Sheila Aikman

Beyond Access: Transforming policy and practice for gender equality in education

Introduction Part One: The Challenges for Gender Equality in Education: Fragmented frameworks? Researching women, gender, education, and development Ensuring a fair chance for girls Measuring gender equality in education Part Two:Transforming Action - Changing Policy through Practice: Educating girls in Bangladesh: watering a neighbours tree? The challenge of educating girls in Kenya Learning to improve policy for pastoralists in Kenya When access is not enough: educational exclusion of rural girls in Peru Crossing boundaries and stepping out of purdah in India Pastoralist schools in Mali: gendered roles and curriculum realities Part Three:The Challenge of Local Practices - Doing Policy Differently?: Learning about HIV/AIDS in schools: does a gender-equality approach make a difference? Gender, education, and Pentecostalism: the womens movement within the Assemblies of God in Burkina Faso Enabling education for girls: the Loreto Day School Sealdah, India Conclusion: policy and practice change for gender equality Index

Multigrade schooling in 'remote' areas of Vietnam

This paper provides an initial examination of the nature of ‘remote’ multigrade schools and the particular challenges which face teachers in such schools. While multigrade schools in general are recognised as being demanding teaching contexts (Commonwealth Secretariat, 1997), this paper is specifically concerned with contexts where multigrade teaching is further compounded by geographical distance from the hub of the education system and the fact that the students have linguistic and cultural traditions different from those in which the curriculum is embedded. The paper considers the nature of the ‘remoteness’ in this context through an examination of examples from the mountainous region of Northern Vietnam. The paper examines the nature of the different dimensions of ‘remoteness’ and considers how the remoteness can be alleviated for both teachers and students so that multigrade schooling for ethnic minority children can be a qualitative and relevant basic education. This examination is carried out by looking in turn at the characteristics identified by Thomas and Shaw (1992) for the smooth-working of multigrade schools: appropriate texts and materials; effective teaching practices; and teachers who are supported through training programmes.

Interculturality and intercultural education : A challenge for democracy

The paper examines the debate taking place in Peru, and also more generally in South and Central American countries with large indigenous populations, on the nature of interculturality and intercultural education. It investigates concepts fundamental to interculturality such as democracy and equality and asks what they mean in the context of the Peruvian state, civil society and the indigenous movement. It questions whether an interculturality based in apolitical calls for dialogue and respect for cultural and linguistic plurality can meet the needs of indigenous peoples and their daily confrontations with oppressive and unequal intercultural relations. Taking Peru as an example, it investigates the possibilities for the development of an interculturality that is characterised by equality and participation and which enables indigenous peoples to have greater control over their lives. It then briefly examines the nature of the intercultural lives of the Harakmbut of SE Peruvian Amazon and a new indigenous intercultural education programme which the Harakmbut hope will help them address the inequalities and exploitation which they face.

Conceptualising gender equality in research on education quality

This article sets out to re‐conceptualise gender equality in education quality. Four approaches to conceptualising gender equitable education quality are identified in the literature: human capital theory with a focus on parity and sameness for all; a human rights and power perspective, within which gender equality is viewed as transforming unjust structures; postcolonial critiques, which celebrate and recognise difference; and the view of development as social action for empowerment with gender intersecting with other inequalities. The framework is applied to an analysis of a programme of research on education quality, EdQual. The article maintains that for education quality at the level of classrooms to move beyond fairness of distribution of resources, to consider the nature of educational experience for boys and girls, requires a deeper questioning of the gender biased nature of schooling. It also indicates that education quality demands an analysis of gender dynamics in the wider social context of the lives of boys and girls. These findings have strong implications for large research programmes.

Gender equality and girls education: Investigating frameworks, disjunctures and meanings of quality education

The article draws on qualitative educational research across a diversity of low-income countries to examine the gendered inequalities in education as complex, multi-faceted and situated rather than a series of barriers to be overcome through linear input–output processes focused on isolated dimensions of quality. It argues that frameworks for thinking about educational quality often result in analyses of gender inequalities that are fragmented and incomplete. However, by considering education quality more broadly as a terrain of quality it investigates questions of educational transitions, teacher supply and community participation, and develops understandings of how education is experienced by learners and teachers in their gendered lives and their teaching practices. By taking an approach based on theories of human development the article identifies dynamics of power underpinning gender inequalities in the literature and played out in diverse contexts and influenced by social, cultural and historical contexts. The review and discussion indicate that attaining gender equitable quality education requires recognition and understanding of the ways in which inequalities intersect and interrelate in order to seek out multi-faceted strategies that address not only different dimensions of girls’ and women’s lives, but understand gendered relationships and structurally entrenched inequalities between women and men, girls and boys.

Interrogating discourses of intercultural education: from indigenous Amazon community to global policy forum

This article investigates discourses of intercultural education, taking as its starting point two ‘encounters’ in 2010 with contrasting aims and expectations of intercultural education. One is the launch of the 2010 Global Monitoring Report, where intercultural education is viewed as a means of overcoming marginalisation and promoting inclusion, and the other is in a rural Amazonian community context, where intercultural education serves to actively compound processes of exclusion. The article examines these discourses of intercultural education, locating them socially, culturally, politically and historically, and draws distinctions between educational analyses of diversity that emphasise identity and difference and those that prioritise interculturalism. It exposes complex and intersecting dynamics of social change and political contestation in the Amazonian ‘encounter’, which question the viability of globalised (technical-adaptive) strategies for inclusion of people whose intercultural lives are characterised by abjection and marginalisation.

Education and inclusion: re-examining the narratives

Governments, donor agencies and other interested parties have long promoted the expansion and improvement of education systems as a means to foster more inclusive societies and a better quality of ...

Indigenous knowledges and education

This Special Issue is concerned with understanding the status of indigenous knowledges and the nature of negotiations and contestations being played out by educators and learners concerned with re-defining education to reflect their cultural, social, spiritual and linguistic values. The core question we seek to address is how non-majority cultures, languages and knowledges may achieve recognition and value within mainstream educational systems. And, if indeed they can and do, what this means in terms of their negotiation with the hegemony of western, scientific knowledge in the curriculum and through pedagogy. The articles in this Special Issue are concerned, then, with a diversity of non-dominant knowledges. We have chosen to refer to knowledge in the plural in order to reflect not only a plurality of terms – for example indigenous, local, faith-based, western – but also to recognise a diversity of discourses associated with each of these, including, for example, notions of dominant or hegemonic knowledges and marginalised or colonised knowledges. In addition, there may be different paths to knowledge not necessarily associated with linear literacy-based knowledge. Indigenous ways of knowing may be linked to sensory knowledge, spiritual knowledge or knowledge that uses the body in a holistic sense for learning (see, for example, Classen 2000, 2004; King 2000; Lopes da Silva 2000). By referring to knowledges in the plural in this way we also recognise the diversity of worldviews and systems of knowledge that exist around the globe and critique dualist notions of traditional-modern or indigenous-scientific knowledge. While some of the articles discuss what might be termed ‘local knowledges’ and others focus on cultural/religious/spiritual knowledges, the overall focus on indigenous knowledges comes from the origins of five of the articles in this Special Issue in a Panel entitled ‘Indigenous Knowledge in a Globalised World’ at the 2011 International Conference by the UK Forum on International Education and Training (UKFIET), on Global Challenges for Education: Economics, Environment and Emergency. We are pleased to also include in this Issue the Conference Address by Birgit Brock-Utne, President of the British Association for International and Comparative Education, entitled ‘Languages and inequality: Global challenges to education’. Compare Vol. 42, No. 5, September 2012, 673–681

Marching to different rhythms: international NGO collaboration with the state in Tanzania

This contribution examines relationships between international NGOs and state education institutions in their efforts to achieve Education for All. It does this through an investigation of Oxfam GBs multi-level and multi-strategy approach to education in Tanzania. Looking at three components of this programme, it explores what a ‘one-programme approach’ means for Oxfam GBs education work and investigates its partnerships and advocacy relationships at the local and national levels with different state education institutions and agents. The boundaries of partnership and collaboration are discussed and it concludes that advocacy practices need to be viewed as multiple, part of a process, and emergent.

Challenging deficit discourses in international education and development

Research and policy in international education has often been framed in terms of a deficit discourse. For instance, policy debates on women’s literacy and education have begun by positioning women ...