Gender transformative education systems : Pathway to a gender-equitable world

• In Event: Promising Approaches in Gender Transformative Education

Proposal

In India, adolescents, especially girls, find themselves being undervalued, neglected with restricted mobility, low priority for schooling, and high risk for early marriage – all pushing them towards confining domestic roles. The discriminatory attitudes, beliefs and understanding they display as adults are to a very large extent, shaped by the stimuli they receive within schools. A Randomised Control Trial of a 2-year long adolescent empowerment intervention with a gender-lens generated evidence that adolescent learners are able to better negotiate their life choices when exposed to a gender-transformative pedagogy through classroom sessions. External evaluations of the gender-transformative curriculum notes some of the following shifts in the behaviour of the learners :
- Children from homes with most gender regressive attitudes (bottom 20%) have attitudes like children from regular homes after exposure to the curriculum
- Significant shift in students' attitudes on norms related to women's paid employment - 12.9% increase; girls' higher education - 8.4% increase
- Boys' behaviours shifted more significantly than girls (0.46 SD vs. 0.21 SD) indicating greater social constraints for girls

Taking the learnings ahead, a 5 year program on Gender Transformative Education Systems (GTES) was designed to integrate a gender lens into the education systems of two Indian states. The intervention will cover 29,250 schools, encompassing 134,000 teachers and 4 million adolescents. The aim is to support at least 500,000 girls to stay longer in school and 2.4 million adolescents to show gender equitable attitudes and behaviours, which will go a long way in ensuring that adolescents reach their full potential and are able to live a life free of discrimination and violence. This program will help to answer some of the questions around : (a) What is the strategic pathway to work on a GTES and how to make a balance between depth vs. scale of operation? (b) Who are the key levers of change as part of the GTES design? and (c) What are the long and short term impacts on learners and the larger school system generated by a GTES?

Some of the recommendations for policymakers, educators, school administration are the following :
(1) Integrate gender as part of the curriculum across subjects for secondary schools can bring about large scale attitudinal shifts and gender-equitable environments in schools.
(2) Ensure school environments are safe and discrimination free without any corporal punishment; discrimination based on caste, gender, disability, etc.; or bullying, verbal and physical abuse
(3) Build teachers' expertise on gender through experiential training on gender and curriculum delivery; creation of additional learning resources based on behavioural science; and regular monitoring to examine the efficacy of progressive behaviours and recognize those teachers incorporating gender in the classroom.
(4) Engage parents in conversations on gender with targeted messaging during parent-teacher meetings.
(5) Implement programming that promotes positive interactions for adolescent girls in school settings and reinforces transformative messages around girls’ ambitions, their roles in society, and their ability to continue education.

Author

• Sunita Menon, Breakthrough Trust