Using the ‘Sick Tree’ Analogy for Catalysing Gender Transformation with ‘Champion Teachers in South African Rural Schools

• In Event: Girls and Young Women Driving Gender Transformation in Rural Spaces in Global South Contexts

Proposal

In South Africa (as is the case globally), systems of oppression and inequality intersect to create power imbalances that facilitate notoriously high rates of gender-based violence (GBV) (mainly against girls, women, queer and gender non-conforming individuals) in homes, communities, and institutions/organisations (Sabik, 2021). How do social systems produce and reproduce social problems, and what are the social roots of the social problems reflected in individual behavior? Every society has a gender structure (Risman, 1998, 2004) in which gender inequality is produced, maintained, and reproduced at the individual, interactional, and institutional level (Risman and Davis, 2013). Social institutions have gender norms, values and codes of conduct that occur over extend periods and tend to shape gender roles (Branisa, Klasen & Ziegler, 2010). Yet, sex-role and socialization theories locate gender in the individual and make gender seem like something static (e.g., gender is something created at conception (biological theories) or in childhood (socialization theories) and like it is not subject to changes). Girls’ Clubs/Girl Groups have been positioned as a ‘from the ground up’ sustainable capacity building tool for women teachers working with schoolgirls to address gender inequality and GBV in their school and community (Page, 2020). This paper draws from findings of a Ford Foundation-funded project: Girls’ Clubs: Building the capacity of girls to address gender inequality and GBV in and around their schools and communities (Grant number: 140626). Using a workshop approach, we have been working with 11 young women teachers to enable them to establish and facilitate Girls’ Clubs/Girl Groups in their own rural schools. These ‘Champion Teachers’ (CTs) invited 12 to15 girls from among the girls they teach to join an extracurricular Girl Group and serve as accessible mentors to the girls in the Club. We used participatory visual methodology (e.g., drawing, photovoice, cellphilm, and community-mapping, etc) to enable the CTs to reflect and dialogue on their own lives and on their work in facilitating the Girl Clubs in their (mostly) rural schools. This presentation focuses on a workshop in which we asked the CTs to use a ‘Sick Tree’ analogy drawing to analyse gender as a social structure. Informed by a theory of gender as a social structure (Connell, 2002; Risman 1998; 2004) and gender as a social institution (Martin, 2004) that is embedded in the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of society, we invited the CTs to draw/find an outline of a tree and 1) on each branch and leaves, write a challenge that girls in their girls club face in and around the school, including the community; 2) on the trunk of the tree write the institutions that make these happen in the community; and 3) on/around the roots, write the broader systems of oppression that feed/influence the trunk in the community (e.g., racism, classism, etc). In this workshop, we wanted the CTs to understand gender as a social structure and to use their understanding to imagine how it might help their school communities or structures therein to catalyse gender transformation.

Authors

• Relebohile Moletsane, University of Kwazulu-Natal

• Lisa Wiebesiek, University of Kwazulu-Natal

• Nkonzo Mkhize, Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change

• Samkelisiwe Luthuli, University of KwaZulu-Natal