Gender and Education Committee Highlighted Session: Educating adolescent girls around the globe: Challenges and opportunities

Session Submission Type: Group Panel

Description of Session

Based on the upcoming edited book of the same name, this panel intends to facilitate a critical look at young adolescent girls’ education and comes at a time when overlapping and intersecting concerns for adolescent girls, ages 10-15, and their education could not be more crucial. Evolving gender roles and external forces such as globalization, migration and urbanization, technology, and changing economic and political contexts (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014) disrupt, challenge, and change traditional ways that young adolescent girls have or have not been schooled. These changes are complex and problematic yet also can open opportunities especially in a world with a large youth population needing developmental and structural support. More than half the population today is under 30 years old with the vast majority living in the developing world (USAID, 2012). With enabling and empowering education policies and environments, many girls and countries can benefit from this “demographic dividend” (USAID, 2012). This session allows chapter authors to share with CIES colleagues their research on young adolescent girls’ education in varied parts of the world.

MAIN PERSPECTIVES -This panel allows both established and emergent scholars, native and non-native speakers of English, the space to take a critical perspective on these many complex issues examining power and privilege, obstacles and enablers (Giroux, 1983), that create specific consequences for young adolescent girls. Panelists examine gender-related issues that are often not framed and analyzed with approaches that explore power and structural forces (Stromquist, 2007). They address concerns through varied conceptual and theoretical lenses all within a broad critical framework and using varied methodological approaches, primarily qualitative. The papers will describe the policies and programs of governments, NGOs, and others to forward education for adolescent girls, while also deconstructing the structural and institutional obstacles such as their universal doctrines and discourse, their lack of contextual discernment, and their patterns of creating ineffective policy and programs without listening enough to these girls and what they describe as their concerns, challenges, and needs.

Importance of the panel/poster session to comparative/international education or the conference theme – Calling upon a humanist education, this panel seeks to provide context to the agency of young adolescent girls as a specific population with specific needs and expectations. The panelists identify incremental steps, some successes, hidden curriculum, and numerous problems in responding to developmental, academic, cultural, religious, and contextual needs of adolescent girl students. As governments strive to increase enrollments for young adolescent girls around the globe, curricula, programs, and projects must be designed and constantly monitored to help individual students to succeed in their fluid, intersectional roles so that they may be personally educated and empowered but also help to sustain societal growth and progress in quality of life issues. As we begin to understand more about the common and sometimes overarching challenges in adolescent girls’ education, these papers also help us to realize the more nuanced complexities that exist in varied countries and when traditional values, culture, ethnicity, religion, race, and neoliberal policies intersect with adolescent girls’ lives in particular locations.

Description of how the session will be structured – As session chairs, the editors of the text will welcome the audience and provide a brief context. The authors and discussant will engage in short presentations, and time will be allotted for audience questions, and discussion among the panelists.
Using a combination of research, policy, praxis, and theory, this session will create opportunities for lively discussion and dialogue.

Sub Unit

• Committee: Gender & Education

Chairs

• Sandra Louise Stacki, Hofstra University

• Supriya Baily, George Mason University

Individual Presentations

• More than Access: Overcoming Barriers to Girls’ Secondary Education in the Peruvian Andes - Joseph Levitan, Sacred Valley Project / Penn State University

• Doorways: Preventing and Responding to School-Related, Gender-Based Violence in West Africa - Emily Forsyth Queen, NA; Lorena Gonzalez, NA; Shannon Meehan, NA

• Empowering Girls through Leadership Development: CARE’s Model in Action - Amanda Moll, CARE USA; Emily Janoch, CARE International; Virginia Kintz, CARE International

• Reflections on Identity, Difference, and Rights in an Islamic High School. - Caroline Berinyuy, Young Women’s Leadership Program; Carol Anne Spreen, New York University/University of Johannesburg

• Wearing Hijab: Muslim Girls’ Schooling Experiences in the United States. - Wafa Hozien, Virginia State University

• Empowerment of Excluded Girls in Schooling: Exploring Capabilities and Social Justice Change in China - Vilma Seeberg, Kent State University

• Adolescent girls’ education, empowerment, and marginalization in Gujarat, India: Inclusion, exclusion, or assimilation? - Payal Shah, University of South Carolina