Senegalese Women and Girls in Formal Education: Where Do They Fit?

• In Event: Women in Leadership Across the Continents: Equitable Education Systems for All

Abstract

Objectives. This paper is derived from a larger study, Senegalese Parent, Family, and Community Engagement in Education (Gilliam, 2021). It highlights the interviews of four indigenous women in Sub-Saharan Africa using a gendered lens and begin a conversation on their perspectives about quality education and their role in education. It addresses the question, What do the women of Dekka, Senegal believe is their place in education, and what role do they play in their villages and communities once educated? Dekka serves as the pseudonym for the village and high school outside Senegal’s capital city, Dakar, where the study took place.

Theoretical Framework. Because of African American families’ cultural connection to countries in Africa resulting from the Atlantic Slave Trade, this study used the indigenous framework Ubuntu (Metz, 2007), Barton et al.’s Ecologies of Parental Engagement (2004), and Epstein’s framework of Six Types of Involvement (1995) to guide the qualitative case study that examined the roles of parents, families, and village members in the education of their high school students in Senegal. The original framework illustrates that the core beliefs of the participants, represented by Ubuntu, coupled with their environment, represented by Barton’s Ecologies of Parental Engagement, would be manifested in their actions and the ways that they engaged in children’s education, represented by Epstein’s Six Types of Involvement. This paper centers on the world and words of Serer women and African feminism in Dekka (Blay, 2008).

Methods. This qualitative investigation used snowball sampling to ensure that women in the community with the knowledge and expertise of education had the opportunity to tell their stories through semi-structured interviews (Creswell, 2018; Kovach, 2010; Staojanovski, et al., 2017).

Data Sources. In the larger qualitative case study, 22 members of the Dekka community, including parents, students, family and community members, and teachers and administrators, participated in semi-structured interviews that were audio or video recorded. The recordings were transcribed and then translated to English and analyzed using the conceptual framework previously mentioned. This paper highlights the voices of the women participants.

Results. While data from semi-structured interviews with parents, students, family and community members, teachers, and administrators of Dekka High School revealed that the people of Dekka seem to have relationships, beliefs, and ways of being that encourage parent, family, and community engagement, there also seem to be underlying expectations about women’s places and roles in education that may impact their engagement and participation in education. The language of the interviews, the women’s descriptions of the importance of education, and descriptions of their roles in and responsibility to the community seem to suggest that women, although formally educated, will send someone else to lead the people, and that the women themselves may not be viewed as leaders.

Scholarly Significance. The data that the Senegalese women provided regarding their explicit and implicit roles in education add to a growing body of research that addresses gender equality in education and women’s impact on the education of their children and development of their community through engagement in education.

Author

• Nikysha D. Gilliam, Los Angeles Unified School District