Life course within an education system: Tying together research, gendered environments, and points in time and place

• In Event: Non-static individuals within non-static systems: Pushing data and action further for marginalized children

Proposal

Within a community, what synergistic behavior can we uncover that can help with a positive flow of complex and dynamic relations among components? What happens over the life course of an individual and where are the positive trigger points across his or her lifespan? What is happening to girls if they are on par with boys in early reading (example in Senegal; example in Rwanda), but by four years later, have dropped out in large numbers (example from Mali, from Senegal, from Rwanda)? It’s not just about girls, but about the whole system, which includes all of the other people in the system: Teacher workforce is overwhelming male; School director workforce is even more overwhelmingly male, Fathers and mothers and their capabilities and attitudes, Peers and their social conditioning. There is a set of factors around girls that creates a certain set of environments and a certain set of motivations. We will draw on collected evidence to think about system issues. What can we trace to start pulling out factors and then draw those into specific suggestions for early reading, for example? This could also be the case for other marginalized children who drop out at higher rates - what is the environment and community encouraging or not, both at school and home - for them concerning school? How can girls who are performing as well or better than boys become an anchor for influencing the system from within? We will consider how to instill change across time from the position of strengths (and challenges) we can point to in the data. Plenty of data have been collected in different studies on early grade reading with EGRA (Early Grade Reading Assessment) and SSME (Snapshot of School Management Effectiveness) questionnaires. While the main focus of these studies has been on the EGRA results, there is much data that can be analyzed to try to characterize the experience of the girls as early readers as well as the women as teachers. This presentation will illustrate this possibility by comparing the experience of the girls with boys as well as the female and male teachers. We will see what kind of questions it is possible to answer with data collected and propose areas to explore when developing SSME questionnaires to inform on the experience of the girls in the educational system.

Authors

• Michel Rousseau, Universite du Quebec a Trois-Rivieres

• Mary Faith Mount-Cors, EdIntersect, LLC