Posted on: 28 March 2007
Gender Balance and Bias is the theme of this year’s Gender Education Association International Conference which was opened by the Minister for Education and Science, Mary Hanafin on March 28th last.”The debate and discussion which will form the basis of this conference will address many of the themes of gender and education which face policymakers today,” commented Minister Hanafin at the opening. “Such debate is vital in helping us to reflect more closely on how we are responding to gender issues in education.”
The conference which examined past, present and future issues of balance and bias in education, explored themes such as teacher education inequality issues, the feminisation of the teaching profession as well as gender balance in primary, secondary and tertiary curricula and its impact on balance in the class, among other issues.
“It is a highly significant event,” said Dr Maryann Valiulis, Director of TCD’s Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies. “Having delegates from all over the world demonstrates the extent and importance of gender in education and the need to expand our knowledge about the ways in which gender affects our educational experience.”
UCD Head of the School of Education and Lifelong Learning, Professor Sheelagh Drudy gave a keynote address on Gender Balance/ Gender Bias: Teaching, Teacher Education and Professionalism in Changing International Environments in which Professor Drudy outlined issues relating to gender, teaching, teacher education and professionalism in the context of emergent global processes and the development of the knowledge society. She gave particular consideration to the impact of the feminisation of teaching, reviewing international patterns of gender variations in the teaching profession.
Professor Mineke Van Essen, University of Gronigen, the Netherlands, spoke on Femininity as a pitfall. A historical perspective on the strategies of professional women in education and outlined how in educational history, femininity and professional authority were represented as a ‘contradictio in terminis’. Professor Van Essen examined how ambitious women educationalists attempted to reconcile femininity and professionalism through strategies such as the development of their supposed ‘natural’ qualities within a professional context, or in other words, to ‘profess gender’. According to Professor Van Essen, the result was that they used bias to achieve professional gender balance within the educational domain.
Professor Rebecca Rogers, Education Department of the University of Paris spoke on Thinking about gender balance and bias in the colonial context: women teachers, Islam and the education of Muslim girls in French Algeria in the 19th century. Professor Roger addressed the issue of gender bias in education through a case study approach of Muslim girls’ education in 19th century Algeria where in 1845 a Frenchwoman opened the first school for Muslim girls in Algiers. The debates surrounding the schools’ opening, its functioning, and then its closure in 1861 shed light on the multiple ways in which girls’ education was envisioned in a colonial context where Islam posed a political problem. “The schoolteacher who started the school argued that Muslim girls’ education should be at the heart of the French “civilising mission” in Algeria; her vision, while promoting girls’ education, carried with it the overtones of racial and class superiority that characterised the civilising mission,” commented Professor Rogers.
The Honourable Justice Sydney Hanlon, the first Judge of the Dorchester County District Court in Boston spoke on Gender, Violence and Women’s Education. (Friday 30th March 2007), in which he outlined that around the world, one in three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused during her lifetime, most often by a member of her own family or someone known to her. According to Justice Hanlon, this gender violence, and the resulting trauma, dramatically affect a woman’s ability to meet the demands of everyday life, including, especially to pursue an education at all levels. In the United States, research shows that women of secondary school and college age are most at risk for gender violence: they are sexually assaulted, stalked and battered in significant proportions, almost always by someone they know: a boyfriend or former boyfriend, a friend or an acquaintance. Women who are in college are more at risk than those who are not, and most of these incidents go unreported to law enforcement or campus authorities. “Changing this culture of gender violence in a constructive and fair way poses an important challenge for leaders in women’s, and men’s, education in the years to come,” stated Justice Hanlon.
The conference has been jointly organised by Dr Maryann Valiulis and Jennifer Redmond of the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, TCD and Dr Deirdre Raftery and Dr Judith Harford of the School of Education and Lifelong Learning, UCD. The conference organising committee has published extensively in the area of gender education.
