How do you imagine educational spaces that are inclusive, accessible, and gender just? Any suggestions?
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How do we make Educational Spaces more accessible to all?
A most pertinent question when crime rate against women is a whopping 39/hour. On one hand more and more girls are breaking the proverbial glass ceiling and on the other, the rising aggression on streets limits their mobility. I want to share with this erudite group an insight.
I recently went on a field trip to a village in Uttarakahnd. Speaking to the young girls, I learnt that they were all educated up to 12th standard. In this relatively well off village, parents are open to educating their daughters but won’t let them go out into the city to pursue higher education mainly because of lack of proper transport & genuine safety concerns.
Two solutions that I could think of :
a) Educational Institutions should provide dedicated transport (like schools) to be accessible to those living in remote areas
b) Educational Institutions (Higher Learning) should increase their presence in remoter areas .
Looking forward to hear from everyone, what you make of this & possible solutions.
Public spaces are designed by men who make policies based on how they interact with their urban surroundings, which creates contrasting perceptions about city for men and women. The lack of representation of women in policy making leads to lack of understanding of women’s needs and expectations from a public space which directly or indirectly affects their mobility, career prospects and quality of life.
Universities are often a catalyst for bringing a change in the real world as they lead by example and showcase what is possible if there is enough conviction to create an equitable society. Some of the basic measures that can be taken by universities are as follows:
1. Ample washrooms
2. Sanitary napkin vending machines
3. Women Support Group headed by members from student body, faculty and other staff) which both sensitises students, faculty and staff as well as redresses complaints.
The basic issue lies in the lack of understanding of the needs of the opposite gender which may cause misunderstanding, threat and conflict. Therefore it is important gender sensitisation is made a priority and there is equal representation of women in policy to accommodate all perspectives and make the society equal and inclusive for everyone.
Educational spaces have 2 broader aspects – One the hardware bit in terms of physical infrastructure. Second – the software bit which is the human interface between the teachers/staff and students. I would like to focus and stress on the second aspect (from a school perspective) and highlight, the teachers more often than not are gendered being.
In creating gender-inclusive learning environments, what gets missed out are the crucial roles of the teachers. We tend to forget that the teachers themselves are products of their society and can carry with them the gender stereotypes/baggage of their communities (for better or for worse).
Interventions tend to focus on strategies for changing gender norms and attitudes of students, while missing to acknowledge and address the gender biases that teachers—whom the education community has tasked with the responsibility of catalysing wider gender norms change—may hold themselves.
There needs to be a conscious attempt for reflective practices and well thought through gender-sensitization workshops for the teachers to become more aware of and take action on their own biases. This in turn will have a ripple effect in the larger school eco-system.
Promote the culture of inquisitiveness. But for that to sustain, there is also a need to create safe spaces in the for the children to voice their experiences and concerns. Their experiences and concerns can critically help identify of what is working and what isn’t and help identify such gaps which promote gender biases.
Gender inclusive education can gain more attention when it is coupled with the success in learning standards for all students. Therefore, it is important to develop a set of quantitative and qualitative indicators that can use data to corroborate the positive impact on quality and standard of learning aided by gender inclusive educational approaches.
1. Education that aims to inculcate respect for all human beings.
2. An administration that enacts strong rules and implements them. An efficient system of grievance redressal.
3. A strong culture of mentorship.
4. An approach to gender that is between toxic (male) chauvinism and denial of gender difference.
We are making efforts in that direction. The language and idea of inclusion are limited to supporting students that need support to develop their English language abilities and students with learning needs. Unfortunately, we don’t see our children as whole people with overlapping and intersecting identities. I found Kimberle Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality of great value in informing my practice as an educator. A universal and a rather unfortunate feature of communities in Asia are rigid systems and hierarchies of positions and ranks defined by structural values and belief systems. For example, a Korean student faces two kinds of challenges, he is attending all classes in English and reading and writing complex texts while working on developing his proficiency in the language but he also faces discrimination by other Korean students who form friendships based on rank and class. We also work with white male students who are on the autism spectrum. While it is important to support students and provide them with tools to navigate the world with these challenges, we also need to find ways to engage with race/class privilege.
1. Celebrating diversity through black history, women’s history, and Dalit history month for example. Moving away from saviourhood and facilitating lessons to amplify the voices of community leaders from historically disadvantaged groups to help young people reflect on questions of caste/class/race/gender/able-body privilege
2. Celebrating pride month
3. Reading LGBTQIA+ literature in the classroom
4. Bilingual storytelling performance — an opportunity for second language learners of English to embrace and take pride in their bilingual identities, recognising that their first language and/or mother tongue is an asset.
We did a reading comprehension based on the story of Zanele Situ, is a Paralympian athlete from South Africa & wrote a biographical essay on Caster Semenya. We also watched Hidden Figures in class during Black History Month and organised a Socratic Seminar on allyship, privilege, and idea of meritocracy.
Many students in elite and privileged institutions are under the assumption that their grades and efforts are a result of their own hard work and effort. They often don’t reflect on how their cumulative social capital and resources have allowed them to access education. There is a growing need in India to talk about caste privilege in the same manner.
Our policies and structures should also be inclusive. For example, having a gender-neutral bathroom, a wheel-chair accessible campus, and opportunities for young people to participate in mixed gender sports.
Some of us are receiving Comprehensive Sexuality Education training from TARSHI to create a sexuality education programme that is inclusive of all identities. My students run a club at school called the Nagoya Action Heroes inspired by the initiatives led by Blank Noise. They started conversations on consent and wrote a proposal to the school administration to advocate for a comprehensive sexuality education programme. They also raised funds in solidarity with the transgender community in India to raise funds for the #StopTransBill protest, and organised bake sale on campus to amplify the work of a transgender comic writer, Sophie Labelle. Creating for an autonomous space for students to lead, mobilise, and actively take part in political discussions from a young age is very important.
Suggestions based on my study Harassment of female students in Educational institutions are as under:
1. Educate students about harassment and its various aspects.Students must be taught the difference between friendly teasing and bullying,between flirting abd harassment.
2.Make elimination of Harassment a top priority .Empower teachers to take a stand against inappropriate name calling and sexual comments.
3.students often feel fear ,insecure ,hesitation or shame while sharing incidents of harassment with their family members and teachers, so they need encouragement to discuss about harassment like molestation, bullying etc. Students will only reveal that they are being harassed if they will feel themselves secure.
4.self defence classes for female students should be part of curriculum.
Experts say that a support system helps such crime under the protection of children from sexual offences act,teachers are required by law to report child abuse if they get to know about one but unfortunately in most schools ,teachers have little time and sensitation to engage with students individually, this means that they require supervisory staff to curb such tendencies.
Last but not least i hope Students never experience harassment of any type but i want suggest to give them the knowledge and skills to minimize their risk of facing this issue .There is a need to sensitive the society,and mass awareness programmes should be carried out through variety of media.
Thankyou.
Here are my initial thoughts to make educational spaces inclusive, accessible and gender just:
Any institute level policy or protocol shouldn’t be biased towards a particular group
During my college, if you are staying in girls hostel and if you enter inside the hostel after 11 pm, you will have to make a simple entry in the register kept at the gate but such protocol wasn’t there for any other boys hostel. This might look like a small thing but I do feel that it’s not a creating a healthy culture.
One of my friends shared that in her college there is stringent timing for girls to enter inside the hostel i.e around 9 PM and then the gates are closed. The same policy is not in place for boys hostel which I think is unfair and unjust.
Building trust and sensitivity
If the institute really believes in the values of openness, compassion, and empathy, the processes and system should be designed in such a way that one can give feedback. The design should be inviting and participatory. Only when we create a culture of trust and belongingness, one will come forward to share their grievance. This will ensure that the channel is always open and one can be super sensitive to practises that are unhealthy for the culture.
Few things which can be starting point:
Organizing periodic townhall meeting students and director / deans
Online platform share, reflect and have discourse.
Strengthening the student community
I think one of the most effective, albeit simple, ways an atmosphere like this can be achieved is by setting up an open forum where all the stakeholders in an educational space – the students, faculty, administration in a college, for example – meet on a regular basis for everyone involved to voice their concerns and discuss their ideas. My experience as a part of a student-led group whose main aim was the safety of the student body has shown me that very often, all these different parties are of similar minds when it comes to debating issues regarding safety, but these ideas are often lost because they are expressed in conversation between individuals and not brought out in a discussion that is open to and attended by all.
This serves as a starting point from where the suggestions and ideas debated can then be used to implement concrete changes that have taken the opinions of all concerned into consideration and allows the various stakeholders to understand the perspectives of others involved.
In addition to this, I think it is imperative for effort to be put into ensuring that issues regarding gender, safety, public spaces and more are discussed in classrooms as well. This is so that it does not only fall to those who have had negative experiences to instigate change and join conversations such as in an open forum and that those who might have otherwise been unaware of these concerns as a result of their experiences thus far also understand how their peers might experience educational spaces differently.
I have no practical solutions, only an idealistic one: make people realise that it’s not that difficult to respect other people’s physical and mental dignity. It is, in fact, the most passive thing you can do. When you actively go out of your way to make people feel uncomfortable because of their gender, sexual orientation, caste, religion or whatever else, you are making efforts, putting in energy and time, and actively deviating from whatever your previous goal was. Instead, stick to doing what you’re doing, and let people live with their diversity.
For educational spaces to be inclusive, accessible, and gender-just, I think it’s important to think of two things: intersectionality and the formal-informal spaces that constitute an educational institution.
Intersectionality – which roughly means taking into account multiple axes of marginalisation such as gender, caste, class, religion, language, and sexual orientation – is hugely important if one hopes to make educational institutions inclusive and gender-just. What this means in practice is to ensure that all kinds of identities and experiences are represented adequately in the student body and teaching departments. In other words, we need to think carefully about the people that make up an educational institution and why it is that some groups are more visible and present than others. Educational institutions therefore need to think long and hard about their hiring practices and admissions policies to make sure that the people who work, learn, and live in their institutions do not form an elitist, homogeneous cohort. This is, of course, easier to implement in publicly-funded institutions like Delhi University where reservations have considerably democratised access to education (although much more work needs to be done to make the university space effectively inclusive for people from all kinds of marginalised backgrounds).
The second thing is to focus on both the formal and informal spaces that make up an educational institution. In my personal experience of being a university student, it took me a long time to realise that even classrooms are incredibly alienating and exclusive spaces where only certain kinds of people (mostly from urban, savarna, upper/middle class backgrounds with an expensive, private English-medium school education) are prominently visible in classroom discussions, tutorials etc. and receive formal recognition for their work in the form of better grades, awards, scholarships, internship opportunities, job offers etc. This certainly has to change and in my opinion, it is the institution and the faculty that have to pro-actively make the classroom more inclusive because it is unfair to burden students from marginalised backgrounds with this responsibility. One way to do this would be to implement inclusivity training programmes for teachers to make sure that students from all kinds of backgrounds have a fair opportunity to participate in the learning process and also to make sure that their work is not evaluated against a high, elitist benchmark but rather takes into account their particular disadvantages and vulnerabilities. For example, if a Dalit student from a vernacular-medium background is finding it difficult to do an assigned reading for a course and is therefore unable to write an essay based on that reading, the student should be able to approach the teacher and ask for help without the fear of being dismissed or ridiculed and also receive practical support – like an extension in the submission deadline or different readings, perhaps – to finish the task effectively. Another way to do this would be to create a rigorous, anonymous feedback-mechanism for the teaching process so that students can express their concerns and problems in a safe way and hopefully, these can be implemented thereafter in the teaching process.
In addition to these formal spaces, it is also important to ensure that students from all kinds of backgrounds are able to effectively participate in the informal spaces and practices of their educational institutions. Many activities (such as debating, theatre, music, sport etc.) and informal events (such as fresher parties, department farewells, college fests, semi-formal events to celebrate festivals or graduation etc.) are inaccessible to students from marginalised backgrounds either because they require money as a precondition for participation or the cultural ethos of that space/activity is elitist and alienating. I don’t know what kinds of concrete solutions can change this situation but I do think it is important for both the institution and the student body at large to come together and actively democratise the informal elements of the educational experience.
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