Promoting gender equitable values in schools in challenging digital and social contexts

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel focuses on how education systems can promote gender-equitable values in challenging digital and social contexts.
Misogyny - as exemplified in the behaviours and views of men like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson - - is increasingly recognised to be part of boys’ and young men’s social environments. It affects and influences education in multiple ways: through normalising misogynistic views, which are then expressed among peers and/or to the wider student body; influencing how boys interact with their female peers and teachers; influencing boys’ sense of masculinity and their aspirations,and raising concern around how schools should seek to respond to this environments. Efforts to tackle misogyny and promote gender equitable values in schools increasingly need to respond to this challenging context, as demonstrated for example in studies and media reports from Australia and the UK. Simultaneously, and relatedly, anti-gender movements that seek to restrict what children can learn about gender and sexuality are gaining increasing political influence, in part driven by the ease of mobilizing both opinion and action online, further affecting how education systems can respond to gender inequitable views and practices.

Well before these developments, the potential of education systems to cement inequitable gender norms, or to challenge them and promote gender-equitable values had been recognised. This has led to two decades (or more) of efforts to develop curricula and learning materials that challenge misogyny and gender inequalities, to remove stereotypes from learning materials, and to prepare teachers to teach equitably. Often starting as small, experimental civil society initiatives, gender-equitable content is now increasingly mainstreamed into school curricula in public education systems. Too often, such discussions look at education as a ‘closed system’, paying little attention to changing external influences, not least the presence of social media in young people’s lives and challenging political environments. By contrast, this session will discuss efforts to mainstream gender-equitable values in education in the context of these challenging dynamics. It will consider what has worked well, why and how positive practices can be scaled up and how potential challenges can be overcome.

Taking diverse challenging contexts into account, the panel will present learning from experiences of educational initiatives working with students and teachers that involve challenging gender inequalities. Our chair (Michalko) will set the scene, with a brief overview of how online misogyny and anti-gender backlash are affecting boys, young men and education globally. The first paper (Marcus and D'Angelo) will synthesize insights from a recent literature review and set of interviews with practitioners from seven countries (six of which are in the ‘Global South’). It will focus on insights at three levels: in the classroom; in teacher education; and in terms of supportive education systems and policies. The second paper (Bhatnagar et al) will drill down into the experiences of the Global Boyhood Initiative, working with teachers to integrate gender equality education in primary schools in the UK - a rare example of designing and implementing curricula focused on pre-adolescents. It will present initial findings from a mixed-methods evaluation of this work. The third (Serrano Amaya and Sanchez-Corales) will draw on recent primary research to discuss some of the strategies that networks of (principally) female teachers in Colombia have deployed to promote gender-equitable values in their teaching. Few studies have focused on the personal or professional risks that teachers engaging in gender-equality education face. This presentation will therefore shine a spotlight on these risks and raise questions of the kinds of responses that may help mitigate them in different contexts. The fourth presentation (Chowdhury and Menon) will focus on experiences of scaling up gender-transformative education within the public education system in two Indian states, using both digital and offline approaches. It will discuss how the challenges encountered in adapting the original NGO programme for delivery within the state system have been overcome, and highlight remaining challenges. The discussant (Keddie) will reflect on the issues raised across diverse contexts, drawing also on her research in Australia and the US, which spans gender-transformative education and online misogyny.

Sub Unit

• Gender Justice SIG

Organizer

• Rachel Marcus, ODI

Chair

• Ján Michalko, ODI

Individual Presentations

• Promoting gender-equitable masculinities through formal education - Rachel Marcus, ODI; Sophia M D'Angelo, Education.org

• Pathways to transform gender stereotypes: learnings from the Global Boyhood Initiative in the UK - Isha Bhatnagar, Equimundo; David Bartlett, Equimundo; Taveeshi Gupta, Equimundo; Clara Alemann, Equimundo

• The risk of teaching gender equality - José Fernando Serrano Amaya, Universidad de los Andes; Natalia Sanchez-Corrales, Universidad de La Salle

Discussant

• Amanda Keddie, Deakin University