Gender mainstreaming in education

Gender Mainstreaming in Education

What to teach?
Adding or integrating knowledge, changing sources, adopting new
groups’ perspectives, promoting new understandings…

How we teach it?

Being aware of our gendered position, considering our own experience and
how it relates to our teaching, adopting new methodologies…

Why we teach it?

Defining our educational goals, understanding ho we can contribute to
social change and how gender mainstreaming can be a means to this
purpose
Sandra Harding (1986): three possible
approaches to the feminist epistemology
1.feminist empiricism
It believes in positivism and in the scientific method but thinks
that there is an androcentric bias in science leading to a partial
knowledge of the world.

2.standpoint epistemology
marginalized groups are bestowed with an “epistemic privilege”,
where there exists the potential for less distorted
understandings of the world than dominant groups.

3.postmodern epistemology
shift away from dominant, positivistic ideals of objectivity and
universal understanding
1. Empiricism: bringing her-story
to light

Men are over-represented in textbooks (exampe in

history: Chick 2006; Williams & Bennett 2016)
and there is a dominant (white, male,
heterosexual) default perspective. The daily life of Medieval nuns

Teaching political and military history, and individual

events Vs. following the flow of themes through
time.
The subjects of the history are not really two, but one,
speaking on behalf of both.

Valuing women’s knowledge, or recovering memories,

methods, contents and values ​that are not part of
the (andocentric) mainstream culture.
Where the streets have no
It is a matter of working on the gaps of curricular (female) name
programs, on silences and omissions.
1. Empiricism: bringing her-story
to light

It’s not about just teaching gender history,

but it’s about teaching history from a
Virginia Woolf
gender perspective.

Ex. It’s not about just adding women in

literature anthologies, but to reason on
their absence and on the implicit
aspects in the organization of memory
(which, for example, privilege some
sources over others). Immanuel Kant
2. Standpoint:
we don’t teach just what we know.
We teach what we are

Knowledge is always situated and embodied.

Women, as oppressed group, have an epistemic privilege.
All knowledge is situated. bell hooks

We, as educators, must start from ourselves: our language, our biographical experience, the
way we interact with (gendered) students.
We are not generally teachers and educators, but women and men, bearers of a point of view
on the world.

Focus on the relational dimension of teaching and on the gender models we legitimize,
consciously or not. Not just about denouncing inequalities but creating new knowledge.
2. Standpoint:
we don’t teach just what we know. We teach what we are

Gender biases may reinforce stereotypes and thus influence expectations and learning
outcomes. Such biases may occur unintentionally in your classroom and in the community
at large. They are rooted in experiences, culture and the media, and are passed from
generation to generation.
https://www.vvob.org/sites/belgium/files/grp4ece_toolkit-lowres.pdf
3. Postmodernism: deconstructing
stereotypes and queering identities
There is no Woman nor Man, but not even
"women" and "men": any category has normative Judith Butler
connotations that exclude or stigmatize
experiences as deviations from the norm which
defines them.
It’s about breaking the chains of obviousness.

Gender is a doing: we need a critical look at the

processes underlying the creation of differences,
primarily that between male and female, in order
to overcome inequalities and stigmas.

However, gender is not an individual act of will.

3. Postmodernism: deconstructing
stereotypes and queering identities
It’s about:

Deconstructing stereotypes in the textbooks Judith Butler

Interaction, role-playing and group work, focusing on

students’ feelings and behaviour and how they define
it in relation to gender

Asking thought-provoking questions that challenge

gender roles

Mixing groups and chores

Text book picture analysis: here
Gender-responsive (verbal and non-verbal language)