Educators’ Explorations with Gender Performativities and Orientations: A Participatory Action Research Project in West Nile Sub-Region, Uganda

Shelley Jones

doi:10.20360/langandlit29440

Abstract

This paper discusses findings from a feminist participatory action research study conducted in the West Nile region of Northern Uganda with a group of 35 educators who attended a one-week intensive professional development course focused on promoting gender equality in schools. Through a theoretical and methodological framework of multiliteracies and multimodality, gender constructs were “exposed” (Butler, 1988) and “disoriented” (Ahmed, 2006), opening new spaces for the promotion of gender equality, as well as pedagogical approaches to literacy that the participants could integrate into their own teaching practice to facilitate transformative learning in their own school contexts.

Highlights

Sustainable Development Goal 5, Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, is testament to global recognition of the need to prioritize efforts that will challenge and change practices, behaviours, and structures that have served to oppress and discriminate against girls and women
The participants did not identify the underlying gender constructs that framed the space of these orientations and performances
The multimodal activities described below discuss how the participants began to engage with gender constructs and gain deeper understanding of gender-related issues in their own lives as well as in their educational contexts

Summary

Introduction

Sustainable Development Goal 5, Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, is testament to global recognition of the need to prioritize efforts that will challenge and change practices, behaviours, and structures (many long-held and culturally embedded) that have served to oppress and discriminate against girls and women. Disorienting gender within deeply patriarchal societies, such as Uganda, will entail no less than a radical deconstruction of the way things are and have been: gender equality can only truly be achieved if gender is exposed as a social construct that is “performed” (Butler, 1988) along “lines” (Ahmed, 2006) that have been forged and afforded particular forms of power (or oppression) and privilege (or subjugation) by history and culture and that can be “disorientated” in order to be reorientated (Ahmed, 2006) Educators in such contexts, as frontline proponents of gender equality, have a dauntingly complex task. Because their own identities have been shaped by Language and Literacy

Results

Discussion

Conclusion