of view that culminated in the declaration of Mary as theotokos, or God-bearer, at the Council of Ephesus in 431. In the second- and third-century era of the martyrs, marian piety was minimal in the Latin-speaking church. Struggling to establish Christianity in a hostile Roman Empire and wrestling with heretics in the attempt to define true doctrine, the fathers turned to the mother of Jesus only when they needed her to establish his human nature. When they did, they did not hesitate to criticize her for lack of faith (Tertullian) or impatience at the wedding of Cana (Irenaeus).

In the earliest marian theological interpretation, she was evoked (very briefly) as a good counterpart to the bad Eve, mother of the living in the Hebrew Scripture. Just as Paul had called Christ the New Adam, so Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian called Mary the New Eve. The fathers' descriptions of Eve and Mary, however, reflected a misogynistic culture in their distortion of Genesis 2-3. They grouped all women except Mary with Eve, a weak seductress tempting the noble Adam to a fatal fall. Milton repeated this interpretation centuries later, and vestiges of such attitudes persist even today. Icon painter Yaraslava Mills, for example, commissioned to create a resurrection scene in a church window, asked her clerical donors if she could uncover Eve's hands-traditionally invisible under red cloth-so that Christ could reach out his hand to her as well as to Adam. She was told no; it was impossible because Eve was unclean.

Seeing Mary as a human woman like themselves, contemporary women see her connection with an Eve liberated from her role of cliche seductress. Barbara Grizzutti Harrison represents the feelings of many when she calls Eve her sister because "without the genetically transmitted knowledge of good and evil that Eve's act of radical curiosity sowed in our marrow, we should not desire to know and love God, we should have no need of him. We should have no need of one another." 12 Phyllis Trible's groundbreaking rereading of Genesis rescues Eve from being seen as temptress. In the scene with the snake in which Adam is passive but later blames Eve, God accepts her explanation, damning only the serpent, but making both Adam and Eve responsible. Trible says: "The Yahwist narrative tells us who we are (creatures of equality and mutuality); it tells us who we have become (creatures of oppression), and so it opens possibilities for change, for a return to our true liberation under God." 13

Mary's Virginity

When sexual renunciation replaced martyrdom as the mark of true Christian dedication in the fourth century, influential churchmen like Jerome and Ambrose urged women to join communities of committed virgins and widows. No longer seen as the Jewish mother and disciple of the Gospels, Mary became the heroine of this new asceticism. Her virginity (before, during, and after giving birth to Jesus) became more and more associated with the church itself, especially in the view of the influential Bishop Ambrose of Milan. Matthew and Luke had spoken only of Mary's virginal conception of Jesus, highlighting divine action in his birth. But the fourth-century fathers seemed to know better what kind of mother was fitting for God. It is startling to hear bishop Athanasius of Alexandria describe her:

Mary ... was a pure Virgin, with a harmonious disposition .... She did not want to be seen by men .... She remained continually at home, living a retired life and imitating a honeybee .... She generously distributed to the poor what was left over from the work of her hands .... She prayed to God, alone to the alone, intent on two things: not to let a bad thought take root in her heart and to grow neither bold nor hard of heart .... Her speech was recollected and her voice low. 14

This perennial male fantasy of a quiet, selfless woman may not, however, have convinced his feminine audience as much as a more available figure of Mary from popular culture. The Protevangelium depicted Mary entering the temple to study when she was three, and the theme became a popular and continuing one in art. This temple presentation of Mary is celebrated in the Catholic liturgical calendar (Nov. 22); its theological justification is that Mary belonged only to God. Women, however, may well have seen it differently. In the early centuries of the church, they could gain an education only as consecrated virgins and widows. Historian Peter Brown says that evidence from the lives of many women who joined celibate communities at this time suggests that it was not the image of the reclusive honeybee that attracted them but that of Mary as student. Following the norms they could not change, such Christian women were able to lead meaningful lives of scholarship and service, strengthened by their devotion to Mary as a lifelong learner. 15

In our world, women have had to reinterpret Mary's virginity to make it meaningful to them. Both ordinary people and scholars seem to agree that the word defines Mary's autonomy. "She's not under any man's control" sums up the common view, echoing Sojourner Truth's famous outburst on the floor of the Women's Rights Convention in 1851: "That little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men `cause Christ wasn't a woman. Where did your Christ come from? ... From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him." 16

Instead of allowing male authority to assign significance to their experience, women today are discovering its meaning themselves. In the Mediterranean world from which Mary and the church arose, virginity symbolized not only the temporary absence from sex of the small number of Vestal Virgins, but the independence and self-direction of the goddesses, rather than their abstinence from sex. It was their freedom that made them virgins: No one owned them. In Scripture, Mary is never portrayed as under the control of any man: "The image of Mary as a virgin," theologian Elizabeth Johnson reminds us, "has significance as the image of a woman from whose personal center power wells up, a woman who symbolizes the independence of the identity of women." 17

Deploring Mary's passive, submissive image as one responsible for much violence used against women, Asian Christian women echo Johnson's judgment. They do not see Mary in exclusively biological terms, but find her life open to wholeness and to others. Korean theologian Chung Hyun Kyung says Mary strengthens women to tell the truth; her unbreakable spirit is their model.18

Emergence of the Mother of God

In the early church, however, knowledge of the Bible or the possibility of an education were possible only for the elite. The great majority of Christian urban dwellers and displaced agricultural workers streaming into Rome and Constantinople because of the constant invasion of Huns, Vandals, Goths, and Persians in the fourth and fifth centuries demanded childbearing rather than virginity of their women. The exclusion of any female images from the Christian concept of divinity in the Latin Church-- concerned to eradicate the worship of pagan goddesses-was particularly hard on people whose experience with life-producing powers had been connected with the female principle for millennia. They became devoted to a more popular image of Mary, that of the compassionate Mother of God, the theotokos, venerated in the liturgy of the Eastern Church at least since the second century. In the Odes of Solomon, Mary is called a woman of power and agency, giving birth to Jesus "like a strong man with desire."

The more Jesus was divinized by the fathers, the greater was the need for a mediator who could remind people of his humanity. Slowly the mother of Jesus became accepted by the public as their protector. St. Ephrem's poetic praise of her role as "the daughter of humanity" whose "luminous eyes" see all things clearly represented the view of the great Cappadocian Fathers-Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nanzianzus. When Christianity became the established religion of Rome and the Latin Fathers no longer feared Mary's connection with earlier mother goddesses, the whole church declared the mother of Jesus to be theotokos (literally the God-bearer). at the ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431. Crowds celebrated noisily in the streets outside. Icons, churches, and feasts in her honor multiplied. Mary was credited with saving Constantinople from barbarians in 626-the first of innumerable similar accomplishments attributed to her in the next thousand years. The compassionate figure of the mother of God permitted believers to preserve their differences as well as their communal ties. Her intercessory role satisfied the most primitive needs for protection at the same time that it supported complex intellectual arguments for her son's humanity. The God-bearer was and is an accurate symbol of Mary, for it recalls the spirit-filled woman of Luke's Gospel and her words.

THE MIDDLE AGES: PRAYERS, PILGRIMAGE SHRINES, AND BLACK MADONNAS

The power and influence of the theotokos was present everywhere in medieval Christendom: in the daily prayers of monks and nuns, in the art and worship of churches, in the books of hours and portable altars of the nobility, in the banners, statues and imagination of peasants. As at Ephesus, Mary seemed to perform different functions for her varied devotees, depending on their class, state in life, and gender. In social function as in life, she was the very image of incarnation.

A scholarly abbot like Anselm of Canterbury did not hesitate to pray to Mary in the erotic language of the Song of Songs, which had become part of the regular readings and chants for her feast days, nor to connect her function with that of natural renewal:

O woman full and overflowing with grace, plenty flows from you to make all creatures green again. 19

Devotion to Mary seemed to transform the emotional life of powerful abbots like Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux, making them more humble and understanding religious superiors. It did not, however, carry over into their attitudes to real women. Art, sculpture, and sermons demonstrate that the Eve-Mary split remained dominant throughout the medieval world.

Yet women-including women monastics-did not necessarily see themselves as they were seen, nor did they relate to Mary as male monks did. If marian devotion made men more tender, it served to strengthen women. It is instructive to look at the role Mary played in encouraging the twelfth-century Benedictine nun Elisabeth of Schoenau to pursue the vocation to which she felt called by God. At the age of twenty-three, Elisabeth began having visions that urged her to criticize priests and church authorities publicly for their laziness and failure to instruct the people. These "arrows of the Lord" were a torture to her, because she feared what people would think if she, a woman, obeyed them. But when Mary appeared to her wearing priestly garments and signed her with the sign of the cross, she lost her fear. When an angel appeared to her shortly afterwards and told her to act "manfully," Elisabeth began her new career as an outspoken preacher and prophet.20

Her courage was reinforced by the example and words of the older abbess, Hildegard of Bingen, who encouraged her in what she called their common vocation as prophets. She shrewdly advised Elisabeth not to claim too much, however, but to explain humbly to those who questioned her that as a woman she was only an instrument-a trumpet through which the Spirit broadcast the mysteries of God.

Though Hildegard was heard in her time, even by popes and emperors, her music, drama, manuals on healing, and rich theological art were not included in mainstream tradition. Only in the last few decades, and largely because the nuns of her order preserved and translated them, have we been able to share in her visions, which assign a central role in world salvation to Mary and contain an unusual rehabilitation of Eve. Hildegard didn't focus on original sin, which so dominated mainstream western thought, but on the Creator's love and joy in creation. She saw the world as wedded to its maker and Mary as central to this ongoing marriage. Because Mary brought God's son into the physical world, Hildegard believed that Mary and Eve were now united: "Mary is Eve: there is only one Woman, she who was born of Adam in order to be, like Wisdom, the mirror of God's beauty and `the embrace of his whole creation'." Hildegard believed women fulfilled an essential purpose on earth: "At every level the feminine is that in God which binds itself most intimately with the human race, and through it with the cosmos."21

Hildegard's works, of course, were not available either to the townsfolk or to the vast majority of illiterate peasants in medieval times. Mary, however, was as close to them as the nearest wayside shrine. They remembered her daily when they paused at work to pray the Angelus and meditate on the mystery of the Incarnation. The rosary served to keep the Gospel stories alive in the imagination of the vast majority of believers, including clerics, who had no Bibles and little theological guidance. And those who made pilgrimages-kings, queens, and commoners-sought her out together at the same shrines. Apart from that of St. James at Compostella, almost all of the best known (Chartres, Montserrat, LePuy, Dijon, Rocadamour, Loreto, Walsingham, and many others) were dedicated to Mary. Recorded legends and the miracle books still preserved at these shrines testify that Mary was constantly responsive to the needs of the sinners and saints who asked her help in conception, healing, and forgiveness.

One form of art that became the focal point of such shrines in western Europe were portable wooden statues, small enough to be carried about among the populace on feast days. These Romanesque statues of Mary holding on her knees the child who resembles her exactly were called Virgins in Majesty or Thrones of Wisdom. Both artists and viewers thought of them as portraits, and they evoked an immediate response. St. Ignatius of Loyola tells us in his Diary-presumably referring to the Black Madonna of Montserrat-that Mary "showed me that her flesh was in that of her son."

An art historian who came upon little-known examples of these statues in northern Spain wrote to me about their continuing evocative power:

The power of these images-vs. the insipid plaster Marys I had always known-made me re-think Mary's place in the church ... and in my life. Theologically, the Madonnas speak to the humanity of Jesus which the worshipers could see in a concrete way. She seems to be communicating directly: This is the child of my body, my blood, my genes. He dwelt among us; he shared our destiny. He was human as we are. In an age of "high" Christology, a clericalized church, and a remote Eucharistic celebration, these images offered consolation and support for ordinary Christians in the midst of uncertain and fearful times. What a source of communal bonding! She belonged to the people, not to the hierarchical church, it seems.22

MARY AND THE GODDESS: THE POWER OF ARCHAIC SYMBOLS

It is both significant and mysterious that many of these Virgins in Majesty-like some of the most famous painted icons in Eastern Europe-- were black. There are many theories as to why-accidental change, aging, the effects of soot from candles or fire; some may be pagan idols taken for Mary. Church authorities accepted them as visual texts of the Incarnation, citing the Song of Songs in explanation: "I am dark but lovely, 0 daughters of Jerusalem." There is no question, however, that they also absorbed the functions of Greco-Roman goddesses.

Like Demeter and Isis, Mary was dark like the fertile earth as she took over the traditionally feminine role of mediating human transitions from birth to death. "Pray for us now at the hour of our death" joined the earlier part of the Ave Maria after the plague in the late Middle Ages when the feast day of Mary's Assumption was moved to the time of the harvest festival. As at Ephesus, Mary's figure was capable of absorbing important aspects of the feminine divine in response to human religious need at the same time she reminded people how Christ-so often portrayed as a stem judge in the Middle Ages-was always with them. Through devout communal belief and creativity, Mary was thus able to deliver the message of her Magnificat in a different age.

Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney believes that the Christian poet's imagination has been blessed because Catholicism managed to preserve part of the old feminine religion in its structure. "The Virgin Mary as intercessor, mother of Mercy, Star of the Sea, occupies in the common psychology the place occupied by the muse in the poetic psychology."23 To those who think only literally and often ahistorically, such an attitude is superstitious, heretical, even devilish. Such literal beliefs accounted for the ferocity of the attacks on black madonnas during the Reformation and in the French Revolution.

To those able to think metaphorically, however, they stimulate thought. Undismayed by Mary's ability to assimilate elements from different cultures, including the pagan, Newman saw it as the effect of sacramental grace enlarging and refining the church's teaching: "We even hold that one special way in which Providence has imparted divine knowledge to us has been by enabling her to draw and collect it together out of the world."24

Today such symbolic accretions are less shocking than the fact that Mary was used to justify anti-Semitism and made a constant patroness of war, or that her influence was invoked against the Muslims (who venerated her greatly). Opposing armies from Christian countries even fought each other under separate banners of Our Lady (Vladimir for the Russians, Czestochowa for the Poles). What is more important and harder to explain is how the image of Mary managed to overcome such projections and distortions so that her message of God's compassion was able to reach ever greater numbers of people.

Victor Turner says that the ability of a symbol to absorb and mediate archaic elements-exactly what black madonnas do-is an important part of their transforming function. The conflict of multiple meanings they arouse is not idolatry but the desire to purify. Contemporary science tells us that we all contain archaic responses in our own bodies. Such symbols root them and allow for the purification of archaic ideals. If we destroy such symbols, rather than reverence them, we will lose a vital mediating source of transformation.25 This seems evident in the power of black madonnas to attract many who are seeking the feminine divine today. As China Galland's spiritual journeys indicate, the symbol of Mary as black madonna is capable both of integrating and empowering the feminine self on behalf of others and of serving as a bridge to images of the feminine divine in other religions.26

Just such bridging and transforming accompanied the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico in the sixteenth century, an event that made it possible for the indigenous Aztecs to become Christians. Both the Spanish and the Indians venerated the dark image of Guadalupe as the mother of the true God. In 1531, according to local legend, this image of Mary appeared on the tilma of the poor Indian Juan Diego. Speaking in his own language, Nahuatl, she requested him to ask the bishop to have a church built for her on Tepeyac, a hill sacred to the Aztecs. She told him that she wished to give consolation and relief to his suffering people. Virgil Elizondo recently translated a Spanish version of the original Nahuatl poem reporting her appearance. It conveys Juan Diego's recognition that the lovely vision he saw shared the place among the lowly that the biblical Mary assumed. Understandably, she calls him "my most abandoned son"; surprisingly, he calls her "my most abandoned daughter."27

Within a few decades, Guadalupe (and other black madonnas such as Aparecida in Brazil) helped foster relationships of respect within Latin American society for those of different backgrounds and color. The results have been far from perfect, but these images retained the potential to stimulate the liberation theology of our time. The veneration of such black madonnas has also brought about a powerful and inclusive feminist understanding of Mary, leading Brazilian theologians None Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer to extol Mary's ability to reawaken the extraordinary creative energy in human beings.28

THE POST-REFORMATION RETURN OF MARIAN INFLUENCE

Mary appeared in the New World just as European Christendom was splitting in two, marking the end of unified devotion to Mary. Late medieval accretions from paganism, nationalism, and sentimental devotion-sometimes making Mary's motherhood seem more important than the word or person of God-understandably contributed to the Reformers' antagonism to marian art and devotion. Most pre-Reformation clergy were poorly educated, and their homilies on Mary had little biblical or theological basis. How could one who valued the Bible not be shocked at Saint Bernardine of Siena's praise of Mary as a kind of spiritual seductress?

O the unthinkable power of the Virgin Mother! One Hebrew woman invaded the house of the eternal King; one girl, I do not know by what caresses, pledges or violence, seduced, deceived and, if I may say so, wounded and enraptured the divine heart and ensnared the Wisdom of God .... 29

For several hundred years, Mary would be glorified by Catholics and largely ignored by Protestants. Catholic women had long been devoted to the Mary of everyday life-witness the realistic feminine actions and emotions conveyed in Giotto's life of the Virgin in Padua (early fourteenth century) or the widespread appearance of the pieta after the suffering and enforced caretaking caused by the plague in Europe. Notice, too, that it is largely to poor, vulnerable young women that hundreds of nineteenthcentury apparitions occur.

They cannot be ignored in a history of marian piety. From the third century onward, private visions of the Blessed Mother have been recorded; they blend with legends and fact in the Middle Ages and in such appearances as that at Guadalupe in Mexico. In the increasingly secularized world of Europe in the nineteenth century, they multiplied, became public and serial. Some were dubious, all were affected by local needs. The Catholic Church is cautious in its approach to such events, never saying Mary appeared, but only that in some cases-when the source is holy and the fruits of an apparition are sound, as at Lourdes-that it is not against faith to pray there. For the poor young women who saw Mary, such apparitions seem to function as the creative theology of the marginalized. In almost every such case, the community rallied around the seer or seers, making these events public, communal affirmations of faith in situations where church and livelihood seemed threatened.30

But it was the publicly expressed need and hope of Protestant English and American women in the same century that first gave explicit voice to Mary's agency on behalf of social justice and her ability to strengthen women's sense of identity, vocation, and social image. These women pointed out that feminine symbols were missing from their churches and from public life. As they visited Europe and the new museums at home, they observed the wealth of painting and sculpture in which Mary was depicted as a strong and admirable woman. The shrines and daily devotions English social reformer Frances Power Cobbe witnessed in her travels to Italy convinced her that Protestants should ask themselves whether they were wise to have given up "something with which their creed can ill dispense." To Catholics, Mary "is the representative of all the feminine virtues and perfections"; they know that "Love, motherly tenderness and pity, is a divine and holy thing, worthy of adoration. The heart of humanity longs to rest itself on the compassion of its Creator."31

To the Americans Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary was helpful both in strengthening their sense of identity and purpose and providing a useful model for other women to follow. Both kept favorite marian paintings by Raphael in their homes. Fuller's essays and poems reveal her attraction to Mary both as mother and virgin, a magnet for her own psychic yearning for wholeness. Perhaps for the same reasons, she was deeply moved by the image of the mother of sorrows who endured her son's death and went on to join the community of hopeful grievers. In her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) she placed the mother of Jesus in the roster of goddesses and virgins who might spur the development of contemporary women. She did not see Mary as a goddess; her role was special because she alone was part of human history. Fuller comments that Mary's potential for enlarging the freedom of women has yet to be realized. What is most surprising, perhaps, is that this freethinking woman saw Mary's chief virtue as potency of Spirit and believed that only a spiritual transformation of society could bring about true equality between the sexes.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's identification with Mary was equally intense but almost exclusively oriented to her role as a mother. Not only was she writing at the height of the Victorian era, which idolized selfless, maternal women, but she herself had suffered the loss of two beloved sons, Charles and Henry. This daughter and wife of Calvinist ministers viewed Mary as a prophet because of her Magnificat. But above all, Stowe identified with Mary as the mater dolorosa, whose suffering drew her to the "idea of sorrow in heaven-sorrow for the lost, in the heart of God himself."32 Mary's image, particularly as represented in Raphael's Sistine Madonna, inspired Stowe's authorial attempts to introduce a more maternal God into the paternalistic Calvinism she knew so well.

All the elements necessary to reveal Mary as a liberating model for women were available in the late nineteenth century, but unfortunately they existed in different groups, classes, and religions whose members did not communicate well with one another. By the time the second wave of the women's movement captured main-stream acceptance in the 1960s, many of its most public proponents found religion and maternity part of womens' problems, not liberating solutions.

Time, however, has brought about more nuanced and differentiated views of what constitutes women's liberation. These include interdependence, both with nature and humankind across the globe. Mary's Magnificat arose at a particular historical turning point, as Christianity developed from Judaism. Yet its meaning is relevant in our very different historical situation in which Christianity and Judaism are in a new relationship to other world religions, now recognized as valid traditions in touch with ultimate reality. Mary is venerated in Islam and Hinduism. The potential of her presence to evoke the divine feminine and heal divisions without canceling diversity is a tremendous, largely untapped resource.

Will contemporary feminists come to appreciate Margaret Fuller's insight that devotion to Mary is potentially beneficial to women?

Man looks upon Woman, in this relation, always as he should .... Frivolity, base appetite, contempt are exorcised, and man and woman appear again in unprofaned connection as brother and sister, children and servants of one Divine love, and pilgrims to a common aim.33

I hope so. Rescued from her long silence, Mary reveals that women's voices are not confined to a suppressed female truth, but are meant to speak the truth for all. She is indeed the "daughter of humanity" St. Ephrem named her, calling on all cultures to respond to the challenge of the Spirit today.

1 Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer, "Mary," in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, ed. Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993). 483.

2 Mary Gordon, "Coming to Terms with Mary," Commonweal (Jan. 15, 1982). 12

3Valerie Sawing made the point in "The Human Situation: A Feminine View" (1960), reprinted and duly praised in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

4 Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 143.

5 J. H. Newman, The New Eve (Oxford: Newman Bookshop, 1952), 77-8.

6Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Mary: Glimpses of the Mother of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), ix.

7 Cf. Hans Klein, "The Magnificat as a Prayer of Jewish Women," Theology Digest 46 (Spring 1999), 43-7.

8 Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet (New York, Continuum, 1994), 187.

9As quoted in Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1985) 2:106.

10 Sara Maitland, Daughter of Jerusalem (Henry Holt. 1995), 324.

11 Gaventa has performed a real service by including the text of this hitherto almost unavailable work in an appendix to her Mary.

12 Barbara Grizzutti Harrison, "A Meditation on Eve," in Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible, ed. Christina Buchmann and Celina Spiegel, (New York: Fawcett-- Columbine, 1994), 1.

13Phyllis Trible, "Eve and Adam: Genesis 2-3 Reread," in Womanspirit Rising, 81.

14 From his Letter to the Virgins, quoted in Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (Westminster, MD: Christian Classis, 1985), 1, 52-3.

15See Peter Brown's The Body and Society: Men, Wonen and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press. 1988), esp. ch. 13, to see how women managed to lead productive lives in this harsh cultural context.

16As quoted in Lerner, Feminist Consciousness, 106.

17Elizabeth A. Johnson, "Marian Tradition and the Reality of Women," Horizons 12/1 (1985), 133.

18 Chung Hyun Kyung, "Who is Mary for Today's Asian Women?" in Struggle to Be The Sun Again (Maryknoll, Orbis, 1990).

19 Anselm of Canterbury, The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973; 120.

20 Cf. Anne L. Clark's Elisabeth of Schoenau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).

21 As quoted in Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 66, 160, 250.

22 Letter from Philadelphia art histroian Bobbey Burke.

23Seamus Heaney, The Furrow, Sept. 1985.

24 J. H. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 381.

25Victor Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 144.

26 For her account of personal geographical journeys and spiritual development that focus increasingly on the transformative power of black madonnas, see Galland's Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna (Baltimore: Penguin, 1990), and The Bond Between Women: the Journey to Fierce Compassion (New York: Riverhead, 1998).

27 See Virgilio Elizondo, Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997).

28Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer, Mary: Mother of God, Mother of the Poor. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987).

29Graef, Mary, 1:317.

30 For more analysis of these complicated phenomena, cf. David Blackbourn, Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), Turners, Image and Pilrimage, and Sandra Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

31 Frances Power Cobbe, "Madonna Immacolata," ch. 14 of Italics (London, 1864) 329, 331.

32 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign lands. 2 vols. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1854), 2:350.

33 Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1855 reprint; Norton, 1971), 305, 308-9.

Sally Cunneen is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at Rockland Community College (SUNY). She is cofounder of the ecumenical quarterly Cross Currents and author of several books. including In Search of Man.: The Woman and the Symbol (1996).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.-volver índice-

Michael Reynolds; Kiran Trehan. Assessment: A critical perspective. -volver índice-
Studies in Higher Education. Abingdon, Oct 2000

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Volume: 25, Issue: 3, Pagination: 267-278, ISSN: 03075079

Subject Terms: Higher education // Education reform

Abstract:

The article draws attention to the anomaly that alternative approaches to assessment are not more evident in critical pedagogies. Using critical versions of management education as an illustration, the authors point out that there is little examination of the assessment procedure, let alone any replacement of it by less hierarchical methods.
Copyright Carfax Publishing Company Oct 2000

Full Text:

ABSTRACT The article draws attention to the anomaly that alternative approaches to assessment are not more evident in critical pedagogies. Using critical versions of management education as an illustration, the authors point out that there is little examination of the assessment procedure, let alone any replacement of it by less hierarchical methods. Drawing on students' experiences of participative assessment, the authors also illustrate some of the social processes involved and question the implicit assumption that such practices necessarily bring about equality. Differences within student groups influence power relations, which in turn are likely to affect the process of assessment and its outcome. While supporting the aims of participative assessment, particularly as an element of critical pedagogy, the article emphasises the need to take account of the complexities involved and ends with a discussion of implications for the role of tutors.

Introduction

Over the last decade there has been an increasing concern for the introduction of a more critical interpretation of practice in adult and higher education (see, for example, Welton, 1995 or Barnett, 1997). The same concern is evident in our own field of management education, as a response to the considerable influence which managers as a professional group exercise over the lives of employees, the wider community and the environment (Alvesson & Willmott, 1992). In recognition of this, management teachers have been urged to `analyse management in terms of its social, moral and political significance and ... to challenge management practice rather than seek to sustain it' (Grey & Mitev, 1995, p. 74). The challenges vary, from critical theory, liberationist (Freirian) theology, feminist and post-structuralist scholarship, to Marxism and labour process analysis. While differences between these schools of thought are too significant to be overlooked, together they comprise a critical perspective which provides a basis for rethinking adult and professional education. Whichever critical perspective is applied, its characteristics are likely to include:

* questioning assumptions and taken-for-granteds, asking questions which are not meant to be asked;

* foregrounding processes of power and noting how inequalities of power intersect with social factors such as race, gender or age;

* identifying competing discourses and the sectional interests reflected in them; and ultimately

* developing a workplace and social milieu characterised more by justice than by inequality or exploitation.

The principles of a critical pedagogy are applied in different ways. Taking management education as a case in point, critical perspectives are reflected in the content of the curriculum (Nord & Jermier, 1992), the kinds of material used (incorporating cinema and fictional literature, for example: Thompson & McGivern, 1996), and in drawing on students' work experience as well as their experience of the course itself (Grey et at, 1996). A critical stance is also reflected in the choice of analytical frameworks introduced to students, whether deconstructionist (Summers et al, 1997) or applying feminist inquiry and cultural critique (Caproni & Arias, 1997).

Approaches such as the learning community (Reynolds, 1999), or more critical interpretations of action learning (Willmott, 1997), apply a critical perspective in both content and method, reflecting longer-standing influences of educators who have `called into question the political and normative underpinnings of traditional classroom pedagogical styles' (Giroux, 1981, p. 65). In such approaches, students are able to reflect on their professional experience, to select the ideas with which to make sense of it, and to influence the direction and content of their learning by sharing in decision-making within the structure of the course.

Assessment, the focus of this article, is not simply another aspect of educational method. Its function in providing the basis for granting or withholding qualifications makes it a primary location for power relations. As Heron (1979) has argued:

Assessment is the most political of all educational processes; it is where issues of power are most at stake. If there is no staff/student collaboration in assessment, then staff exert a stranglehold that inhibits the development of collaboration with respect to all other processes. (p. 13)

More than any other aspect of education, assessment embodies power relations between the institution and its students, with tutors as custodians of the institution's rules and practices. The effects of judgements made on individuals' careers, as well as the evaluation of their worth by themselves or by others, ensures that assessment is experienced by students as being of considerable significance.

A re-evaluation of assessment methods might, therefore, be expected to be a prominent feature of a critically-based educational programme-particularly one which aims for pedagogical consistency between the curriculum and teaching methodology-and to involve less hierarchical procedures and relationships. Conversely, criticality can be claimed to only a limited extent if assessment, the clearest manifestation of power within the educational context, is not itself questioned and modified. Yet, while examples of critical pedagogy are accumulating, they seldom reflect corresponding changes in assessment practices. Where assessment does depart from mainstream practice, alternatives are typically based on humanistic, student-centred aspirations for social equality, rather than on an analysis of the assessment process in terms of institutional power.

This article develops two related themes. The first is a review of propositions for a revision of assessment from the perspectives of both student-centred and critical pedagogies, with brief examples from our own practice. The second theme proposes that, in developing less hierarchical approaches to assessment, it is also necessary to understand and work with the complex social processes that accompany them. It draws on the reported experiences of students involved in participative assessment to illustrate the complex political and social dynamics of learning groups, and the way the process of assessment may be affected by them. The final section considers implications for tutors, particularly in the context of critical pedagogies.

Assessment: a critical interpretation

In adult and professional education there have been proposals for more participative approaches to assessment, whether peer (carried out by fellow students), collaborative (jointly evaluated by students and the tutor), or consultative (collectively between self, peers and tutor, but with ultimate responsibility resting with the tutor). Among advocates of studentcentred learning, this interest has been prompted by the concern that conventional assessment practices are not consistent with such goals of education as `developing independent learners and critical thinkers' (Boud, 1986, p. 14).

As Boud sees it, engagement in more participative practices helps to encourage critical faculties and wean students from dependence on the assessment of others. Rowntree (1987), in his critique of mainstream practice, argues that traditional assessment processes are themselves contradictory. The notion of the assessor as an all-knowing, all-powerful entity is fundamentally flawed, because it fails to take sufficient account of the biases of the assessor and of the potentially prejudicial nature of the process.

Characteristic of critiques at the time, Heron (1981a) argued that prevailing models for assessing student work in higher education were too authoritarian, in that tutors exercised unilateral, intellectual authority by holding the power to make decisions. They determined what students learned, they designed the programmes of learning, the criteria for assessment and carried out the assessment of each student. Students held no power in this process, and did not participate in decision-making about their learning at all. Heron saw all this as entailing a high degree of social control by an academic elite:

The issue ... is a political one; that is, it is to do with the exercise of power. And power is simply to do with who makes decisions about whom. (1981b, p. 56)

As a consequence of these concerns, the 1980s and 1990s saw a growth in the literature on self and peer assessment, albeit often in the context of otherwise traditional teaching methods. In a number of publications, attention was drawn to such issues as: comparisons of teacher/student ratings (Bond, 1986; Falchikov, 1989); the introduction of self-assessment practices into undergraduate courses (Boud, 1986); work on peer, self and tutor assessment (Stefani, 1994); peer tutoring (Saunder, 1992); and self and peer assessment (Howard, 1991). During this period, the topic of self, peer and collaborative assessment began to be studied more critically (see, for example, Boud, 1981, 1989; Cunningham, 1991; Heron, 1981b; Somervell, 1993).

As summarised briefly in the introductory section, recent influences from radical education (Giroux, 1992), feminist pedagogy (Weiler, 1991) and from critical theory (French & Grey, 1996) have given fresh impetus to the development of more participative, less hierarchical approaches to teaching and learning-the expression of a critical perspective in both content and methodology. Arguably, in such a context, some form of participative assessment might be expected as a prerequisite. Yet, as we observed at the outset, while there are some examples of a critical pedagogy affecting content and method, corresponding changes in the practice of assessment are harder to find. This omission reflects, perhaps, the tendency, within the social reconstructionist tradition in education, to be stronger on political vision than on practical propositions (Gore, 1993). Just as likely, it is due to the pivotal role assessment plays in maintaining the legitimacy of the academy and its procedures.

There are those who are aware of this contradiction and the constraints imposed by `the institutional hierarchical structure which teachers and students typically inhabit' (Grey et al., 1996, p. 105). Similarly, Gore (1992) has emphasised that the relationship between teacher and students is `at some fundamental level, one in which the teacher is able to exercise power in ways unavailable to students' (p. 68). Some educators have seen these disparities of power as placing inevitable limitations on what can be done with the assessment process Crisdell, 1993). Others have addressed the inherent contradiction with 'expedient' modifications to procedures: such as group assignments and contracts for grades (Weiler, 1991); ensuring that examinations are used `to test the quality of thinking, not the quantity of what is thought' (Grey et aL, 1996, p. 104); or by advocating that students are involved in dialogue with tutors over `the criteria, function, and consequences of the system of evaluation' (Giroux, 1988, p. 39).

It seems, however, that critical pedagogies have yet to make any significant impact on the essentially hierarchical nature of assessment. This might at first seem puzzling, given earlier examples of collaborative assessment developed within the `student-centred' learning movement. Perhaps it is because of critical educationalists' mistrust of the humanist discourse which characterises student-centred approaches, `divorcing the social relations of the classroom from the kind of theoretically informed action that could link classroom social relations to a viable political perspective' (Giroux, 1981, p. 66).

Participative Assessment in Practice

Within this article we define participative assessment as a process in which students and tutors share, to some degree, the responsibility for making evaluations and judgements about students' written work, gaining insight into how such judgements are made and finding appropriate ways to communicate them. The criteria for assessment may be as given, or there may be an opportunity for students to influence them. At most, this can mean-as with students on the postgraduate course in Management Development at the University of Central England-being involved in peer assessment which takes the form of evaluation and commentary on written work, and in reaching agreement with student colleagues as to its grading.

Students work collectively in action learning groups, and peer assessment is intended to evaluate each student's understanding of their chosen topic area and how it relates to the practice of management. They are expected to record the comments and grades that result from group discussions. In this sense, students' dialogue and social support is fundamental to the assessment process. A member of staff is present to facilitate decision-making, but not to pass judgement on the assignments.

The MA in Management Learning at Lancaster University involves a consultative procedure for assessment in which each student, their learning group of four or five colleagues and the tutor contribute comments on each paper or project and agree a mark. The criteria are part of the course 'givens', and a factor with which each group must engage is that, while students are expected to take part in marking each other's work, the tutor will have more experience of interpreting the criteria. The tutor is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the learning group agrees a mark and for recording both marks and comments. Rarely, a disputed case is carried forward to the examining board for resolution.

It must be said that the introduction of both these examples of participative assessment pre-dates the advent of the critical turn in management education, owing more to influences from student-centred or self-managed learning approaches. However, we would argue that, in principle, the procedures are consistent with the emphasis in critical pedagogies on engaging reflexively with power relations in the classroom. Arguably, there is additional value for the students, who are involved in similar processes and dynamics as those which arise during their work as professionals in managing, selecting, appraising and making judgements of various kinds about other people.

The emphasis on students learning from each other in small groups, and the opportunity for their evaluation of each other's work to influence the assessment outcome, would seem to provide the foundations for `diffusing authority along horizontal lines' (Giroux, 1988, p. 39). Giroux continues, `under such conditions, social relations of education marked by dominance, subordination, and an uncritical respect for authority can be effectively minimized' (p. 39). But does sharing in the procedures of assessment necessarily result in more critical or democratic processes? Do methods that are less hierarchical actually weaken `the traditional correspondence between grades and authority' (p. 38)? And, as well as the more obvious distinctions between tutor and student, what of the cultural bases of power which influence relationships among the students themselves? Are they not also likely to affect the assessment process? These questions are absent from most accounts of participative approaches, propositions for peer assessment, for example, seeming to assume that equality can be ensured simply by removing the tutor from the procedure.

If we are to accept that students' ability to assess their own as well as others' work is an important element in the learning process, then questions of power and authority deserve particular examination. In the next section, and as a way of furthering understanding and development of a more critical approach, we will examine such questions in the light of students' experiences of participative assessment.

The Significance of Power Relations in Participative Assessment

In this section, we will explore the significance of power in participative assessment and the question of empowerment, drawing on the ideas of critical and feminist pedagogies. Our discussion will be illustrated by reported experiences of students on two of our postgraduate courses. Data were collected through observation of the assessment process at tutorial group meetings, supplemented by interviews in which students described their experiences and feelings before, during and after these meetings. By illuminating the social and power relations embedded within participative forms of assessment, we hope it will be possible to present a more contextualised and processual account than the proceduralist recipes that Boud (1981) saw as dominating the study of this vital aspect of educational practice.

The Social Complexity of Power and Authority

It might be assumed that questions of power and authority are chiefly confined to traditional assessment methods, and that they are not so problematic in more participative approaches. The nature of the dynamics of participative methods generally would suggest otherwise (Reynolds & Trehan, forthcoming); and, as Ellsworth (1992) points out, contrary to the rhetoric of critical pedagogy, concepts of power, empowerment and student voice have become myths that perpetuate relations of domination. Dispenza (1996) voices a similar concern, that by 'talking' empowerment into existence we are adding to the politically correct language of the more modern education philosophies, and that `the articulation of such language often disguises a lack of imagination at an operational level in the classroom, and an unwillingness to change more comfortable didactic methods' (p. 241).

If self-awareness, consciousness-raising or reflexivity are introduced into the assessment process without power, authority and judgement-making being examined or changed, students have even less control than in more traditional methods. Not only, therefore, should power and authority be central foci of analysis in the context of a critical pedagogy (Gore, 1993), but they might also be expected to result in visible changes in classroom relations.

In practice, clarifying the role of the tutor in participative approaches is unlikely to be straightforward. The tutor's intention may be that students will share in evaluating and grading work, even-as in peer assessment-to the extent of collectively managing the entire process. Initially, however, such freedom may cause anxiety and frustration, as this student's reflection on their experience of it illustrates:

The atmosphere with my group varied and was considerably influenced by the role of the facilitator, because we were unsure as to what their role was. It felt initially that his presence was disruptive ... on reflection it was useful because we had to examine our own feelings and desire to be led and directed.

Even then there are difficulties, because of the ambiguities that result from the redefinition of the tutor's role, and disconfirmation of expectations of the extent and basis of authority associated with it. Bilimoria (1995) notes the shift which takes place, from a tutor's role based on the `exercise of control, expertise, and evaluation' to a concept of authority as shared among participants, expressed through collective generation of knowledge and in the `ownership' of its evaluation (p. 448). But this is not necessarily how students experience it: the assessment process in my case was quite short, principally because there was a tutor who was a member of the group and she put her marks in first, which everybody then kind of fell in with because, you know, we just weren't experienced, not up to arguing.

Without recognition of such ambiguities and support in making sense of them, participative approaches to assessment may be experienced as a more subtle technique for disciplining, as the next extract from students' comments indicates:

The contribution and involvement of the facilitator felt to me ... to use an analogy, like having an arrogant hierarchical senior manager constantly present and expecting great things from you and then disappearing for a round of golf ... still expectin., everyone to believe his claim [to be] 'part of the team'.

To question the extent or the basis of the tutor's authority is not to deny its legitimacy, a point to which we will return in the final section. But such an inquiry may usefully identify its bounds or limitations. The distinction that seems worth making is between expectations that seem reasonable:

Before we started the tutors should have schooled us in the techniques, because the whole process always seemed fairly arbitrary to me.

they have run many such courses before and hopefully would use their legitimate and expert power to guide us if things went wrong.

and indications of unquestioned deference to tutors' authority. Then the belief that tutors should `impose ... rules regarding marking schemes' is replaced by an equally unquestioning regime of self-discipline:

As long as the facilitators did not interfere we felt we must be on the right lines and therefore felt secure.

As Race (1991) has argued, if students know that tutors will intervene if they think the marking is unsatisfactory, the procedure cannot be claimed to be either participative or empowering. For participative assessment to realise in practice what it promises in principle, therefore, it is important to be alert to the tendencies for hierarchical relations to persist in the shape of disciplines which students come to impose on themselves and on each other.

This, it could be argued, is a form of governmentality (Foucault, 1979) exercised through the action of `being one's own policeman', of managing one's own practices, as the following reflection implies:

I do not believe that when we first started peer assessment we critically evaluated the work we did. We were pleased to say that someone had passed. Gave very little criticism either at an individual or group level. However what was very interesting was that as we began to undertake more peer assessments, we all became more critical and instead of the high grades that were originally being obtained, they began to be lower.

In as much as this extract indicates that students will take responsibility for critically examining each other's work, participative assessment might reasonably be considered a success, confirming the observation that peer assessment is as likely to result in tough as in generous grading (Heron, 1979). On the other hand students' experiences can indicate a less constructive process:

At the beginning we were careful not to be too critical of other groups because we feared retaliation, i.e. if we gave them a low mark they would repay the compliment. Nothing was stated but it appeared to be an almost unwritten rule.

If this 'mistrust' were to develop unobserved by the tutor, participative assessment has become part of a machinery of normalisation. Practices are sanctioned, not by an external authority or an appeal to collective sentiments, but by `mundane acts of self authorisation which sustain in the practitioner a compliant identity, a self policing individual' (Usher & Edwards, 1996, p. 56). Applying Foucault's development of the concept of the panopticon as the embodiment of the principle of surveillance, unfacilitated, participative assessment could be seen as a shift from the darkened cells of the traditional prison to the well-lit panopticon cell, a device which, though seemingly more humane, has the more subtle effect of creating self-disciplining subjects. In the same way, Ball (1990) argues that confessional techniques used in pedagogical practices, which encourage students to view the procedures of appraisal as part of the process of self-understanding, self-betterment and professional development, are simply more complex mechanisms of monitoring and control.

Differences, Machinations and the Micro-political

Vince (1996) argues that learning environments are a particularly telling arena for viewing negotiations on autonomy and dependence. Within participative assessment, therefore, it is important to acknowledge socially constructed differences within learning groups and the inequalities of power that such differences can generate. As Vince highlights, active engagement with the consequences of such differences needs to be an integral aspect of educational processes.

From our own experience, active engagement in participative forms of assessment can prove an emotional and anxiety provoking procedure, as the following extracts demonstrate:

When I think about it, it was just intense, quite emotionally charged. I just felt this ringing headache.

There was a feeling of uncertainty, you feel a part of yourself is being exposed and being assessed, so there is vulnerability.

We do not expect participative assessment to be comfortable, and, as hooks (1993) points out, learning is unlikely to be without some anxiety, or critical learning without a sense of personal struggle. But it would seem important to address the question of how students' assessment of each other might be affected by differences present in the learning groups. Unfortunately, as well versed as we might be in theories of learning and of group dynamics, frameworks in common use are rarely adequate in the analysis of difference, let alone in acknowledging the part difference plays in participative approaches to learning.

Dearden (1972), in his critique of non-directive facilitation, cites the example of a prisoner who, having his freedom restored after a long time, `exhibits only anxiety and withdrawal in the state of freedom, rather than the capacities of self direction and choice'. He argues that the granting of freedoms by a teacher can result in that source of control merely being replaced `by that of some other agency' (p. 451). The issue of difference is central to our understanding of power and the social processes at play within participative assessment. Simply to exchange one situation of power relations (tutor-student) with another (studentstudent) does not of itself guarantee equality. It raises a new set of complex power relations which need to be understood. Individuals have status and influence within the learning sets, informed by who they are in wider society, in relation to age, gender, race and class. These differences will surface through assessment as with any other element of a participative course design, as the following illustrations highlight:

on the course, peer assessment invariably includes feedback from a wide range of intellect and knowledge within which the person assessed probably falls in at some point with the range ... this implies that some assessment is made by individuals of a lower intellect/knowledge ... how valid does that make this assessment?

One consequence of this approach is that in my group people would make allowances for some of the women's experience and abilities, or rather lack of it.

On the positive side, these accounts demonstrate how the social processes taking place within participative assessment, as any other part of the course, provide opportunities for students to develop their understanding of relationships. But they also show how differences of gender, ways of working or perceived ability can become translated into a hierarchy of the 'normal' (Tannen, 1992). The following quotations illustrate ways in which students saw differences having an effect on the outcome of assessment:

the whole assessment process relies on us to be open ... both in giving and taking comments, including criticism ... but often this was not the case ... Instead what really happens is people sort things out informally ... groups of individuals always working together with other groups ... struggles for power ... different people having their own agendas.

you can present what's expected ... [by other students] ... that way you're always guaranteed a good mark. Looking back it's easy to see how powerful individuals got what they wanted.

This suggests that norms in participative assessment groups are not necessarily negotiated between equals, but can be disproportionately influenced by more powerful individuals or coalitions, and these inequalities may in turn be reflections of the social context. Cunningham (1991), for instance, argues that sometimes women and black students have suggested that only other women or black people constitute peers, in that they do not accept that male or white students can be classified as peers, or that they should take part in their assessment.

Operating assessment methods which encourage learners to be supportive to fellow learners, whilst at the same time developing their skills in critically evaluating the work of others, is a challenging, complex process. The language and discourses used in the examples we have selected from students' reflections illustrate the subtle processes involved in implementing participative assessment, and highlight the uncertainties associated with such processes. At best, participative methods empower students by constituting them as active learners, responsible for their own learning. Superficial applications in the interests of `student involvement', within an unaltered disciplinary regime of the academic institution, engenders surveillance through self-regulation, especially if students are required to reveal or confess themselves.

While participative assessment can be supported from the principles of a critical pedagogy, the experiences of students involved underline the need for tutors to be prepared and able to work with the complex social processes which are generated. If not, retaining traditional practice may be preferable, in spite of its inherent contradictions with the principles of a critical pedagogy.

Participative Assessment and the Tutor's Role

Our support of participative assessment methods is based on the premise that they are more consistent with the aims and principles of a critical pedagogy than are top-down, unilateral grading systems. If course content and methods are informed by a critical perspective, assessment procedures should reflect examination and critique of power relations, not just in the abstract but in the lived reality of the classroom. There is the additional advantage for students of having to engage with similar processes and issues to those they are likely to encounter in their professional worklife. Conversely, if assessment-the clearest manifestation of power within the educational programme-is unchanged and acceptance of the tutor's authority unquestioned, claims for a critical approach to the learning design are limited.

This article is based as much on our observations and experience of some of the more difficult aspects of participative approaches to assessment, as on our commitment to incorporating them. In particular we have emphasised the need to take account of the social processes which result from the application of participative methods to learning groups: ambiguities in tutor-student relations; potential contradictions in relation to the institutional context; and the power relations which emerge from differences within the student groups. We have drawn on students' experiences to illustrate the way these processes play their part.

While acknowledging the contribution of self-directed learning theory to the development of participative assessment, we have questioned the assumption that such practices are necessarily empowering. In student-centred methods, as to date with most critical pedagogies, even though the socially constructed nature of the teacher's authority has been acknowledged, there has been insufficient analysis of the institutionalised power relationships between teachers and students in assessment. As a consequence, alternative methods may provide the illusion of equality but, for the most part, an essentially hierarchical relationship remains intact. Intended modifications to assessment may, after all, be constrained by more powerful interests that argue for the preservation of traditional practices (Gore, 1993). Brookfield (1986) has highlighted how a number of institutional variables seem repeatedly to skew, distort, or prevent the application of empowerment through the means of curricular imperatives, grading policies and institutionally devised evaluative criteria which preclude student involvement.

If assessment procedures in the classroom are changed, but the institutional context remains the same, the involvement of students can amount to a subtle exercise in control. They have been asked to believe they have a greater measure of control over their learning, but, while this may extend to operational processes, the nature of the underlying power relationships remains unaffected; in which case, how much control do they really have over their learning, as well as its evaluation? As Golding (1980) observed, the idea of empowerment is a more acceptable prospect than being controlled, but if the language has been merely to make the exercise of control less contentious, the outcome may be the same.

A further aspect of participative assessment to which we have drawn attention in this article is the importance of attending to differences other than the distinctions between student and tutor. As student experiences illustrate, social processes that are generated from differences of value or belief, or from differences of gender or educational background, also affect the dynamics of learning relationships. Competitiveness, a sense of intellectual superiority over others, or a lack of conviction in the validity of other students' opinions, can affect the judgements they make of each other's work.

We believe it is necessary to respond to these questions, both because of the effects which assessment has on learning and in the interests of students' further professional development. Understanding the ways in which the rhetoric of empowerment is used in the interests of control is relevant for students who will encounter similar ambiguities in the workplace-especially if they are likely to be involved in appraisal, selection or other aspects of management (Collinson et al., 1990).

Conclusions

Do these contradictions and complexities mean that participative assessment, however appealing in theory, and however consistent with the principles of a critical pedagogy, is too fraught with difficulties and problematical consequences to contemplate in practice? The proposal that students should play a significant part in evaluating their own and others' learning is clearly a departure from the traditional interpretation of the tutor's role. The possible consequences we have briefly outlined suggest that additional areas of understanding are required of tutors, as well, for the substantive evaluation of students' work. Rather than to discourage, our propositions are intended to highlight the implications for the tutor's role and the kinds of understanding that are required, both in redefining authority and in making sense of the processes which are generated or released by applying less hierarchical methods.

The issues and dilemmas we have highlighted are those that tutors might identify for discussion, even if they cannot be neatly or easily resolved. Equally, there is a role for the tutor in supporting discussions of these issues when they are initiated by students. Where participative assessment in some form is practised, there is value in an open examination of what it entails. The procedures and processes of assessment extend further than the negotiations between tutors and students. How and where are disputes resolved? Which other sources of difference or of power might affect students' evaluation of their own and others' work? What happens beyond the participative classroom, in examination boards and discussions with external examiners? What is the tutor's responsibility in drawing attention to these aspects and the tensions associated with them?

Responding to these questions calls for an understanding of the processes involvedincluding the tutor's own part in them-and the skill to support students in working through the implications for their assessment of each other's work. The dilemmas and contradictions involved in participative assessment can be acknowledged at the start of the programme, and worked with as they arise before, during and after assessment, as well as later in course reviews.

Given the nature of the issues, dialogue is arguably more constructive than legislation in identifying both the givens and the negotiables, and where the line between them is to be drawn. Ideally, throughout the process of participative assessment, tutors can identify and work with the social dynamics of each learning group. As Bright (1987) says, `discussion of the student/teacher relationship must include a frank look at the power of the teacher' (p. 98). While guarding against spurious or exaggerated claims for participative assessment, it can be appreciated as a location where power relations can be at least understood if not negotiatedwhich seems more consistent with the principles of a critical approach.

Empowering pedagogy does not dissolve the authority or power of the instructor. It does move from power as domination to power as creative energy ... a view of power as creative community energy would suggest that strategies be developed to counteract unequal power arrangements. Such strategies recognize the potentiality for changing traditional unequal relationships. Our classrooms need not always reflect an equality of power, but they must reflect movement in that direction. (Shrewsbury, 1987, p. 9)

Acknowledgements

The authors would particularly like to thank the postgraduate students who took part in the study, and Dr Vivien Hodgson, Professor Monder Ram and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the article.

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MICHAEL REYNOLDS : Lancaster University, UK

KIRAN TREHAN : University of Central England, UK

Correspondence: Dr Michael Reynolds, Department of Management Learning, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YX, UK.

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