(Un)making schooling for pregnant learners and re-integration of student mothers: The formation and utility of Critical Afro-Feminist Education (CAFE)

• In Event: Case studies of gender inequality in education

Proposal

School policies force pregnant girls to drop out of school. Despite the support from peers, teachers, and school personnel, existing research confirms that school climates are largely hostile and intolerant towards pregnant learners and student mothers across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (Ngabaza & Shefer, 2013; Chilisa 2002). Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened teen pregnancy not just within the SSA region but in South Asia, with over 400,000 recorded (UNICEF, 2021) cases, resulting in both direct and indirect effects on the young mother’s health, education, as well as economic and social outcomes. This paper conducts a decolonial analysis on the politics of the readmission of student mothers and pregnant learners into education systems in Malawi and Zambia.

This investigation is conducted by putting together two frameworks of analysis that I have not seen jointly explored elsewhere. According to Comaroff and Comarroff (2012), the Global South is rarely viewed as a birthplace of theory to explain global historical events. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) concurs by stating that indigenous scholars struggle to theorize and research due to the Westernized nature of theorizing. As a form of resistance to challenge hierarchical and hegemonic modes of knowledge production, this study draws from the lens of Paulo Freire (1968) and Bell hooks (1994) on critical/liberatory feminist pedagogy and Tamale’s (2020) framework on Afro feminism that centers on decolonial and emancipatory practices within education policy and practice in African contexts. Through these two lenses, I examine both Malawi and Zambia’s readmission/re-entry guidelines and aim to analyze the issue through different perspectives, including the political, historical, and cultural contexts.

With this premise, I propose what I call the Critical Afro-Feminist Education (CAFE) framework as an onto-epistemological lens and interpretive method that distinctively speaks to African women's experiences by challenging oppressive structures in African education systems from multiple angles, including pedagogical, ontological, feminist, and Afrocentric perspectives. This critical lens reveals new possibilities on how to address the challenges related to in-school pregnancy as well as different forms of social action within schools and beyond on what decolonization of education systems might look like, especially during the era of COVID-19.

This discursive analysis engages with African feminist theorists and critical education scholars who engage with epistemologies that interrogate and challenge neoliberal, hierarchical, and hegemonic modes of school operations and knowledge production in African contexts with recognition of gender and cultural differences as well as unequal power dynamics. This analysis seeks not just to interrogate and challenge patriarchy and the legacies of imperialism within the field of girls’ education, but also to create new forms of theorizing and knowledge-making that support education for marginalized girls, especially student-mothers and pregnant learners, to advocate for an education future that speaks for all.

Author

• Pempho Chinkondenji, University of Massachusetts Amherst