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Built environment education : a feminist critique and reconstruction Avery, Hinda H.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationship between built environment education and the discourse which focuses on women in the built environment. It critiques the major built environment education programs in Britain, the United States and Canada, from a feminist art teacher's perspective, showing, with one minor exception, that the spatial and structural needs of women are not taken into account; it presents an overview of the literature concerning women in the built environment; and finally, it demonstrates how community-based women-centred initiatives and issues, as documented in the literature, can, and should be incorporated into built environment elementary and secondary school programs. The principal argument of this dissertation is that the built environment exists predominantly as the expression of an ensconced and inequitable social order. As such, the built environment has resulted, and continues to result in the oppression and subordination of women. By not including the spatial and structural needs of women, within a community-based curriculum, and thereby denying the special circumstances of female students, most built environment education programs reproduce and entrench these exclusionary practices.

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