Education 2030 recognizes gender equality as a key feature of inclusive and equitable quality education. Yet while school enrolments continue to increase globally, gender inequalities remain in experiences in schools, with ongoing marginalisation of certain groups, and gender-unequal educational outcomes.
Improving gender equality in teaching and learning is key to addressing these issues; as what is taught in the formal and informal curriculum will affect attitudes, values, skills and knowledge around gender. But what institutional and system-wide changes are needed to break cycles of exclusion around gender in teaching and learning? How do policies translate into reality and which national and international actors are key in the diverse challenges around gender equality?
The symposium offers three papers that examine different aspects of these challenges. It will offer innovative, critical perspectives on the dynamics and political realities around gender, education and inclusion, which are central to making education more gender inclusive by 2030.Discussant:tbc (see email).
Amy North and Elaine Unterhalter: Gender, policy and contested practices
An unexamined assumption by many who developed the MDGs and EFA, and went on to monitor them, was that policy, rather than people, made change happen in relation to gender equality. In this paper, we question this. We argue that people, shaped by and shaping social relations under particular historical conditions, inside and outside government, take policy and re-make it through practice. Understanding these historically situated relationships of practices around gender equality policy is key to understanding whether, or under what circumstances, global policy goals may be realised and their transformation between global, national and local sites. In this paper, we trace analytically relationships and processes of enactment across these boundaries, distinguishing four terrains of a middle space that stretches between a policy and its realisation in practice, and drawing out their significance for institutionalising and sustaining work on gender and education.
Nora Fyles: Gender-responsive education sector planning
The Education 2030 Framework for Action petitions governments to ensure gender issues are integrated in education planning and programming. Since 2014, UNGEI and Global Partnership for Education (GPE) have collaborated on an innovative initiative to support countries on this, developing a guidance for education sector planning based on globally agreed good practice in education planning, gender mainstreaming principles, and field research with education ministries in Eritrea, Guinea and Malawi. The guidance will be launched in 2017, through a series of regional workshops designed for Ministry of Education planners, gender experts and national development partners. The first workshop will include 6 GPE partner countries in Southern and Eastern Africa.
Drawing on early learnings, this paper will explore the potential for country led education sector planning involving multi-stakeholder partners, to be an avenue for gender integration, breaking down policy silos, and embedding gender considerations into national and global systems, to effectively contribute to the achievement of inclusive and quality education for all.
Rosie Peppin Vaughan: Transnational Activism on Gender and Education
Women’s civil society groups can be key in moving towards gender equality; in education, they can be central in pushing forwards on curriculum reform around gender, teacher training on gender, non-formal adult education initiatives and alternative delivery models, and engaging with marginalised groups. While there has been significant work on the role of the international women’s movement and on activism in national contexts, there has been little investigation of transnational activism on gender and education. This paper reports on new empirical work, using social movement theory to explore the factors underlying how and why civil society groups link to global policy structures, also asking whether the shifting global power balance has implications for civil society engagement under the SDGs.
