Curriculum and content
are decolonized and gender transformative. They ensure progressive and relevant technical, cognitive, and creative skills, social knowledge, and deals with rights, dynamics, social norms, and beliefs.
If not deliberately designed to be transformative, education can be one of the most conservative social mechanisms – capable of reinforcing gender stereotypes and engraining harmful knowledge structures and forms of understandings in an entire generation of citizens.
A curriculum that is not properly adjusted to promote equal gender rights may contain gender biases in learning material, representation, and teaching practices. This can cause an educational environment of discrimination and intolerance based on gender or sex that spills over into society at large. In its most dangerous form, such beliefs, mindsets, and practices can lead to gender-based violence.
On the other hand, education that creates awareness of gender norms, dynamics, practices, and empowers all learners to question, challenge, and transform harmful social norms has the potential to decrease violence against women and girls. Rather than being gender-blind, education systems should promote gender equity, including sexual and reproductive health and rights, and support learners’ awareness of injustice and rights violations.
It is critical to invest in gender audits of curricula, teaching and learning materials, and ensure inclusive review processes (in education planning, budgeting, and curriculum development).
Case Story
Empowering girls through intercultural gender transformative education
in Riberalta, Bolivia
One example of gender transformative and decolonized education content is found in the Riberalta municipality of Bolivia. In Riberalta, 60% of the population lives in poverty. Poverty affects, among other things, children’s performance in school as many must drop out of school over different periods of time to support the income of their families. Other significant obstacles to their education include gender discrimination, different types of violence, teenage pregnancy, and low-quality education.
Schools in Riberalta often have students who are older than expected for their grade level (falling behind in school), pregnant youth, temporary school dropouts, and the lack of family support for education. The five-year education project by Oxfam and partners, Empowering girls through intercultural gender transformative education in Riberalta, addresses these obstacles. The project aims to empower 6,000 girls, boys, and adolescents from 6 to 14 years old in 20 primary schools through improving education in collaboration with different local actors of the education community.
To do so, it has:
Introduced new technologies and education materials that reflect the local context and culture to promote gender equality and alternative life projects;
Produced booklets, applications, and radio programs that promote the participation of women, the continuation of schooling, a life free of gender-based violence, and invites boys and girls to question social norms.
Our local partner organisation Fundación Machaqa Amawta has developed all of the material, made freely available online on the RibeTic’sAulas blog, an online educational resource bank for schoolchildren as well as teachers. The name, RibeTic’sAulas, is an abbreviation of the Spanish name for Riberalta Technology Classrooms. RibeTic’sAulas is developed with the support of Oxfam and the Hempel foundation. and includes free digital resources for students and teachers, including the radio program for learning math and language “Grillo Alegría”, a computer application with math and language games, and a smartphone application to build a life project. These digital resources have provided a crucial platform for continued learning under the region’s school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project is currently systematizing this model and will later present it to local authorities and the Ministry of Education to replicate and scale-up the project.
The episodes of the radio program called Grillo Alegría covers math and language subjects. All over the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, radio broadcasting educational material has enabled learners to continue their education despite school lock-downs. Although distance education can never, and should never, replace in-person learning spaces, it can supplement the regular educational material during emergency education under a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mi proyecto de vida
(My life project)
Another digital resource developed by the project is an educational computer application with 10 interactive games in math and language for girls and boys. The material is based on an analysis of which subjects and themes children in 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th grade have the most difficulty with in the Riberalta region. The games enable schoolchildren to learn through play and develops their ICT (Information and Communication Technology) skills.
The app for mobile Android phones, “Mi Proyecto de Vida” (My Life Project), helps girls and boys in 5th and 6th grade imagine and dream of how much they can achieve in the future by helping them create a life plan. The app has Indigenous representation, which enables the many Indigenous learners of the Riberalta region imagine themselves flourish and dream big about their life plans. It also challenges harmful gender norms by encouraging boys to cook and clean in the home, and girls to pursue big careers so that children learn to think in terms of gender equality and justice.
It is important to stress that technological solutions like these can never replace public quality education, where teachers are trained in gender sensitive and transformative pedagogy. These technological educational materials can spread content over great distances and supplement regular formal classroom education. However, it should never be a standalone solution or substitution for face-to-face learning.
This case story from Bolivia also relate to Life-long learning through life skills education as well as pedagogical methodology, all part of Gender Transformative Education.