Gender Transformative Education: Potentials & Possibilities of a Feminist Reparative Education

• In Event: Gender Transformative Education: An Emergent Concept’s Opportunities and Limitations in the Global North and South

Proposal

Gender Transformative Education (GTE) has emerged as the newest framework within the international development education arena focused on gender and education. GTE follows gender mainstreaming, gender sensitive and gender responsive approaches within gender, education, and development. Whereas gender sensitive and gender responsive education begin to move beyond parity and address inclusion, a gender transformative education framework asserts an attempt to “address norms and practices by challenging power relations, rethinking gender norms and binaries, and raising critical consciousness about the root causes of inequality and systems of oppression” (2021, Plan International, UNGEI, UNICEF, Transform Education). In challenging power relations, rethinking gender norms, and addressing the root causes of oppression and inequality, GTE has the potential for a feminist repair. This conceptual paper imagines the possibilities of gender transformative education as a framework for a critical feminist reparative education.

Reparative education, according to Arathi Sriprakash (2022), highlights education’s potential as a tool for repairing injustices to move towards transforming collective futures. Sriprakash brings attention to UNESCO’s call for education to have a “new social contract” that focuses on repairing injustices while transforming the future. Relatedly, GTE elucidates a new social contract in education focused on with its attention to challenging power relations and addressing root causes of oppression through critical consciousness. In line with UNESCO’s new directions for education, I suggest that GTE similarly calls for repair and a move towards education’s transformative potential. Education with a reparative lens attends to the multiple forms of state violence, and recognizes that unless injustices are addressed, they continue in social institutions such as schooling. Reparative education underscores the importance of attending to the afterlives and continuities of such violence within education systems (such as racial, gendered, class, and caste segregation). It explores the possibilities of practices, policies, and stakes of material, epistemic, and pedagogic repair. Taking up a critical feminist perspective in theorizing GTE as reparative education affords attention to the legacies of overlapping racial and gendered colonial violence that persist in educational institutions, and offers particular aspects to the three dimensions (material, epistemic and pedagogic relations) of repair.


References

Sriprakash, A. (2023). Reparations: Theorising just futures of education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 44(5), 782-795.

UNICEF, UNGEI, Plan International & Transform Education. (2021). Gender Transformative Education: Reimagining Education for a More Just and Inclusive World. UNICEF. https://www.unicef.org/reports/gender-transformative-education

Author

• Karishma Desai, Rutgers University