Building a Culturally Responsive and Expansive Girls' Education Ecosystem: Demonstrating a participatory Community-Driven Approach

Group Submission Type: Workshop

Description of Session

Purpose. This workshop aims to engage a participatory, collaborative process of working towards a collective goal of formulating an action plan for establishing a gender-transformative educational (GTE) ecosystem focusing on rural and historically marginalized communities. Participants will think through the perspectives of a diverse team comprising government officials, researchers, educators, community organizations, and families and undertake an interdisciplinary approach to formulate a national strategy to enhance learning outcomes for girls. In doing so, they will examine methods to deliver consistent, community-driven educational experiences for girls across their K-12 schooling journey, leveraging at-scale systems while emphasizing community-led initiatives, comprehensive educator training, intergenerational involvement, and advocacy for GTE as a priority. At the same time, they will understand and draw insights from the process of working in a diverse collaborative to advocate for equitable transformative education systems.

Learning objectives. Through the workshop, participants will -
a. explore how to go about building a GTE ecosystem that is community driven
b. go through the participatory process of working in a diverse collaborative
c. be able to understand the strengths and challenges of working in collaboratives and,
d. develop insights to engage effectively with future collaboratives

Delivery plan. The approach will be informed by improvement science and guided by three overall questions, “what is the problem we’re trying to solve, what is the change we’re putting in place, and how will we know if that change is an improvement?” (Cohen-Vogel, 2015). The workshop will begin with a whole group discussion of what a gender transformative approach would look like, its key goals and outcomes and what methods could be implemented that would ensure the participatory nature of the process. After this, they will be divided into five groups which will work on five themes that will be critical in defining a GTE ecosystem. These will be:
(1) Transformational Pedagogy (pedagogical approaches that include socio-cultural influences and promote gender equity),
(2) Competency-based Monitoring and Assessment (equitable assessment practices aligned with competency-based learning objectives),
(3) System-based Capacity Building (contextual capacity-building programs for educators, government officials, and community leaders),
(4) Ecosystem Infrastructure (infrastructure gaps necessary to support GTE initiatives), and
(5) Dissemination of best practices (institutionalizing effective practices, promoting innovation, advocating for policy reforms, and catalyzing collective action toward advancing GTE).

In each group, participants will assume the role of system officials, non-profit leaders, school staff, researchers, parents, and girls to contribute diverse perspectives to the agenda. Theoretically, the approach will informed by a) Gender-transformative strategies which aim to reconfigure gender dynamics by redistributing resources, expectations, and responsibilities among women, men, and non-binary individuals, often emphasizing norms, power dynamics, and collective mobilization, b) Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Pedagogy (CRSP) which is centered on enhancing student learning, cultivating cultural proficiency, and nurturing critical awareness for marginalized communities (Ladson-Billings, 2021) and c) engaged and community-driven ecosystem outlook that envisions an engaged and aligned ecosystem comprised of stakeholders (Pinkard, 2019), that would include voices of girls and other stakeholders, representing, their families, teachers, school leadership, administrators, bureaucrats, and community organizations and would represent different layers like in the bioecological model (Bronfenbrenner, 1977). All members will work in the small groups to demonstrate how to reach the domain’s set outcome in that domain.

After the small groups, all participants will reconvene in the big group to debrief and present back to the group, their plan of action, what are they ways in which their plan could be actualized, how would they know when their plan is actualized (what metrics might look like), the challenges faced working collectively, and their mitigation.

Sub Unit

• Book launches and Workshops / Workshop

Chair

• Ananya Tiwari, Texas A&M University

Workshop Organizer

• Payal Shah, University of South Carolina

Presenter

• Vaibhav Kumar, SwaTaleem Foundation