Attitudes and Empowerment in Rural Upper Egypt: A Comparative Study of Students in Community and Government Schools

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Shifting paradigms on sustainable development: complexities of teaching and youth education

Proposal

The community schools (CS) program in Egypt, started under the direction of UNICEF in 1992, was meant to be a movement. “The Pedagogy of Empowerment” (Zaalouk 2004) used in the CS program was meant to be transformative, creating “new norms and social meanings” (Zaalouk 2004:27) for the students and eventually for the wider society. These early CS served primarily poor girls, living in relatively isolated areas, who otherwise would not have had an opportunity to attend school, either because they had failed to enroll before the maximum age for starting in a regular government school; or because they had started school, dropped out, and now wanted to return to continue their education (Zaalouk 2004). Zaalouk (2004) has shown that the academic success of these early CS students exceeded that of students in government schools, and that the students felt empowered relative to their experience before starting school.

The UNICEF CS were meant to be “seedbeds of innovation” (Farrell and Hartwell 2008: 27) whose student-centered, child-friendly, active-learning pedagogy was the reason for the academic success and transformation of their students (Hartwell 2007).

Following on the early success of the UNICEF program, the government began the one-classroom school initiative, and this model eventually expanded to other small one-classroom / multigrade schools (MGS) generally run by NGOs and often funded by international organizations. (All the CS, one-classroom schools, and MGS will henceforth be referred to simply as CS.) It was expected that with the guidance and support of the Ministry of Education (MoE), the pedagogy and innovations of the UNICEF CS would diffuse throughout the other CS, and then into the mainstream government school system (Farrell 2008; Farrell and Hartwell 2008).

However, as the CS model spread, it changed. Recent work has shown that currently CS often do not serve the original target population (Author 2016). Though current students are overwhelmingly female and tend to come from relatively poor families, community schools are located near to (sometimes in) regular government primary schools; the students start at, or near, the statutory age for beginning education in government schools; and they advance year by year through the statutory six years of primary education. The degree to which programs manage to diffuse innovative methods has also been questioned (Megahed et al. 2012).

The demand for CS has also changed, as has the proper way to assess the CS impact. Even as CS were expanding, regular government primary schools were also being built. As a result, as noted, many CS are now close to (and even in) regular schools, and CS students follow an educational trajectory similar to that of students in regular government primary schools. Most CS students now follow the standard MoE curriculum. Moreover, data from 2014 show that even among girls 14-15 years of age from poor, rural, upper-Egyptian families, 95% had ever-enrolled in school, and 87% had completed at least the primary stage. Given the likelihood that almost all girls, even poor, rural, upper-Egyptian girls, go to school, it is now appropriate to compare the attitudes and empowerment of CS students with government school students, rather than with out-of-school girls who are, in truth, relatively rare, even in rural upper-Egyptian villages.

In this paper we undertake a study of attitudes and empowerment of girls in three upper-Egyptian villages, comparing students in community schools with students in government schools.

Our study focuses on female students, 8-15 years of age, from MGS originally built and managed by the NGO, CARE. These data are supplemented by age-matched female students from other CS in the three villages, and similarly matched female students from regular government schools. Preliminary research showed that the students of the CARE MGS and other CS were very similar in terms of family background, educational attainment, and other independent variables; and also in terms of their attitudes and indicators of empowerment. Therefore, for this work, all the CS students have been grouped together. The sample includes a total of 316 girls from CS, and 174 government primary school girls. Although originally the CS were set up and managed by NGOs, by the time of the research they had been under MoE administration for at least 4 years, and though maintaining their multigrade structure and alternative pedagogy, largely followed the government curriculum.

Parents of almost all the students were also interviewed. Most of the parents interviewed were mothers, but about 20% of parents of both community and government school students were fathers. Parents were asked many of the same attitudinal questions, and about the same issues related to empowerment as their daughters. Household questionnaires for all families provide additional background information.

Among the attitudes and indicators of empowerment considered are: mobility, self-esteem, participation in decision making, views on gender roles, views of female circumcision, and use of violence as discipline. Preliminary descriptive analysis shows: 1) In general, this is a conservative region, where almost all girls say they have a limited role in decision making, and support female circumcision and the use of beating as punishment. 2) There are few significant differences between the girls in CS and those in regular primary schools on any of the outcomes variables. 3) To the extent there are significant differences, regular government school students tend to hold more “progressive” attitudes.

In further analysis we will explore these preliminary results in greater depth. For example, we will use multivariate analysis to test whether differences in attitudes are related to family background. We will also correlate the views of girls with those of their parents. We hypothesize that the attitudes of girls and their parents are similar, and, to a large degree, reflect the views of the surrounding society. In general, we will seek to determine whether community schools, as they currently function, provide a transformative education.

Authors

• Fatma Said Abdelkhalek, Budapest University of Economics and Technology

• Ray Langsten, Social Research Center / American Univ in Cairo