Examining Grassroots Transnational Gender Equity and Social Justice Commitments

• In Event: Postcolonial Epistemologies and Transnational Social Justice: Knowledge, Power, and Difference

Abstract

Purpose
While education has served as a practice of freedom and socioeconomic mobility for many, curricula, pedagogies, and policies have been complicit in reproducing inequity and oppression. This paper focuses on transnational educators from developing countries who participated in a 6-week US based professional development focused on gender equity in education. During the program, they engaged in socio-cultural analysis of education by utilizing their own diverse biographies and collective learning community. Framing gender in socio-cultural, political, and personal ways offered opportunity to reflect on and recognize the validity of their own epistemology in creating and sustaining social justice initiatives.

Theoretical Perspectives
The paper utilizes a decolonizing theoretical framework (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999, 2005), international perspectives on social justice education (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010), and neoliberal globalizing discourses (Tikly, 1999) to examine grassroots social justice activism against biographies of location, race, religion, and gender. Social justice as an ideal must be re-visioned in theory and practice, as global relationships change the landscape of justice and equity (Subreenduth, 2013).

Methodology
Utilizing critical autoethnography (Behar, 1996), discourse and policy analysis, I draw on the experiences of 60 educators who participated in a funded project that focused on critical pedagogy with a focus on gender equity. Data sources were from course activities and presentations, reflections, biographies, and individual and focus group interviews. Drawing on the assumptions of critical ethnography, I analyzed how identities and epistemologies of transnational educators (and mine) engage with structures of power and privilege within marginalized global educational contexts.

Results
The program offered opportunities for educators to re-consider what they know, to develop and implement more critically nuanced, reflexive, and diverse pedagogies. Based on the 6-week program, I found:
- that the educators’ social justice non/activism was closely aligned to their political, cultural, religious and/or economic biographies/experiences
- collectively their reflexive practices brought higher conscientization of how societal repetition leads to normalization and common sense with regards to gender in/equity
- these entrenched common sense notions are part of the reason why it is so difficult to disrupt or learn against these normalized views of reality. Learning against repetition is a long-term, conscious and often tedious process – a process that requires patience, willingness to be open and vulnerable (Kumashiro, 2000)
- need to have a more engaged pedagogy (hooks, 1994) that provides students with multiple perspectives, enabling them to know themselves better and to live in the world more fully by reaching critical awareness and engagement

Significance
This paper presents social justice epistemology from the global South analysis as an alternative lens through which marginalized can coalesce to examine the discursive nature of gender, power and knowledge with marginalized educational contexts. Noting that globalization has “no stipulative meaning” but is politically and theoretically contested (Rizvi & Lingard, 2000), this situated theorizing offers complex insights into the dynamics of decolonizing educational social justice efforts within developing countries.

Author

• Sharon S. Subreenduth, Bowling Green State University