rashmi education of adolescent girls radcliffe - …...“my husband first stopped me to go to the...
TRANSCRIPT
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Education of Adolescent Girls in Rural Uttar Pradesh, India
My Experiences at Kasturba Gandhi Girl’s Residential Schools (2006-10) administered by Mahila Samakhya.
Key Learnings
• Women empowerment is a critical and enabling condition for adolescent girls’ education.
• Teacher empowerment is a key process. • Enabling institutional structure is necessary for program contextualization and
wider impact.
Slide-Map
Slide 1-2 – Discuss Mahila Samakhya and Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidhyalaya Scheme Slide 4-7 – Discuss context and inequalities faced by adolescent girls and women Slide 8 – Discuss teacher selection Slide 9-18 – Discuss teacher orientation and its course design Slide 19 – Discuss strengths Slide 20 – Video Slide 21 – Discuss challenges Slide 22-23 – Key Learnings
The experiences that I’m honored to share today are located in the rural school sector
of Uttar Pradesh, India. The state of Uttar Pradesh, with a population of 170 million, is
not only India’s largest state but also it is equal to world’s tenth largest country by
population. This state has around 160,000 government elementary schools and
540,000 teachers (Flash Statistics, DISE 2013-14).
Kasturba Gandhi Girls’ Residential Schools (KGBV) were established and administered
by a women’s only gender-specific institution in India called Mahila Samakhya (MS).
The focus of MS is on community-based women's education and empowerment. My
experience with KGBVs indicated that due to social and economic factors in India, it
was indeed difficult to empower and educate adolescent girls without the support of
such institutions. The role of a women’s only institution, such as, MS in this regard is
twofold. First the institution constructs relevant forms of knowledge that is required to
drive the empowerment process for adolescent girls and women.
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Times of India, 2007 National Daily Editorial by Prof Krishna Kumar Former Director NCERT, New Delhi, India
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Secondly, it becomes a catalyst for creating a critical mass of understanding and
perspective in the broader community around them to support the empowerment
process. As a result poor rural adolescent girls and women successfully emerge from the
program with radically changed equity-based self-confidence and energy. Based on this my first thesis is that the outcome of the program showed that the implementation of KGBV schools within the context of gender-specific community-based intervention under MS was effective.
MS was founded under the National Policy on Education, 1986, which stated that
women empowerment was a critical pre-condition for the effective participation of
women in the education process. The policy recognized the deeply entrenched
psychosocial biases for gender inequality in the culture. It redefined education as an
enabling and empowering tool and as a process that would enable women to “think
critically, to question, to analyze their own condition, to demand and acquire the
information and skills they need to enable them to plan and act collectively for change.”
MS relies on a philosophy of community development and transformational social
change by infusing feminist energy in women’s groups that can slowly dismantle the
psychosocial foundations of gender imbalance. MS depends on non-government
employees. The program actively recruits women from inaccessible and impoverished
rural areas as potential pupils for education as well as its future employees. It prepares
them for empowerment work in their respective communities. The role of project
functionaries is facilitative, not directive. It supports women to determine the form,
nature, content and timing of all the activities in their village.
The program initiates itself by setting up dialogues with women on context-specific
issues. Such issues include various social and political structures of power and their
impact on people and processes, distribution of resources, and forces causing
marginalization of people, especially, females. The Program has multiple entry points
that depend upon the need and urgency of the community. The empowerment
curriculum is designed around a selected priority area. For example, if the prime
concern of women is managing water crisis for domestic use, then the core curriculum
and vocabulary will be designed around how to manage scarcity of water.
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Under the umbrella of this program gender-experts share their experiences,
information, analyses as well as data processing. This helps women identify social
structures that produce patriarchy, gender-inequality, and exclusion. In fact, the
content, process and implementation design of the program attempt to bring about a
change in a woman’s relationship with her own body, self and more broadly her
relationship with environment, community and with other social and political
institutions.
MS nurtures deliberative processes and an environment that create bonding among
women based on common and critical awareness of their marginalization in social,
political and economic structures. In such a setting, a group with continuous
empowerment processes consolidates as a collective, where women feel safe to ask
questions, to challenge gender-specific norms and traditions of inequality, to raise their
voice against social discrimination and injustice and to speak fearlessly about
themselves. There is substantial evidence that women value being part of these
collectives known as Sanghas (Assembly) in Hindi. This supportive environment, new
understanding and group cohesion improve women’s confidence levels and create a
sense of self in wider context. It imbues them with the energy to analyze their situation
and to raise their voice to alter their position from subordination to that of choice and
dignity. Thus claiming equality and due rights. If we name this new found energy as
feminism, it brings a laser-like focus among women for their equality and empowerment
to end violence of all forms against them. Many a times this could cause women to get
in conflict with their own family norms and other social structures of power.
Examples:
Experiencing Empowerment
“My husband first stopped me to go to the meetings. I told him: whether you agree or
not, I will go. Awareness and understanding do not come at home, from inside the
house, we will have to go somewhere to learn … If you can go to your work, then I can
go to my meetings.” –- A case study of Mahila Samakhya Programme in Khajooraho
Village Uttar Pradesh India. Master’s thesis, University of Amsterdam, Joni Van de Sand,
October 2007.
“I will not do the fasting as I find no clue how my fasting can prolong my husband’s
life…if in any way this is true, then my life is also as precious as his, so he too should do
the fasting for me.” — Vibha Sahyogini (Village level MS worker), Sitapur Uttar Pradesh,
India, 2006
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My second thesis is that KGBV schools were successful in all those contexts where similar kind of educational philosophy and critical pedagogy was followed to empower and prepare teachers. The emphasis
during teacher selection and preparation was less on mastery of subject content and
more on imbibing perspectives on gender equity and understanding of structures,
norms and processes that lead to marginalization of females and restriction of learning
opportunities for them. The pedagogical approach during teacher preparation
concentrated on infusing them with the similar feminist energy as was present in MS
Sangha women. Because only then the teachers could teach the KGBV students with
the same pedagogical approach of equity. The aim was to develop teaching-learning
methods and content that would raise critical thinking, abilities to solve problems, and
help end marginalization of women.
We observed that teachers as well as the community had subjective expectations from
education, schools and children. These expectations differed by religion, by caste and
by gender of the child. In order to counter these subjective expectations and to
increase opportunities for equitable experience, there was constant effort on making
KGBV schools caste-free, class-free and ritual-free. Every day MS was experiencing what
worked and what got into conflict with the ideals of equality. For example, during
morning school assembly prayer, the posture of eyes-closed with folded hands was
reflected upon from various perspectives of girls’ safety as well as religious sensitivities.
The unmindful usage of local terminologies such as “Achhe Ghar ke Bachhe” (Children
from good families with the term “good” used for upper castes), “Neech jaat ke
bachhe” (Children from lowly castess, having a connotation of not being fit for school
education) was explained to underscore the kind of belief system these terms
perpetuated and how these impacted our behavior as well as the expectations from the
child.
Apart from issues of gender and caste, we also realized that certain key terms in school
sector had acquired an extremely tired meaning over the years, carried little sense and
encouraged no action. The question was how we could add fresh sensitivities and
reciprocities between the language and the action. This required deeper reflection and
unlearning of certain beliefs that were giving rise to fatigue in actions.
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Example
Terms Tired meaning New meaning
School Physical structure Community of learners
Teacher Adult authority to instruct
children
Builds up curiosity in the
mind and facilitates to
explore
Children Recipients of instructions,
to be disciplined and
taught
Young people requiring
care, respect, capable of
learning, have their own
styles to learn
Teaching Transfer of knowledge A mutual learning process
Joyful teaching Not doing anything, letting
children on their own
Participation in the leaning
process
Learning Rote learning/Good
memory
A process of constructing
knowledge
Knowledge Textbooks Multiple sources & diverse
forms
Examination Means to Pass or Fail
children
Feedback for teachers
about child’s progress
Contextualization Use of local material Meaningful to real-life
situation
Community Parents A social unit with common
values with its past, present
and a perspective on future
The tool that was used was critical thinking questions and discussions to discover the
relationship between current meaning, its impact on processes, and learning outcomes.
The aim was to create clarity of purpose, thoughts and feelings around students, schools
and processes that could empower and transform adolescent girls in rural context
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Example:
Innovations towards Education for Empowerment, Published by Best Practices Foundation. DFID India and Government of India, 2010
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My third thesis is that for a change to sustain and be carried forward effectively, the structure of such programs needs to evolve as fast as the evolution of its workers and its targets. In the last 30 years since the establishment
of MS, the program has grown in its coverage. It has created a significant impact on the
lives of women, who have worked in the program as its employees, as Sangha members,
as pupils or as teachers. Its sole dependence on altruistic labor to help poor women
overcome their marginalized position in society needs to be reflected upon. This is more
important as India, even in its rural villages, is experiencing deep impact of market-driven
economy and changing role of state over the lives of people and programs. Despite
apparent success in the empowerment of women and adolescents girls in most wretched
circumstances, gender-specific programs such as MS remain marginalized in the state
policy discourse related to issues of gender justice and women empowerment. In the
absence of political will for women empowerment, an effective state action or
government policy to strengthen such programs is rarely visible.
In spite of ongoing challenges and deprivations, these gender-specific programs have
constructed enormous wealth of knowledge in diverse forms in their own languages and
expressions with immense potential to solve most complex social problems. With
accumulated experience of several decades, these programs have built a repertoire of
culturally sensitive practices and strategies for initiating process of women empowerment,
education and perspective on change. They have created a body of knowledge huge
enough to merit attention of scholars and universities for the expansion of their scope in
theory and application.
There is potential within these institutions for providing policy directions on issues of
development. However, my own experience reminds me of continuing struggle such
organizations face every day to find a voice in state forums on issues, where their voice
would be the only authentic voice.
My work on how to bring gender-specific programs and their workers in the mainstream
of public policy discourse on education and development continues.
Rashmi Sinha