Towards gender-sensitive teaching in Catalan universities? Feminist actors’ strategies for pushing policies forward

• In Event: Policies for gender justice in education across different geographies: The role of feminist actors in countering the 'gender ideology' fallacy

Proposal

The introduction of policies aiming to increase gender sensitivity in education and to reduce gender inequalities and injustices has become somewhat central in the global education policy field (Lahelma, 2014; Monkman & Hoffman, 2013). In Catalonia, one of Spain's autonomous regions, several policies have been implemented over the past decades to promote the introduction of a ‘gender perspective’ into university teaching, as part of broader gender equality initiatives. Notably, following Act 17/2015, making university teaching gender-sensitive is, since the academic year 2020-2021, not only mandatory across all disciplines but also a prerequisite for the licensing of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees by the Catalan University Quality-Assurance Agency (AQU) (AQU, 2019; Benito & Verge, 2020; Verge, 2020).

The article explores how this policy came to be, focusing on the strategies used by some feminists to navigate both status quo and anti-feminist positions and on the struggles among policy actors to mobilize discourse. The research adopts a combined approach of discursive analysis of policy texts and documents (N=19) and semi-structured interviews with relevant actors involved in their formulation (N=18). This methodological combination enables a comprehensive examination that goes beyond “mapping policy discourses” to also include a deeper consideration of “the political context in which certain discourses emerged, which actors elaborated them, how other actors have been excluded, and under which conditions some discourses became more dominant than others” (Verloo & Lombardo, 2007, p. 40). Such an approach aligns with the understanding of policies not only as textual products but also as intricate, nonlinear processes inseparable from power relations (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009).

The findings illustrate the conflicts between feminist political actors advocating for gender-sensitive teaching and other political actors aligned with maintaining the status quo or even opposing feminist agendas. In this line, the results show how, considering the experience of non-compliance with previous laws in this regard and the opposition from some actors to gender-related policies, feminist political actors mobilized certain strategies of legitimization to drive the policy forward. These strategies mainly include: (a) 'authorization', i.e., seeking alignment with other laws and policies and international organizations recognized as relevant authorities, particularly the EU and the UN; (b) 'rationalization' and 'moral evaluation', i.e., linking the promotion of gender-sensitive teaching with the pursuit of social justice and the quest for a better society; (c) the 'strategic use of discourses' not directly related to gender, such as educational quality and nationalism; and (d) the 'link to other policy instruments' to enhance the compliance of the policy, in this case, the quality assurance instruments.

Finally, the article concludes by arguing three related points: (a) how actors not only have unequal power to mobilize discourse to advance their agenda, but also how they use gender-related policies in education to gain a ‘symbolic position’ in the network of policy actors; (b) how some actors capitalize on favorable social and political contexts as policy windows; and (c) how the terms in which gender-sensitive teaching is framed also influence the enactment and effects of such policies.

Author

• Alejandro Caravaca, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona