The time has arrived for a ‘gender curriculum’ to be integrated into Delhi’s education revolution in schools. The singular most important reason is that education should be inclusive and promote consciousness-raising among students, teachers, parents and policymakers for a more equal and violence-free society.
Gender is not only an unequal system of power relations but also a compelling marker of identity that intersects with other axes of inequalities like caste and class. So fundamental are the everyday negotiations on gender that an early school curriculum built around its complexities will only ease lived realities and confront injustices.
If education is a practice of freedom, it must find its emancipatory worth in both responding classrooms and foundational curriculum. Both are interconnected to each other in a symbiotic relationship of strength and fragility. Progressive education must be a quest for self-actualisation.
Structural reform of equity-focused curricular decisions can no longer ignore the links between students’ achievements and their diverse and unequal socio-economic backgrounds. Thus, a resilient education system has to foster a learning environment that enables affective skills, critical thinking and innovation. Herein lies the need for constructive engagement with the pedagogy of gender performance that will prepare children to be democratic citizens.
Pedagogy
A constituent element of curricular development is pedagogy. It is a ‘complex philosophy, politics and practice of education that bears an ethical and political commitment to transforming oppressive social conditions.’
A gendered pedagogy should essentially be ‘humanising’ and build on the richness of a teacher-student relationship. Learning social responsibility and political agency are informed choices from such a philosophical standpoint. Locating learning in social/gender issues and connecting with shared experiences and confessions in classroom spaces are fruitful takeaways for collective progress. Unless voices are unsilenced, shame will not allow children to talk about how being a woman on the street at night feels or how technology is misused for online harassment of girls.
Knowledge production and its claims
The central methodological question for curriculum development would be how and where would gender find a place. My answer would be everywhere: in textbook chapters and playrooms. Teaching is a performative act that has to be embedded in the plan-act-observe-reflect framework. The idea is to question values and normative assumptions in disciplines that reinforce patterns of subordination.
The unrecognised influence of gender on the production of dominant knowledge and existing knowledge claims needs nuanced classroom discussions. For example, exploring if there can be a naturally sexed body will enable an engagement with concerns of sexuality, problems of heteronormativity, consent and laws. In a science class, teachers could discuss gendered patterns in scientific imagery that may not be accurate. An example could be the use of gendered metaphors in human reproduction that presents the female body as passive.
Representative image of a school. Photo: Jagseer S Sidhu/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Language
If we believe in John Locke’s words that the human mind begins as ‘a white paper void of all characters without any ideas’ then the inner theatre of mind needs nurturing from childhood. Classroom practices that are uncritical of language as a tool to buttress gender stereotypes are problematic spaces of learning.
Sexism in language enhances male control over the production of cultural norms. Words for women are more sexualised than words for men. Often, women find themselves at a loss for words to articulate their existential problems like sexual harassment or menstruation.
Maleness in language constrains thought and even possibilities of an alternative vision of reality. Classroom pedagogical strategy can experiment with the creation of a language of their own. It could become a cautionary tale for the violence of language that normalises the use of cuss words in conversations among students.
Addressing the problem of masculinities
The extraordinariness of a gender curriculum lies in questioning hegemonic masculinity too. Patriarchy adversely impacts not only women but also men. Marginalised men are often subject to oppressive power operated by other men.
The classroom has to probe anxieties of ‘proving’ one’s masculinity to blend solidarity between different genders. Interrogating ideas of heteronormative binaries could be a good beginning to naturalise sexually diverse identities. The association of aggression with masculine standards of success, power and vitality could be a moot point in understanding the dynamics of violence that plagues women’s lives.
Cognitive and moral development
Every curriculum has to do away with sexist standards of reason. Traditional learning tends to focus on curriculum as an object or textbook instead of an embodied world of children. New pedagogical techniques have to re-centre around feeling, empathy and passion. ‘Caring’ in classrooms can propel more responses to conversations.
The point is to create meaningful spaces for finding voices through coalescent argumentation that exposes gender stereotypes and intervenes in the institutional structures that sustain intersectional oppression.
A good example of such cognitive capacity building is through art education. Meanings to specific visual artworks can be discussed to allow students to think about how gender biases are inscribed to a work of art or even how students process an artwork from their gendered positionalities.
The way forward
A gender curriculum has to evolve for systemic change that infuses agency in teachers and students alike. By rendering visible gendered cultural inscriptions, it can benefit from dialogic, dialectically educative encounters in the classrooms. The transition from ‘the will to know’ to ‘the will to become’ must be a classroom habit. Agreeing with Judith Butler, the one-goal mission is ‘to think through the possibility of subverting and displacing’ perversions of gendered ideas that interrupt the progress of any citizen. Transformative change in the attitudes of children will be the first step to revolutionise society. Delhi, don’t shy away from it.
Anita Tagore is associate professor at Kalindi College, University of Delhi. She is a lawyer and socio-legal researcher.
