Leading Change: Youth-Led Feminist Activism for Gender Transformative Education

• In Event: Justice, Social movements, and Protest in/through Education

Proposal

Frustrated by global leaders’ backtracking on the educational rights of women, girls, and gender non-confirming people, young feminist activists are taking control. Transform Education is a feminist coalition of youth-led groups with a mission to enhance Gender Transformative Education. The Transform Education network has been instrumental in cultivating the profile and uptake of Gender Transformative Education, which is defined as education in which all parts of the system are mobilized to transform gender stereotypes, attitudes, norms, and practices by challenging power relations, rethinking gender norms, and raising critical consciousness about the root causes of gender inequality (UNGEI/UNICEF, 2021). Globally, the value of working in partnership with youth continues to be overlooked and underfunded (Josefsson & Wall, 2020). This project will use digital storytelling to record the experiences of Transform Education activists ages 18–25, highlight opportunities presented by partnering with youth, describe the barriers they face in getting their messages heard, and recommend strategies for overcoming those barriers.

The central research question is: How can youth activists increase their impact on Gender Transformative Education? Sub-questions are:
• How have youth activists contributed to the advancement of Gender Transformative Education?
• How have youth activists experienced feminist leadership in the Gender Transformative Education movement?
• How have youth activist voices been supported and received by education stakeholders?
• What barriers do youth activists face in having their perspectives heard by education stakeholders?

Theoretical Framework
Kabeer defines agency as the “ability to define one’s goals and act upon them” (1999, p. 438). A distinction in the operation of agency is whether it operates as individual agency—‘power to’ (choice and decision-making) and ‘power within’ (self-confidence, desire to change, personal motivation) (VeneKlasen & Miller, 2002; Gaventa, 2006; Ibrahim & Alkire, 2007; Trommlerova et al., 2015)—or collective agency—‘power with’ (the synergy from multiple actors working together) (Dubois et al., 2006; Cleaver, 2007; PREAM, 2021). Both have been applied in feminist and postcolonial education research (Bajaj, 2009; Dejaeghere, 2020) and are relevant for this study. Feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) centers gender as an analytical lens, while recognizing its key intersections with social categories including race, sexuality, class, ability, and age, aligning with an intersectional analysis that positions these constructs as mutually constituting social experiences (Crenshaw, 1991; Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016). FCDA focuses on how language operates to uphold and resist power relations (Lazar, 2007) and positions social experience within systemic structures including patriarchy and colonization (Lazar, 2017). It considers discourse and social experience as mutually constitutive and evolving and emphasizes critical reflexivity (Ibid.). FCDA also enables a postcolonial analysis, which is concerned with ways that power and language address the nature of cultural identity, gender, race, social class, ethnicity, and nationality in previously colonized/neocolonial contexts (Burney, 2012; Mohanty, 1988), privileging postcolonial knowledge both academically and in the research communities studied. This is an important addition to FCDA, given this study’s analysis of the experiences of activists mostly from the Global South interacting with stakeholders from organizations still primarily dependent on representatives and resources from the Global North.

Methodology
A digital storytelling methodology enables participants to control the creation of their own narratives. A digital story is a “two- to three-minute digital film consisting of still photographs, occasionally video clips, a voiceover, and a soundtrack of music or sound, which shares an aspect of the author’s lived experience” (Johnson & Kendrick, 2017, p. 668). In Fall 2023–Winter 2024, our team will work with 12 Transform Education youth advocates in 3 virtual regional workshops that begin with focus groups then work with participants to refine and record individual digital stories documenting their activism. Digital stories will be screened and discussed in closing focus groups then ultimately presented in a global screening and discussion with relevant education stakeholders. Following initial open coding of focus groups and digital stories, codes will be organized according to FCDA’s five categories: how language upholds/resists power relation; social experiences within systemic structures; evolution of discourse and social experience; critical reflexivity; and vision for social change (Lazar, 2017).

Significance
Data collection has not yet begun at the time of submission, thus the initial results that will be described in this presentation are pending. They will, however, speak to the opportunities and barriers that young feminist education activists from the Global South face in getting their voices heard and their strategies for overcoming these barriers. This contribution builds on the critical conversations surrounding tokenism, manipulation, and exclusion of youth activists in international spaces (e.g., Bent, 2016; Josefsson & Wall, 2020) and the literature on the ways adult stakeholders can effectively support youth activists (Bent, 2020; Haffejee et al., 2020). It will demonstrate how youth activism operates within a networked environment utilizing collective agency, contrasted to the emphasis on individual agency and activism that is often the focus in the youth activism literature (Hesford, 2014; Jung et al., 2020). This project directly relates to the CIES 2024 theme, particularly Sub-Theme 4 Pedagogies of Protest, by understanding how to translate youth feminist activism into meaningful and sustainable educational change. The presentation will outline how youth activists have worked to turn their protest against gender injustice in education into action for an alternative vision of education that embraces and elevates gender equity, mobilizing the voices of young people from the Global South to enter into partnership with powerful policy and decision makers funding and operating education systems at local, national, and global levels.

Authors

• Catherine Vanner, University of Windsor

• Milena D'Atri, Plan International

• Farrah Munawar, University of Toronto