Gender in the classroom

The author explores way of pedagogically integrating perspectives to dismantle myopic ‘institutionalised syllabic formats’

Teaching is both a political act and process. The ideas chosen to be highlighted and ignored, elucidated and obfuscated, appreciated and censured and the issues, themes and histories that are opened up/considered closed for discussion in the semi-public space of the classroom confirm the presence of an endeavour that leads to the construction of what one might call, ‘motivated knowledges’[i]. Radical pedagogues like Ivan Illich (1983) have argued that more often than not, formal education perpetuates the hierarchical relations of power within a society and serves to systematically reproduce social classes. Critical and feminist pedagogical traditions have critiqued such status quo-ist modes of organising and producing knowledge. Drawing inspiration from the work of Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire (1973) who placed before us a vision of education where both students and teachers work collectively to question dominant ideologies and societally-approved forms of knowledge-construction as well as one’s own taken-for-granted value-systems and belief-models, scholars like Henry Giroux (1994) have argued that critical pedagogy illuminates the relationship between knowledge, authority and power. Critical pedagogy as an interventionistic initiative thus debunks the idea of neutral or apolitical education.
Over the years, many feminist scholars have tried to look at the various ways in which socio-political determinants of gender and class, race and religion have shaped and defined pedagogical practices. Donna Haraway (1988) has, for instance, argued that all constituted knowledge is “partial and situated”.
An active acknowledgement of such partial and situated knowledges that the teacher as a facilitator-figure in the classroom helps produce, makes it possible to create a space where different kinds of knowledges and perspectives can be concurrently recognised and explored: where the teacher and the student become partners in the process of learning and un-learning.
In reality however, institutionalised syllabic formats that are structured carefully (and not so carefully) around certain ostensibly useful principles of teachability (and so also, awkwardly enough a complementary learnability) contribute to a pedagogy-profile that is uninspiringly mono-valent.  The necessity of therefore, composing and constructing educational programmes as active initiatives which allow the learner to access and recreate a network of informations and insights in a manner that insists on a more dynamic interaction between diverse disciplines, between knowledge systems that are international and local and importantly enough between experiential worlds that are global and personal therefore become relevant. In other words, such critical pedagogical practices would help stimulate the questioning of the various givens of received wisdom as well as excite the student to extend a spirited enquiry into her own life. A critical feminist pedagogy then would place an accent on examining the provisionality of identity construction – its dependence on the variables of location and language, class and race and religion.
This is however an ideal proposition. The education system as it stands often poses barriers to the attainment of such democratically composed ‘classrooms’. Among several factors, the fact that teachers are expected to ‘grade’ students imbues them with an authority that becomes an almost insurmountable obstacle.
Also, large classes with defined course structures tend to be antithetical to the more intimate demands of critical feminist pedagogy. The micro-workshop group model, on the other hand, lends itself to programmes where readings can be chosen in collaboration with students and discussions can inspire personalised meditations on themes and issues. Conflicts of opinion, which arise inadvertently in such informalised initiatives, become opportunities not to arrive at the definitive truth at the core of an issue but to explore differences of responses and assemble an assessed network of perspectives in the process.
As a teacher at an undergraduate college, I have had the opportunity to examine closely the various cross-role negotiations between instructors and students. The various ways in which knowledges are produced and consumed in the context of the classroom and the relationship of what one might facetiously call such ‘information-flows’ within the larger institutional apparatus of the educational system (examinations et al) does not but make one feel that the modes of judging students are sometimes not only outdated but are also inimical to the all-important participatory process of knowledge-generation.
Since 1997, I have conducted workshops and reading-discussion groups on a variety of themes ranging from Feminism and its key texts, Development studies and its debates, to the Partition of India and the History and Philosophy of Science. Running through all of these discussions has been my own political conviction and agenda of integrating a gender-inquiry into every act of socio-historical cultural analysis. Being careful about not being mono-perspectival however, one has to be constantly aware that gender is only one of the several central axes to offer perspectives to analyse social phenomena. And that it is crucial to understand the various modes by which issues and experiences of gender, class, caste, religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation among several others intersect each other along multiple planes so that a more substantial appreciation of the event or experience under study can be secured.
Working with groups of under-graduates and grappling with ideas along with students is both a fulfilling and challenging exercise. More recently however, my conversations with younger school-going children have kindled my interest in exploring ways of integrating gendered pedagogical initiatives with other disciplinary initiatives that go into the making of the curriculum that is taught in the school classroom.
In many ways my concerns also try and explore the perceived impact of the media on young children and particularly on girls. In the last few years, two committed organisations have separately put together workshops in Mumbai on establishing and analysing the relationship between gender and the media. Being involved in some measure in both these efforts has afforded me the opportunity to explore the possibilities offered by alternative pedagogical perspectives.
Point of View, an organisation committed to showcasing women’s experiences and philosophies has created an interactive curriculum which exposes participants to a wide range of representations of women, thereby challenging the stereotypical definitions of beauty and enabling them to redefine it for themselves. The six-hour schedule of this curriculum is meant to get college students to observe, introspect and debate on their personal perceptions of women, beauty and the production of sexist imagery by different forms of mass media through the creative use of art, films, advertisements and specially created board games. They argue, “more often than not, advertisements today present a singular version of beauty, which neither represents nor is achievable for the majority of women. By bringing the entire subject of beauty into the consciousness of participants, we hope to empower them to change their own understanding of what constitutes ‘beauty’. While doing so, we also aim to enhance participants’ capacities to critically explore and deconstruct images and representations manufactured by advertising.” The curriculum is designed for both young men and women.
The other collective, A Woman’s Place organises ‘Girls’ Media Group’ workshops for XI standard girls. The idea is to both interrogate the gender-discriminatory image-systems perpetuated by the media and at the same time produce counter-texts in the form of mock newspapers, radio and video documentaries, thus creating a space where participants can acquire the agency to resist and subvert the homogenising tendencies of commercially produced and disseminated imagery.
The liberatory potential of such media-based pedagogy has been discussed recently by Douglas Kellner (2000) who argues that critical media-involved pedagogy provides students and citizens with the tools to analyse intelligently how texts are constructed and in turn helps them construct their own viewer and reader-positions. He also talks of how “critical media literacy is empowering, enabling students to become critical producers of meanings and texts” and helping them “to resist manipulation and domination”.
One cannot but notice that the experience of being at the receiving end of a sustained media-onslaught has weakened the critical defences of most people and on the whole, imageries of reactionary persuasions have got naturalised in many households. My interest however is in the abiding impact that this mass media-boom has had on children. I am however far from suggesting that children are a passive audience uninvolved in the process of interpretation. Nor am I suggesting the presence of a homogenous and monolithic media. However, despite these disclaimers, it is unfortunately possible to suggest without any undue exaggeration that media-texts offer a heavily gender-biased worldview that actively constructs specific and often very defined versions of masculinity and femininity. These constructions hold within them imperatives that define appropriate ways of being and becoming a man or a woman and are linked widely to notions of acceptance in the larger social world. While these texts are targeted equally at boys and girls, the implications of non-conformity for girls often involve a greater number of sanctions and disapproval.
A patriarchally organised, consumeristically produced media sends multiple signals to young girls that are as contradictory as they are individually insistent. All kinds of sexual violence: abuse, harassment, assault, attacks from rejected suitors and rape are regular news items reminding girls that they constantly face the threat of sexual danger. The outcomes of criminal cases for rape are testimony that anything women do or don’t do can be held against them – even the way we dress, talk, walk and conduct ourselves in public places. Concurrently, this consumeristic media-culture broadcasts continuously sexualised images of younger and younger girls sending the message clearly that to be a successful ‘upwardly-mobile’ woman, one has to necessarily be sexually desirable. Among other features, the index of such ‘sexual desirability’ includes body shape (model thin), clothes (fashionably revealing and risque) and the skilful use of cosmetics (to become ‘fairer’ among other things). Young girls then are faced with the impossibility of simultaneously ensuring both their ‘sexual safety’ and their ‘sexual success’ – each of which requires very specific and opposing strategies, strategies which even on their own come without any guarantees, but which when taken together can only ensure the kind of anxieties that keep psychologists in business.
Using illustrations offered in other contexts (in this case, in the United States), I have sought to make a case for designing gendered pedagogic practices aimed at adolescent girls and boys in Indian cities. Mary Pipher in Reviving Ophelia (1995) argues that we live in a looks-obsessed, media-saturated, “girl-poisoning” culture. Despite the ostensible acceptance of gender-equity as an important area of address by most public institutions, escalating levels of sexism and violence (ranging from deliberate discrimination by undervaluing intelligence and achievement to severe sexual harassment) cause girls to stifle their creative spirit and natural impulses, which in the long run, contributes to the ultimate dissolution of their self-esteem.
Lauren Greenfield writes about growing up in Los Angles where it is “not cool to be a kid” and everything seems to be in Fast Forward (1999). She talks of how media-imagery totally determines perceptions of realities and dominates the imagination. In Girl Culture (2002), Greenfield chronicles photographically a deeply disturbing account of the stress-inducing pre-occupation that girls develop about weight, sports and sexuality. Joan Jacobs Brumberg in The Body Project (1997) examines how the changing social values in America have impacted adolescent girls’ perceptions of their own bodies. She suggests that girls see their bodies as a “message board” and goes on to make an impassioned case for “girl advocacy” and cites the need to “initiate a larger multigenerational dialogue” arguing that it is time to talk “about the ways in which American girlhood has changed” and discuss “what girls must have to ensure a safe and creative future”.
Although Pipher, Greenfield and Brumberg locate their work in the United States, the reality for the middle-class Indian urban adolescent girl is not as different as it may have been, say, five decades ago. As she has to continuously negotiate with several intersecting and awkwardly co-existing strains of tradition and modernity in her everyday life, the pressures are probably more complexly overwhelming. As a more aggressive global visual culture emerges out of a trans-national transfer of images, icons, fashions and lifestyles and is offered for skewed consumption to diverse constituencies, distant worlds and world-views start camping on our doorstep and the anxieties to conform only multiply, creating situations that are distressingly replete with cultural ironies and pathos. Even as we struggle to combat poverty-based chronic malnutrition in adolescent girls of lower income families, we are simultaneously confronted with concerns regarding the increase in chronic dieting-based anaemia (even anorexia and bulimia) in girls from more affluent families.
Like Pipher, Greenfield and Brumberg, I too believe that it is adolescent girls who are more urgently at risk in comparison to boys. However, designing a gender-based programme to interrogate the new ideals of femininity must necessarily involve a concomitant inquiry into the construction of the extended ideals of masculinity. It is not enough to address adolescent girls, we also need to talk to adolescent boys in keeping with the larger vision of critical feminist pedagogy, which incorporates multiple voices and perspectives and highlights the virtues of collaborative learning. 
The question now is about how to address this extremely heterogeneous and often unknown group of adolescents. Where do we find a voice that is not unnecessarily shrill but is nonetheless compelling enough to ensure that young girls and boys are provided with the confidence to decode mediatic stimuli and imagery so that they may respond to it with a greater level of honesty, independence and self-assurance?
Instead of combating media-promoted worldviews with acts of selective censorship, one needs to help create spaces where critically liberating and tentative visions of the world can grow: tentative because one knows that any vision that presents itself as the solution has the potential to become dogmatic and oppressive. What we need complementarily then are not only more insightful politico-semiotic critiques of the media but also concrete strategies and suggestions regarding how to communicate to adolescents the viability of other possible choices they can make and explore.
A pedagogical programme which hopes to address these possibilities would necessarily include a mixture of games, exercises, discussions and films designed to elicit a more engaged recognition and appreciation from the participants of the ideologically constructed reality of all visions. Exploring in stages the determining factors behind our socialisation into assuming gendered roles, it would try and use the biographies of the participants themselves as a kind of a rough and ready template to base and guide our collective explorations of these operational socio-historical processes. The constitution of Indianness in a communally-vitiated environment and the obviousness of our heterogeneously produced cosmopolitan identities would serve as ways of furthering a discussion about the layered realities that we inhabit in various modes in different civil society-spaces. One hopes that such a discussion will unravel strategies which would help the students to negotiate with more complex and comprehensive models of participatory citizenship and vigilant consumership for the 21^st century. The greater idea behind such an initiative would be to come up with pedagogical schedules that are progressively more inclusive, extend the enquiry beyond the classroom and most importantly address the interventionist needs of participants across diverse class-memberships.
As preliminary thoughts about some of the requisites for a more radicalised pedagogical initiative, these propositions need to be integrated at various levels with our formally structured learning-systems. That the task is of great urgency and requires new interpretation of modes and models of intimate learning systems is beyond any doubt: it poses a challenge for all teachers who want to think, plan and effect a future which believes in putting justice before every other virtue.

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