Co-Creating Gender-Transformative Education Ecosystems: Systems Change for Girls’ Education

• In Event: Systems Change for Gender-Transformative Education and Youth Thriving: Local to Global Perspectives

Proposal

In a world marked by deepening inequalities, reimagining education as a pathway to peace demands a focus on the systemic barriers that reproduce marginalization and exclusion. This presentation shares insights from a multi-stakeholder initiative to co-create a gender-transformative educational ecosystem in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India, home to over 23 million adolescent girls facing intersecting disadvantages of gender, caste, religion, and poverty (UNICEF, 2023; ASER, 2024).
The project operationalizes systems change (Preskill & Gopal, 2014) by addressing not only access to education but also the relational, structural, and cultural conditions shaping girls’ schooling. Drawing from Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (1977), it examines interconnected layers of influence—from classroom pedagogies to district governance—identifying leverage points for sustainable transformation.
Our approach integrates gender-transformative education (Hillenbrand et al., 2015; MacArthur et al., 2022), which seeks to shift harmful gender norms in curricula, pedagogy, and policy, with culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2021), ensuring interventions reflect local languages, values, and lived realities. Using an intersectional lens (Unterhalter et al., 2020), we explore how overlapping systems of oppression shape girls’ educational trajectories, particularly in rural and marginalized districts such as Bahraich and Shrawasti, where literacy rates remain below 50% (Indiagraphy, 2011).
Methodologically, the initiative blends improvement science (Cohen-Vogel et al., 2015) with participatory action research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Tuck, 2009). Teachers, headmasters, government officials, community members, NGO partners, and adolescent girls participate as co-researchers in cycles of co-learning, problem identification, and iterative design. This process disrupts traditional researcher–participant hierarchies, positioning community actors as co-producers of both knowledge and change (Coburn & Penuel, 2016).
We deliberately chose both quantitative and qualitative data to drive our analysis. Large-scale datasets such as the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (U-DISE+), National Achievement Survey (NAS), and Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) set the broader context and are examined to identify gaps in enrollment, retention, and learning. Participatory methods, including photovoice, community dialogues, and drama, further illuminated barriers such as restrictive gender norms, discriminatory classroom practices, language exclusion, and bureaucratic hurdles. While such challenges are well-documented, our work moves beyond identification to co-creating solutions where students, educators, and communities actively reshape ecosystems to promote equity, agency, and inclusion.
Anchored through the work of SwaTaleem Foundation, a grassroots international non-profit, the project uses gender-transformative, community-based models to strengthen girls’ socio-emotional well-being, leadership, and vocational pathways. Insights have informed a system-wide collaborative in Uttar Pradesh advancing inclusive and equitable education for marginalized groups while building local capacity for research and data use. This collaborative brings together civil society organizations, government officials, educators, communities, and students in a shared process of change.
By situating educational reform within a broader peacebuilding agenda, this work advances CIES 2026’s theme of Reimagining Education and Peace in a Divided World. It underscores that peace is not merely the absence of conflict but the presence of equity, dignity, and opportunity—conditions that gender-transformative systems change in education can help create.

Authors

• Payal Shah, University of South Carolina

• Ananya Tiwari, Texas A&M University

• Vaibhav Kumar, SwaTaleem Foundation