Incremental Transformation: Education for Gender Equality and Peace in Post-war Sri Lanka

• In Event: Exploring gender in peace and human rights education

Proposal

The negative and positive face of education in conflict-affected societies (Bush & Saltarelli) has challenged the long-held assumption that education is by default a means to peace. However, this analysis has not been extended to gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls in conflict-affected contexts. This study examines how ethnic minority girls from Sri Lanka understand the transformative role of education in their lives, particularly as it relates to peace and gender equality. This question is particularly salient in Sri Lanka, a country that has seen growing rates of gender-based violence since the end of a 30-year war (Nikolau, 2016). The research questions are:
1. How do minority girls from three war-affected rural communities in the Northern and Eastern Provinces perceive the role of education and schooling in their lives?
2. How are schools engaging girls to promote gender equality and peace?
Theoretical Framework
Using Galtung’s notion of positive peace, this framework focuses in on the structural and cultural violence experienced by minority women and girls within conflict-affected societies. For education to be transformative, it must create spaces where students become critical thinkers who are empowered to challenge the status quo and begin to transform the root causes of injustice in society. Galtung (1969) refers to this as positive peace, whereby the causes of violence either direct or indirect, are removed through participation, decentralization, and co-decisions. Positive peace requires critical thinking and the ability to engage in democratic processes to change structural and cultural forms of violence (Cremin & Guilherme, 2016). Failing to do so is a form of cultural violence whereby the injustices experienced by a group, in this case, ethnic minority women, is normalized or not acknowledged. Davies (2010) refer to this lack of acknowledgment as a “violence by omission”.
There is a need for greater engagement in positive conflict in the classroom through active teaching about conflict and inequity, in this case gender inequity, to prepare young people to develop the skills and agency to challenge and hold governments accountable; Davies (2006) describes this as interruptive democracy. Davies (2005) suggests that traditional forms of education have often contributed to gender inequity and conflict can be transformed by interruptive democratic approaches to schooling. As such, the degree to which gender inequality and conflict are taken up in the classroom from a positive peace and/or interruptive democratic approach largely determines whether there is hope for achieving gender equality and peace.
Methodology
This is a multiple case study of three rural schools in Sri Lanka’s war-affected Northern and Eastern Provinces. Data includes school and classroom observations of civics classes as well as interviews with four grade 11/12 female students from each of the four schools. Interviews were conducted in the local language, Tamil, and were audio recorded. Observational field notes and interviews were transcribed and coded in Nvivo.
Interviews transcripts and observation were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis which included six phases: familiarization with data; generating initial codes; searching for themes; reviewing themes; defining and naming themes; and producing the report. Data was coded in Nvivo starting at the latent level, which began with first level semantic coding focused on explicit or surface meaning of the data, and then moved to the second, latent level, to examine underlying ideas, assumptions, and ideologies (Braun & Clarke, 2006). This secondary level analysis was guided by the conceptual framework. The final book of codes contained 40 themes (Table 1).
Results
Results are organized to highlight the three major themes for the role of education:
1) Repression
Education was a means to control girls’ bodies to protect culture, tradition and the status quo which included hyper-masculine norms that contributed to gender inequality and conflict. Curriculum and pedagogy placed a significant emphasis on developing students to become obedient rule followers rather than critical democratic citizens. The exception to this was school E which had a some focus on drama and debate. All the girls were concerned about personal security. They reported being harassed on buses, roads on their walk to schools and cited the rape of young girls as one thing they wished would change in the country.
2) Utilitarian
Both pedagogy and the curriculum strongly emphasized the utilitarian role of education which was echoed by many of the participants who felt that the main purpose of education was to obtain work and contribute to the development of the country through economic means. Many of the students felt that that the best way for the war-affected region to develop was to forget about the war and focus on economic development and jobs. At the same time, these students had little knowledge of the type of jobs they could pursue and how the subjects they were studying was preparing them for the future.
3) Resilience
There were moments of resistance to the status quo and resilience by some of the young girls, predominantly from school E and those directly impacted by violence. These moments took place in small micro acts such as traveling to school in groups as a means of protection from by men and boys on the streets or the threat of rape. All of the girls spoke about the day when they will be educated enough to support and uplift their families from poverty. They also recognized and drew strength from their hard-working mothers, many who were war widows. Participants demonstrated resilience overcoming barriers to their goals through creative means.
Discussion and Conclusion
Though education was not a transformative force for peace and gender equality, it was a source of resilience for some participants. Many of the girls most directly impacted by the war felt that education was the only means to transform their lives. Despite education’s failure to transform conflict and gender inequality, it has provided some girls with what Davies (2010) identifies a means to build resilience and agency to survive and oppose further conflict and oppression and ultimately contributes to incremental transformation (Maclure, 2017; Shier, 2015).

Author

• Thursica Kovinthan Levi, University of Ottawa