Faculty of Education - Theses

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Start date: 2013 × End date: 2013 × Subject: early childhood × Subject: gender equity ×

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    Gender discourses and teacher-talk: reconceptualising teachers' roles in promoting gender equity in Pakistani early childhood classrooms
    D'SOUZA JUMA, AUDREY ( 2013)
    This study used feminist poststructuralist theories to reconceptualise teachers’ roles in promoting gender equity in early childhood classrooms in Pakistan. Whilst, how to promote gender equity in early childhood classrooms have been studied in western settings; this is one of the first studies to explore this issue in depth in the Pakistani context. The study used participatory action research to gather data about how twelve teachers enacted gender equity in their classrooms. That data included detailed observations and videotaped data of interactions between teachers and children, interviews with teachers, conversations with children, field notes, monthly meetings of the action research group and reflective journals collected over a ten month period. I found that reconceptualising gender equity in Pakistan is both risky and contradictory because of the discursive ‘regime of religious patriarchy’ that frames and bounds this work. Specifically, discourses of morality, essentialism, heterosexuality, male supremacy and sexuality limited how teachers enacted gender equity in their classrooms and the risks they perceived and at times were prepared to take in promoting gender equity in their classrooms. Any discourses or pedagogic practices which were seen to have their roots in the divine could not be challenged or changed. However, despite this, teachers did find ways to do gender equity work in a context such as Pakistan that is visibly patriarchal and dominated by a regime of religious patriarchy. The thesis thus creates new knowledge about how teachers can challenge discursive practices and work for gender equity from within specific boundaries. It also points to the possibilities of working with children in the future to offer multiple ways of ‘doing’ masculinity and femininity.