When progress needs a push: Making our work in girls’ education matter more

• In Event: Protesting the status quo in Girls Education: Contesting policy discourse, theoretical approaches, and methodological privilege

Proposal

Is girls’ education policy discourse transformative or reproductive? Does it engage a sense of contestation or protest, or does it replicate the status quo? Does it challenge the underlying structures of inequality or focus on “improvements” without attending to causal influences? Examining the underlying discursive framing of policy is one way to more fully develop our understanding as to why we, as a field, continue to put more attention on enrollment, attainment, and a limited set of knowledge indicators, while not fully supporting work that has the potential to challenge assumptions, to rework inequitable socioeconomic and political structures, and to build an educational experience that is more fully one of quality for girls.

The education of girls has been a focus in policy for about half a century (Montoya, 2019; Sutton, 1998), and, as such, has resulted in increasing the numbers of girls in school. Despite these gains, however, 129 million girls remain out of school (UNICEF, nd), and has not done enough to dismantle structures of oppression and inequities (such as gender-based violence), or build a robust notion of quality (along with other issues), despite there being strong research to inform these more complex issues. Efforts and policy priorities beyond access are initiatives that seek to create curricula and conditions needed for a quality educational experience, one that is gender equitable and addresses social structural conditions that affect girls negatively. Increasingly we see a gap in communication across this gulf in priorities, which raises questions about what is discursively driving which priorities, and how. With more understanding of the ways that policy discourses shape possibilities in the field, we can better plan and implement informed strategies, approaches, and projects.

In this paper. I examine a variety of recent policy documents from major organizations who are active in the field to see how girls’ education is conceptualized, situated, and prioritized. This work asks what the underlying ideological thinking (discourses) is that is embedded in the policy language (Ball, 2006) that then shapes understandings and action. This helps us to better understand what influences particular priorities, including work that privileges studying bodies in seats over more transformative and sustainable initiatives. A motivation for this work is to see how policy discourses might be shaping the patterns in how priorities are evident in major initiatives, or absent. Several scholars have noticed that, for too long, policy priorities are prioritizing initiatives that are based on easily measurable indicators – counting bodies in seats to see gains in enrollment, attainment, and parity, or measure basic skills in reading and numeracy – rather than initiatives that seek to change the underlying structures of inequality (Unterhalter, 2019; Monkman, 2022). Despite decades of calls for moving beyond access (Sutton, 1998; Aikman & Unterhalter, 2005), we continue to work on how we are progressing globally with easily measurable indicators to be prioritized above work that gets at the underlying reasons for the challenges.

Author

• Karen Monkman, DePaul University