Adolescent girls’ education in India: participatory visual research as social change

• In Event: Counternarratives, Decolonising Methodologies, and Gender Justice in Research

Proposal

Within the international development agenda, investing in third world girls’ education is now considered among the highest return investment strategies to end poverty (World Bank, 2022).
Emphasis on the economic and social benefits of girls’ education has led to decades of policies and programs, at global and national levels, to increase access to education for girls, promote girls’ “empowerment” – a diffuse yet common term – and alleviate poverty. Yet, in spite of more than 30 years of investment, the challenge of reducing poverty through girls’ education remains. According to UNESCO, globally 129 million girls are out of school (UNESCO, 2022). India, a country of great stratification across gender, class, and caste lines, has been one of the longest participants in the global Education for All campaign in 1990. However, its “underrepresented groups (URGs)”, of which lower caste adolescent aged girls make up a significant number, are still disproportionally out of school.
While the economic benefits of girls’ education and the barriers girls face in going to, and staying in, school are clear, limited attention has been paid to how girls understand and internalize their educational experiences. Little is also known about how girls negotiate between school experiences and their larger socio-cultural contexts (Shah, 2015, Shah, 2016b). This project employs participatory ethnographic methods to ask, how do we as scholars, educators, and development practitioners design policies and programs that are attentive to the particularities of girls in the postcolonial global south who are the “targets” of development initiatives?

In this project, I partner with the Indian NGO SwaTaleem to use participatory research with traditional ethnographic research in one state in India to enable girls to articulate their experiences in ways that attend to the power structures and socio-cultural conditions that make it difficult for them to express themselves (Mitchell et al., 2017). Participatory research allows us to draw upon the knowledge, skills, and vision of the girls themselves to co-construct knowledge that illuminates unjust social structures (Gaventa & Cornwall, 2001; Mertens, 2009; Mitchell 2006). This paper details the process of developing a participatory project with girls who are at the center of development initiatives. This presentation has clear methodological as well as empirical insights to offer the field of CIE in girls’ education and international development arenas.

Theoretical Frame, Research Design, Methods
This project describes the first phase of a partnership with SwaTaleem to undertake a participatory action research project with one KGBV school in Haryana to interrogate the common narrative of schooling as the ultimate key to progress, an area of research that I have been involved with since 2004. This paper will detail the work done in Phase I and Phase II described below in preparation for enacting Phase III in Summer/Fall 2024.

This project adopts an intersectional and postcolonial approach to gender and international development. I layer this broad framework with an epistemological position that privileges the experiences and articulations of the girls at the center of educational policy research and interventions. The absence of the narratives and experiences of the adolescent age group has masked the diversity of girls’ experiences and the range of possible femininities that are revealed through examinations of their own acts of negotiation and resistance (Shah, 2015; Fennell and Arnot, 2009). Working with SwaTaleem, we will examine: (1) how do girls in one KGBV school understand their futures at the intersection of gender, religious, class and caste discrimination and (2) how do KGBV girls negotiate between these experiences and their larger socio-cultural contexts, as they express their educated subjectivities and contribute to gender oriented social change through education policy and practice?

We propose a multi-leveled, participatory vertical case study (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2014) that engages multiple stakeholders in the process of supporting KGBV girls in one district of Haryana. As a research-as-social change and research-as-intervention (Mitchell et al., 2017) project, we will build upon SwaTaleem’s existing relationships and infrastructure working with KGBV girls, communities, government officials, and KGBV schools in Haryana. As a participatory project, the direction of the research and exact nature of the project will be determined and directed by the primary stakeholders – the KGBV girls. SwaTaleem engages a local “female leadership” program that supports women from the local community to act as leaders of the NGO activities in each community. We will leverage this female leadership program to guide this participatory project. This paper will detail the process and insights gained from Phase I and II and describe the goals for Phase III.

Phase I – Working with Swataleem, we used recent data from local government officials and household/student level baseline data collection activities undertaken by SwaTaleem across multiple districts in Haryana to determine which district has the capacity and interest to engage in a participatory project.

Phase II – Working with SwaTaleem Team Leader (TL), we recruited local female leaders (FLs) from the chosen community and I led trainings with the TL and FLs in participatory focus groups with KGBV girls and other supporting stakeholders (parents, teachers, school staff, local and district level government officials). These FLs will work with the KGBV girls to identify the central questions/issues around which the project will be focused.

Phase III – Once the primary question/problem has been identified through the participatory processes in Phases I and II, we explore the use of participatory visual methods (i.e., photovoice, participatory video, digital story-telling, and drawing and mapping) and I will work with the TL and FLs and girls to use one or more of these methods to explore issues of marginalization, dis/empowerment and gender in education. All participatory methods include an iterative process of data collection through the production of visual images and interviews and focus groups catalyzed by the images led by the FLs. The images and the transcripts from interviews/focus groups will serve as the data that the entire research team will analyze together. I will provide leadership in the participatory coding and analysis process, which will culminate with a series of community and policy dialogue workshops, exhibits, and viewings produced by the FL/KGBV girls team.

Author

• Payal Shah, University of South Carolina