Equity and Excellence in Women and Girls' Education: A Global Perspective

• In Event: Equitable Education for Women and Girls: Global Challenges and Local Solutions

Abstract

This presentation will focus on the importance of relationship-building between teachers and their students in the online classroom in an urban girl’s school in India. Being a developing country, digital learning had been slow on the uptake in India till the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world. Almost overnight, teachers across the country found themselves having to shift their approaches to teaching from the in-person mode to the digital one. While this proved to be advantageous in the sense that teaching and learning did not have to be stalled completely for the duration of the restrictions posed to contain the spread of Covid-19 (Jena, 2020), this change proved to be hard because of connectivity issues, since a majority of Indian households do not have access to the kind of strong Internet connection or computing equipment that are prerequisites for full-time online learning.
Learning and teaching in such a challenging environment has been tough for students and teachers to do. A major challenge has been the difficulty in building relationships between the teachers and their students (Kamble et al., 2021). This is no exception at the girls’ school. Learning is a deeply social process which is dependent on the physical and in-person presence of teachers (Bandura, 1977) as well as peers (Furrer et al., 2014) in students’ lives. Given that both elements are absent in the digital classroom, building relationships that aid in student learning has been one of the main challenges that many teachers have been struggling with and innovating against since the pandemic hit the country’s education system.
In order to gain a better understanding of this issue in the education of girls, I examined an urban girls’ school located in the state of West Bengal and conducted interviews and conversations with teachers there to shed light on their methods and approaches to coping with this challenge. I examined their relationship-building techniques before the pandemic, and how they were pushed to change or modify these to suit the online mode of teaching. The method of data analysis was narrative and content analysis, based on the interviews and conversations conducted with teachers, along with any materials that the teachers volunteered to share with me about their approaches.
The significance of this study lies in better understanding of how a girl’s school deals with the challenges and potential solutions for relationship building in online teaching and learning environments engendered by enforced shifts in modality (Medellin et al,. 2021). The results from this study will help foster similar conversations with teachers in other girl’s schools in the larger Indian state of West Bengal, with potential for scaling up in other low resource contexts in the Global South.

Author

• Suha Gangopadhyay, Michigan State University