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What About Our Boys? Educating Boys for Gender Justice

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What About Our Boys? Educating Boys for Gender Justice What About Our Boys? Educating Boys for Gender Justice (draft, not for circulation) DRAFT What About Our Boys?Educating Boys for Gender Justice Urvashi Sahni Urvashi Sahni With with The Prerna Boys, Anshu Jain & Anand1 Chitravanshi Anshu Jain Anand Chitravanshi Table of Contents A Word to the Readers/Preface .............................................................................................................. 3 The Site and Methodology ...................................................................................................................... 5 Conceptual and Ethical Guide ................................................................................................................. 8 An Ethic of Responsive Care ............................................................................................................... 8 Schools as safe spaces and sanctuaries ............................................................................................ 11 Boys as equal persons ....................................................................................................................... 12 Raising Feminist Consciousness in Boys ........................................................................................... 13 Note to the Teachers ............................................................................................................................ 15 A Note on the Lesson Plans................................................................................................................... 17 About Study Hall Educational Foundation ............................................................................................ 17 About the Author .................................................................................................................................... 3 Lesson Plans .......................................................................................................................................... 18 2 About the Authors Dr. Urvashi Sahni is a social entrepreneur, women rights activist and educationist. Through her various organizations, she has been working for the rights of children and women for more than three decades. She is a leading expert in school governance, curriculum reform, and teacher training, with a special focus on girls’ education and the use of technology in education. Dr. Sahni is a nonresident fellow at the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. She was awarded the Ashoka Fellowship in 2011. She received Berkeley’s Haas International Award for her efforts to reform education in India and bolster education for girls 1994. Dr. Sahni was also a member of Hillary Clinton’s CHARGE commitment to ensure that more girls complete secondary education around the world. She was declared the Social Entrepreneur of the Year India, 2017 by the Schwab-Jubilant Bhartiya Foundation. She is a member of the Global Girls Alliance. She has a masters and PhD in education from the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. She has presented academic papers at many national and international forums and universities, including Columbia, NYU, Chicago, and Berkeley, and has given keynote addresses at international drama and education conferences in Edinburgh, Jamaica, Plymouth, Toronto, Northern Ireland, and New York. She has published extensively on critical pedagogy, theatre in education, feminist pedagogy, child cultures, and girls’ education and empowerment. Her current research focuses on developing and scaling her Girls’ Empowerment Program in India with the help of curricular reform, teacher training, and affordable technology. Her latest book—Reaching for the Sky: Empowering Girls Through Education—draws on her 14 years of work with Prerna Girls School, and argues that education can be truly transformative if it addresses the everyday reality of girls’ lives and responds to their special needs and challenges with respect and care. Anand Chitravanshi is the director of outreach programs at Study Hall Educational Foundation (SHEF), overseeing three education-based initiatives across northern India. One of few male advocates for women’s rights in India, Anand's work includes scaling SHEF's rights-based, critical feminist pedagogy to government-run girls’ schools, using technology to popularize SHEF's quality pedagogical practices, and establishing community transformation centers to enroll out-of-school children in schools. Anand was Urvashi Sahni's research associate during the development of the Boy's Curriculum and is part of the core team that is scaling it in government schools. Anshu Jain worked at SHEF as Urvashi Sahni's research associate for three years and is currently a teaching fellow at Asoka University, Delhi, in the Economic department. His research interests include thinking about children's meanings of care and belonging in educational settings, and identifies most closely with his experiences as a school teacher and education researcher. 3 A Word to the Readers/Preface The conceptual framework and draft curriculum presented here have emerged from my ongoing work in Prerna Boys School in Lucknow, India. The school, started in 2009, is a relatively new endeavour by SHEF,1 a nonprofit founded more than three decades ago. The purpose of this document is to share our best practices and their theoretical underpinnings as we worked at helping boys understand gender equality and to reframe their notions of masculinity and manhood—or perhaps more appropriately, boyhood. We share the growing perception that addressing boys’ attitudes is an important part of achieving gender equality. We further believe that lessons on equality are best taught to girls and boys when they are young and that school is the right place to deliver these lessons. We also believe that lessons in equality are as important as lessons in language, math, and science and should be included in the official curriculum. School education can be a powerful transformative force, provided we transform what we teach and how we teach it. This document is useful for those working toward gender equality in and through education, including policymakers, educators, teachers, and administrators. It is also relevant to people engaged in working for girls’ rights to safety, education, and autonomy. Although this document presents work done with boys, it can support and contribute to the effort of the thousands of concerned men and women who are working to create a safer, more hospitable, and happier world for girls and women. The curriculum is a work-in-progress, based on the work we did with boys aged 13–17, in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India from 2016-2017. It is more of a general guide and framework than a step-by-step instruction manual for teachers. It includes a set of lesson plans that we developed alongside the boys. Though the context is Indian and many of the discussions are specific to India, the general ideas can be easily adapted by teachers to other country contexts as well. Lastly, I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, without which the publication of this manuscript would not have been possible. With best wishes, Urvashi Sahni 1SHEF currently runs three K-12 schools, catering to rural children, working-class girls and boys, and upper middle-class children. Through its many programs, SHEF addresses the needs of out-of-school children, as well as children with special needs. In collaboration with the state governments of UP and Rajasthan, SHEF works with more than 900 government schools through teacher training programs. For more on SHEF, see the last section of this document. 4 The Site and Methodology This framework and curriculum for educating boys for gender justice has emerged from 18 months of critical dialogues with the boys of Prerna Boys School in Lucknow, along with some lessons and ideas borrowed from other sources, including my own work with Prerna girls.2 The School was established in July 2009 as a primary school—Pre-K to 5 classes—that we expanded to high school in 2015. The classes are conducted in the afternoon and the student population consists of working-class boys from low-income families, many of whom work in the morning. This initiative was undertaken in response to the demand of the parents of the Prerna Girls School for a quality education for their boys.3 We were also motivated by the belief that in order to achieve a gender-just society, boys and girls both must receive an education that teaches them to critically examine the construction of gender in patriarchal societies. This means that boys, too, must learn to fight, resist, and end sexist oppression in the same way as girls. Boys must also learn how to deconstruct a patriarchal conception of masculinity and reconstruct an egalitarian one in its place. In a hierarchical patriarchal society like India, it is difficult to understand and conceptualize the idea of equality. It is particularly hard for boys given that they are raised with a sense of entitlement, superiority, and privilege. Regardless of the class, caste, or religion they belong to, boys always enjoy a preferred status over their female counterparts. Changing these conceptual frameworks involves a paradigm shift, almost Copernican in nature. School can be a very good place to reframe boys’ worldview by challenging and transcending their perception of masculinity and other firmly entrenched notions of caste, gender, and class. With these motivations,
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