The representation of women in history textbooks: Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya

• In Event: What’s love got to do with it? Social and emotional skills in sustaining learning in low-income and post-conflict contexts

Proposal

The exclusion of women from textbooks has been widely documented across several disciplines— English language textbooks (Abolaji, 2015; Appleby, 2015; Bayyurt & Bag, 2015; Lee & Collins, 2015; Pakuta & Pawelczyk, 2015; Sunderland, 2015), science and mathematics (Eslami, Sonnenburg, Ko, Hasan, & Tong, 2015; Ott, 2015), literacy (Moore, 2015), mother tongue, literacy, vocational, and educational guidance (Tainio & Karvonen, 2015). This study corroborates previous research, illuminating the omission of women (Porecca, 1984) both in text, as well as illustrations and images in history books. We draw on the cases of core lower secondary history textbooks from three East African countries—Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda—where gender mainstreaming has been integrated into education policy documents and curricula. We ask: How is gender represented in history textbooks? How does gender representation vary across the three country cases? Through content analysis of nine textbooks, we explore the extent to which women are represented in the text and they ways in which they are depicted in images. Our analysis demonstrates that despite the nominal inclusion of women in texts, texts draw on gendered language, discuss women primarily in relation to men, construct men as the default, perpetuating gender stereotypes, and, reproducing hierarchical gender relations.

Authors

• S. Garnett Russell, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Lydia Namatende-Sakwa, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Sarah Julianne Lewinger, Teachers College, Columbia University