Global inequalities, multipolarity, and supranational organizations engagements with gender and education

This paper seeks to identify the emergence of a multi-polar space regarding international development in the last ten years that stands between agendas associated with human rights and basic needs, security, the environmental agenda, and responses to the 2008 financial crisis. In this environment, gender and education, notably issues associated with girls’ access to school, have come to occupy a particular resonant space, signalling both an end to all development ills, and the dissolution of differences between, for example, the state and the private sector, equality oriented NGOs and those linked with profit. The paper discusses how in this process supra-national organisations concerned with education deploy a number of key terms –empowerment , effectiveness and evidence – and how the ambiguities associated with these allow policies concerned with gender and education to signal both a social justice project and processes which sanction or sanitise relations of commodification, exploitation or continued inequalities. The analysis comprises three threads of discussion. In setting the scene I first present a montage of some features of global inequalities associated with gender and education and some of the slippery dimensions of multi-polarity. I then consider some of the ways in which multi-polarity has been deployed in discussions of international relations and radical democracy , and use some of the metaphoric aspects of this notion to characterise the present moment in international development policy. Through this I attempt to theorise approaches to gender, education and international development that I term dispersal. In the third section I outline some of the relationships of supra-national organisations with national and local institutions working on gender and education, and show , using the example of the Department for International Development (DFID) Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) programme how features of dispersal are evident in policy declarations, programme descriptions and framing discourses. The conclusion draws out the implications of this analysis for some of the key global policy declarations being negated in 2015, such as the Sustainable development Goals (SDGs)

Negative Capability? Measuring the unmeasurable in education

This introductory article to the special issue of Comparative Education on measuring the unmeasurable in education considers measurement as reflecting facts and uncertainties. The notion of negative capability is used metaphorically to depict some limits of what is measurable, and portray aspects of the process of education, associated with uncertainty and public scrutiny of complexity. Four overarching questions – what, when, why and how – have guided the reflections of the authors who have contributed to the special issue. What are we measuring when we try to measure the unmeasurable in education and what are we not measuring? When have attempts been made to measure the unmeasurable in education, what metrics have been adopted in which contexts, and with what outcomes? Why have measures been adopted as indicators of the unmeasurable, such as human rights? How have particular historically located organisations approached the problem of measuring the apparently unmeasurable in education, with what epistemological, normative and conceptual resources, and consequences? The introductory article looks at measurement as a form of negative capability in some discussions of history of social statistics in education, the current debate over indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals, and how to measure gender equality in education

Measuring Gender inequality and equality in education

Since 1995, considerable expertise has built up in measuring aspects of gender inequality and equality, and in researching these in education, particularly formal schooling. Existing international and national measures used for reporting on gender in formal schooling chart gender parity in school enrolment, attendance, progression, and learning outcomes. Gender parity measures the number of girls as a proportion of the number of boys. This measure generates some insights regarding the distribution and use of resources, but it is narrow. However, gender parity as a measurement technique tells us very little about the institutions which help reproduce gender inequalities within and beyond education. It also fails to give us a sense of the dimensions of gender equality, and the processes and investments in schooling which will develop, support and sustain this. Thus it does not generate sufficiently multi-dimensional insights for policy makers and practitioners with regard to where gender inequalities and equalities are located in education and how change in these processes can be evaluated and tracked using quantitative and qualitative information and a range of strategies for measurement

Global injustice, pedagogy and democratic iterations: Some reflections on why teachers matter

The article argues teachers matter because of their potential to engage in critical reflection on values associated with connecting the local, the national and the global. Their practice can support those who are dislocated, and who have no place. Teachers matter because they can help us understand how we share humanity and aspirations across many differences. The discussion identifies some similarities between approaches to pedagogy and Seyla Benhabib’s notion of democratic iteration. Both concepts suggest a navigation between the general, the particular and some of the complexities of their contradictions which can guide teachers’ work. Frameworks from cosmopolitanism and the capability approach are explored for detail they provide on how this navigation can be considered in practice across differently politically constituted formations and diverse, unequally situated groups. Drawing on some reflections on work in an international classroom, the conclusion explores some of these navigations across inequalities