Classrooms as radical spaces of possibilities

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article provides a brief snapshot of a girls school in Northern India called Prerna. Girls in India are unwanted, unequal and unsafe. Every year a million of them are killed in the womb. One third of the world's child brides (read ‘girl slaves’) are in India. They live their lives in a grim, complex context where, gender, poverty and caste intersect. They face domestic violence and sexual abuse regularly. Many of them are forced into child labour at home and outside. Succeeding in this grim context, Prerna demonstrates how girls need not drop out because they are girls. Schools can indeed defeat the social obstacles to girls' education if it is so committed and engages actively to counter the gender-based factors that keep girls out of school in order to ‘keep in’ girls who are in danger of being ‘pulled’ or ‘pushed’ out. The uniqueness of the Prerna programme is that it puts an empowerment course with a strong focus on the critical study of institutionalised gender power relations in society, in the official curriculum and time table. It does not treat empowerment work as an extra curricular or after-school activity. Most importantly it demonstrates that classrooms can be transformed into ‘radical spaces of possibility’ (bell hooks) when the curriculum is centred on students' lives and its challenges.