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Session Submission Summary

Beyond schooling: reimagining education, development and empowerment for third world girls

Tue, April 16, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Bayview B

Group Submission Type: Refereed Round-Table Session

Proposal

This panel is comprised of a scholar, practitioner, and young person from the global south in addition to a researcher from the global north who have all come together to examine the complex relationships between schooling, education, and power as related to girls in the third world. We have created this panel by centering voices from the Global South to examine this phenomenon. We will utilize a case study of a local community school and girl's education program in Northeastern India to explore the themes of power, education, schooling while situating them within a discourse analysis of capitalism, globalization, and economy. In this panel presentation, we aim to engage in a South-North dialogue to explore fundamental questions about the relationships between schooling, girls education, development, and empowerment with an analysis of power at the heart of our work.
“Educate a girl; change a society” is a popular aphorism stitching together third world girls and education, in such a way that education has come to be understood as the modus operandi to improve the lives of girls in the third world and ultimately to move their nations forward. In fact, in 2000, the United Nations, a key actor and stakeholder in international girl’s education, launched the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) with the intention of promoting education as the avenue to empower girls in the ‘developing world’ to achieve economic success, prevent child marriage, slow population growth, eliminate gender-based violence, reduce poverty, and ultimately change the entire landscapes of their societies by 2015. Through the efforts of multiple international development agencies, like the United Nations, third world girls have emerged as key investments with the unique potential to transform their nations, when they are educated. Education has come to be understood as the way girls from different nations whose fragile lives are somehow weaved together by the fibers of poverty, violence, and vulnerability. But what exactly is it that connects girls in the third world? It is here, the interstices between the real and the imagined that this panel aims to mediate. We want to investigate exactly what education empowers girls in the third world? We further want to examine the violence of girl's being positioned as tools of economic development for their nations. Khoja-Moolji suggests that girls and education have been sutured together discursively and metaphorically--in such a powerful way making it so that whenever one imagines or invokes third world girl’s, education comes to mind as the plausible solution for any issues they may be experiencing. This discursive suturing of girls and education moves beyond ideology to produce material consequences for girls who fall into the category of third world girl. Our panel aims to take up a series of questions to better understand the linking of girls and education. First, we begin by distinguishing between schooling and education. We then delve into asking how education is defined by various communities. We aim to trace a definition of education beyond western paradigms that often center schooling as the pathway to education. We further continue our analysis by asking how exactly does education empower? What education empowers? In what language must education be in to empower? Is schooling the only pathway to education? We have a local practitioner who started a school to support girl's education. We then end our work with imaginations and possibilities with girls from a local community school in Northeast, India.

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Individual Presentations

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