How inclusive pedagogies can end gender oppression

Educators play a crucial role in imparting quality and value education and fostering qualitative change through teaching and learning. They bring about valuable pedagogical and curriculum changes, thus promoting equity and helping students overcome cultural barriers. Avant-garde pedagogies can enhance the active participatory teaching-learning process.

The UN promotes feminist pedagogy to create space for open discussions to ensure a curriculum aligned with themes to develop learner strategies to resist institutional challenges and apply the same to transform gendered power relations within organisations. NEP 2020 recognises the gender-inclusive contributions in the Indian education sector. While it raises the issue of marginalisation based on class, caste, religion, and gender, NEP does not look through the gender paradigms of ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ scientifically. Therefore, it does not address the nuances of class-based gendered violence, caste-based gendered offences, frotteurism, paraphilia, and the arbitrary role of religion in socio-sexual stratification.

A curriculum accommodating ‘peer teaching’ as a pedagogical strategy is becoming increasingly popular in Indian education. Peer teaching can effectively deal with conflicts arising out of class, caste, religion, region, community, and their gender-specific indexes present in the social hinterland of India where the learners inhabit. Learners encountering gendered situations and experiences of conflict would call for a revised moral assessment and action. Peer teaching, therefore, has the potential to erase gendered conflict from knowledge. It can endorse a syncretic discourse to ‘illegitimate’ particular patriarchal visions and chauvinistic claims of society.

However, peer teaching requires the educators, the academicians, and the learners to ‘unlearn’ their preconceived notions of gender norms, traditional values, and patriarchal ideals. Moreover, a considerable number of Indian learners belong to diverse social, economic, cultural, and gender groups, who bring with them a variety of cultural practices, knowledge systems, and perceptions; an understanding of manifold identity becomes critical for the educator. Furthermore, Indian classrooms reflect Paolo Freire’s ‘banking model’, i.e., the teacher is more knowledgeable than the students and therefore possesses the authority; therefore, the teacher ‘deposits’ facts into the students’ minds, who are to memorise and recall them. The teacher is superior to the rest and thus determines what is good or correct. Therefore, peer teaching, even in such a classroom, can issue communiqué but does not ensure ‘inquiry’ about learning. 

NEP’s emphasis on “education as the single greatest tool for achieving social justice and equality” is deemed fit to offer an educational praxis for the Indian education scenario that can liberate learners from gendered oppression, garnering a positive change in Indian society. Educators can think of Freire’s ‘problem-posing model’ as one of the liberating pedagogies. This technique, as enunciated in Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is, hitherto, underused in the Indian education context. However, it restores a more equal relationship between the educator and the students, as everyone simultaneously fills the roles of the teacher and the student. These ‘teacher-students’ and ‘student-teachers’ decide on important topical points to talk about together.

The teacher becomes a facilitator. The educator becomes an instructor. The topical points are presented as ‘problems’ to the whole class. The ‘problems’ are the issues raised to be solved together without any ‘correctness’ prejudice of authoritative ‘ranking’. The classroom becomes a real democratic space where everyone has a voice of equal value. Hence, the educator and the students are all intellectually engaged and contribute to the ‘knowledge’. The use of such teaching techniques for adult learners in higher education will be apt, as it has the potential to transform the classroom academic discourses into a method of gender liberation, deterring gender polarisation from becoming a tool of oppression and patriarchal dominance.

NEP provides for setting up a Gender Inclusion Fund (GIF), especially for girls and transgender students, and recommends that Samagra Shiksha integrate and universalize access to education in all states and UTs. The most critical task in ensuring equity and inclusion at all levels of education is to make the learner an independent thinker. Identification and incorporation of real-life situations and experiences, reflecting the gender paradigm, include discussion, role play, skit, narration, presentation, improvisation, hot seat, etc.; appreciate gender-inclusive participation; and inculcate empathy among the young to adult learners of primary to higher education.

Althea Spencer Miller offers to “introduce into the classroom a plethora of possibilities that resist easy answers and disallow the maintenance of homogeneous neatness.” She proposes that struggles in the community and issues considered controversial and urgent by society can “all become opportunities for the praxis of critical feminist pedagogy.” Thus, educators can adopt feminist pedagogy to dismantle gender dysphoria, the hegemony of gendered hierarchy in Indian education. Such a pedagogy approaches curriculum design in line with international benchmarking to develop academic critical thinking and intellectual open-mindedness, directly reflecting the learning curve of outcome-based education (OBE).

The zeal for problem-solving and perception of gender inconsistencies, gender gaps, or gendered disturbances become the essential stimuli in this creative pursuit and experiential learning process. Conditioning makes the entire student cohort unlearn undesired and unsocial behaviour and learn deserved changes in their behaviour through reinforcements. Segregating learners into sexist prejudices and gender socialisation in terms of their class, caste, gender, religion, sexuality, and region would not provide the desired sense of belonging among female and transgender students. Instead, they should be included in the least restrictive environment possible, prompting successful self-actualization. OBE, in light of NEP, seeks the implementation of the aforementioned objectives. Without a paradigm shift in the pedagogies, NEP’s education strategy would remain a mere rhetorical policy statement enacted through some mechanical, ritualised processes.

(Sreemoyee Sarkar is an assistant professor, Dept of Political Science and History, and Debsarma is an assistant professor, Dept of Performing Arts, Christ (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru)