Militarization and Masculinities: Gendered Citizenship in Post-war Sri Lanka

• In Event: Publication mentoring workshop session
  In Special Session: Gender & Race Studies - Group A

Proposal

Final Stage Doctoral Student

Objectives

This paper investigates how gender roles and relations intersect with citizenship education in eight Sri Lankan high schools and the extent to which teachers’ beliefs and pedagogical approaches impact the relationship between gender equality, citizenship education, and social cohesion in a conflict-affected society.

1. What are teachers’ beliefs about gender equality, citizenship, and social cohesion?
2. How do teachers’ beliefs, the curriculum, and pedagogy contribute to the goal of social cohesion and peace through education?

Conceptual framework

Effective forms of citizenship and gender equality (Bessell, 2001) are critical components for social cohesion. In considering the four characteristics of a cohesive society – a functioning state, respect for human rights, distributional equity, and social capital – Bessell (2001) argues that these goals cannot be achieved without gender equality. Education, and particularly citizenship education, is a means commonly used to promote social cohesion (Green, Preston, & Jammat, 2006; Shuyab, 2012). This is often done through a focus on changes to curriculum, classroom pedagogy, and teacher training. However, education as a tool for social cohesion is complicated by its paradoxical nature (Bush & Saltarelli, 2000). Despite its transformative potential, education can contribute to gender inequity (Stromquist, 2015), and unequal forms of citizenship (Quaynor 2011); this must be taken into consideration when promoting peace through education in conflict-affected societies.

Methodology

This is a mixed methods case study of eight Tamil schools. Data (Table 1,2) was collected using a transformative design framework (Mertens, 2009) through a convergent model for mixing data (Creswell, 2015) (Figure 2). The study included, a teacher survey, school and classroom observations, teacher interviews, and analysis of the grade 6-9 civics textbooks. Teacher surveys consisted of Likert questions related to gender equality and citizenship that were totaled to achieve scores for Gender_Equality and Social_Cohesion.

Quantitative analysis.
To explore the relationship between beliefs on gender equality and social cohesion, a regression analysis was conducted between Likert scores for Gender_Equality items and Social_Cohesion items as well as post-hoc two-way ANOVA for the two.

Qualitative analysis.
Interviews and observations were transcribed, coded and analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis. The analysis process followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six phases which include: familiarization with data; generating initial codes; searching for themes; reviewing themes; defining and naming themes; and producing the report.

Results

Quantitative
Regression analysis showed that Gender Equality (GE) scores significantly predicted Social Cohesion (CSC) scores, β = .12, t(100) = 2.57, p < .05. GE scores also explained a proportion of variance in SC scores, R2 = .12, F(1, 100) = 6.62, p < .05.
A two-way ANOVA was conducted that examined the effect of gender and school on the Gender Equality score. There was a statistically significant interaction between the effects of gender and school on the GE_Score, F (6, 89) = 2.551, p = .025 (Table 4). Simple main effect analysis showed school had significant effect on GE_Scores (p = .003) for males (Table 5) but not for females.

Qualitative
Interviews, observations, and textbook analysis reveled three key findings that contributed to gender inequality and its relationship to conflict:

Fixed gender roles.
Teachers valued the ideal of gender equality and its importance for education. However, most teachers assigned strongly fixed gender roles to the sexes. Rigid gender roles, supported by culture, were used to justify violent behaviour and poor school performance by boys.

Militarization.
All eight schools are in the militarized zones and within walking distance of a military base with soldiers visibly present at all times. Teachers reported that it created a sense of fear, loss of land, harassment and inappropriate sexual behaviour from soldiers towards young women and girls.

Masculine norms and violence.
Boys in general were exposed to high levels of violence. They experienced more frequent and severe forms of corporal punishment by teachers/principals. At the same time, young female teachers reported being harassed by older male students.

Discussion
Quantitative findings show a significant positive correlation between attitudes on gender equality and perspectives on citizenship, peace, and social cohesion. Qualitative findings show a gap in knowledge and understanding of the link between the subtle day to day practices that devalue women and girls to the entrenched gender norms that perpetuate a growing culture of toxic masculinities, and gender-based violence all of which are fostered in a highly militarized environment. This study provides empirical support and further theorizing of the link between disparities in gender relations within a society and conflict as identified by Davies (2004) and Breines, Connell and Eide (2000).

Author

• Thursica Kovinthan Levi, University of Ottawa