Fostering Critical Thinking as a Life Skill to Prevent Child Marriage in Honduras: The Case of ACMHE

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Fostering skills and post-school transitions for girls and other marginalized youth

Proposal

Child marriage is a global problem, as it is found in every region of the world, but it has different characteristics that are contextually-specific (Girls Not Brides, 2020). Education has been identified as an important strategy to delay marriage; trends from Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) indicate that as girls’ participation in secondary education increases, rates of child marriage decrease (Bongaarts et. al, 2017).
Latin America, however, has not experienced a significant reduction in child marriage as education levels have increased, making it a global outlier in this regard. An analysis of trends in education and reproductive outcomes in DHS data from 43 countries (since 1986) found that in all world regions other than Latin America, age of first sexual intercourse, first marriage and first birth increased (accompanied by increases in educational attainment) (Bongaarts et. al, 2017). But in Latin America, the age of first sexual intercourse decreased by almost a year, age at marriage increased by less than a year, and the age at first birth remained constant despite increased levels of education. As a result, although Latin America does not have the highest rate of child marriage globally, it is the only region in the world where it is not decreasing. If these trends continue and no tangible efforts and investments take place for prevention, the region is projected to have the second highest child marriage rate in the world by 2030 (UN Women, UNICEF & UNFPA, 2018). This troubling scenario raises urgent questions about the connections between the quality of education and the prevention of child marriage in Latin America.


In this presentation we will discuss findings from a design-based research project between the University of California, Berkeley and a Honduran non-governmental organization, Bayan Association called Addressing Child Marriage through Holistic Education (ACMHE). We explain why critical thinking is a crucial life skill to prevent child marriage in rural areas of Honduras and illustrate how critical thinking (specifically around gender inequality and marriage) was incorporated into a secondary school curriculum. We describe the pedagogies used to develop this curriculum and offer insights about its implementation. Finally, using classrooms observation and interview data, we discuss how students developed critical thinking and decision-making skills related to gender inequality in society that perpetuate the practice of child marriage.

Authors

• Erin Murphy-Graham, University of California, Berkeley

• Diana Patricia Pacheco Montoya, University of California, Berkeley