Examining the Coloniality of Gender in International Organizations’ Educational Policies: A Comparative Case Study on Teachers' Work in Egypt

• In Event: Highlighted Session: International Organizations and Education Policy: Crisis, Collaboration, and Coloniality

Proposal

During the 2012 teachers' protests in Cairo, Egypt, Habiba, a woman public schoolteacher, boldly declared, "I am indebted because I work!” (Charbel, 2012). Her statement encapsulated the frustration of public schoolteachers demanding improved wages and living standards. Currently, teachers in Egypt face a new challenge with implementing the new Edu 2.0 curriculum reform, funded and endorsed by global actors to help Egypt achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, all the while neglecting to alleviate teachers’ working conditions (Zahran, 2023). This dilemma mirrors the common struggle faced by teachers in the Global South, where Eurocentric colonial and gendered global education reforms often fail to align with teachers’ realities. For instance, women teachers face relentless pressures to perform care work daily (Moreau, 2018; Robert, 2016; Schirmer, 2017). Yet, policies on teaching tend to exclude gender and care work, creating a tension between policy demands and the realities of teaching (Manjrekar, 2013; Simmie, 2023). Decolonial feminist scholars moreover highlight how global policy narratives reflect colonial legacies, disproportionality affecting Global South women (Connell et al., 2009; Lugones, 2010, 2016). Despite the persistence of colonial power asymmetries and the dominance of Eurocentric neoliberal epistemologies in education policies in the Arab world (Aydarova, 2017; Morgan, 2017; Zakharia et al., 2022), the implications of colonial and gendered discourses in education policies on teachers and teaching remain understudied in the region.
My comparative case study examines how education policies in Egypt frame the problems and solutions related to teachers' work with a focus on the current Edu 2.0 secondary curriculum reform. In this paper, I will present the preliminary findings of my Critical Discourse Analysis of policy documents of the main actors involved in the reform: UNICEF, the World Bank, and the Ministry of Education. Some of the policy documents include annual reports, policy statements, and press releases extracted from each organization’s website. Drawing upon a decolonial Afro-feminist lens (Tamale, 2020) and Lugones’s (2010, 2016) theory of coloniality of gender, I explore whether and how coloniality, along with its associated masculine discourses of modernity, is perpetuated through international and state actors’ policy prescriptions on teachers and teaching in the Edu 2.0 curriculum reform. I expect that the Edu 2.0 reform will uphold and perpetuate the coloniality of gender discourses. This expectation arises from the reform's primary objectives, which involve integrating digital learning and skills-based approaches into the curriculum, elements previously linked to coloniality and masculinity, which decenter African knowledge (Holloway et al., 2000; van Stam, 2021).
This research responds to a call from critical feminist education scholars to center gender in the study of educational policies and teachers' work (Acker, 1995; Connell, 2009; Marshall et al., 2017; Simmie, 2022). By highlighting the coloniality of gender in international organizations’ education policies in the Arab world and its implications for teachers and teaching, this paper contributes to research on coloniality and power in global education policies, calling for a more critical and nuanced understanding of policy technologies and their impact on gendered relations and labour processes in teaching.

Author

• Yara Abdelaziz, O.I.S.E. University of Toronto