Gender bias is rife in textbooks

By Aaron Benavot, Director of the GEM Report and Catherine Jere, University of East Anglia

Congo Textbook 2006: Education Civique et Morale. Education pour la paix

Today, on International Women’s day, we are investigating the persistence of gender bias in textbooks, and reminding policy makers that until it is addressed girls’ motivation, participation and achievement in school will continue to be undermined, affecting their future life chances.

As well as investigating the way that gender discrimination and inequality is reflected in textbooks’ pages, a future policy paper later this year will look at the way that education for sustainable development, and global citizenship, including human rights, environmental rights, peace and non-violence, and cultural diversity are portrayed. As such, our focus on textbook content supports the emphasis in the Sustainable Development Agenda on inclusive, quality learning.

Can mobile learning bridge the digital divide and learning gap?

ICT for learning may be a trendy and popular topic as a blog on this site last week discussed, but the fact remains that children from poorer households are less likely to have access to ICT both in and out-of-school. As a result, they take longer to adapt to using the technology or hone their ICT skills. The Dakar Framework in 2000 warned of the risk of ICT exacerbating existing inequalities and said such technology should serve, rather than drive, education strategies. With no huge changes in access to ICT since those days, this advice still stands. But has the advent of mobile learning moved the conversation along?

How wide is the digital divide?

A girl in Nigeria carries out her homework.

In poorer countries the ‘digital divide’ is often more extreme as computer resources remain greatly overstretched. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), in Egypt, the Dominican Republic, Nepal and the Philippines, over 100 children share a single computer in primary schools. This is partly because many schools still have no electricity. In Nicaragua, for instance, only a quarter of elementary schools have electricity. In Nepal, only 6% of primary schools and 24% of secondary schools have electricity.

Kenya’s primary schools (or those with electricity) to get laptops any time now

Children receive food at a mobile school some 50 kilometres from Lodwar, Turkana, Kenya.

The government in Kenya is about to live up to its 2013 election pledge and deliver laptops to primary schools any day now, or, at least, to all primary schools with electricity…

Kenya’s education system is in need of an overhaul, as was made an election issue in 2013. It is estimated that one million children are still out of school and vast disparities remain. Our WIDE database shows that the poorest girls in the country complete an average of just over 5 years of school, about 3.5 years fewer than the average. Meanwhile, as the GMR 2013/4 showed, half of those from poor households drop out early, while only 16% from rich households do so. As a result, around three-quarters of the poor have not achieved the basics, compared with 37% of the rich.

Good news: Gender equality due to make its way into the global education indicators

This blog celebrates the expectation that there will be a new indicator proposed to monitor target 4.7 on sustainable development and global citizenship from the one currently listed in the reports by the Inter-Agency and Expert Group. Moreover, it is expected that the change to the proposed indicator will refer to ‘gender equality’, a term included in the target. This change will demand us all to put our minds to ensuring there’s a way we can actually measure the term and ensure progress towards it over the next fifteen years and beyond.

SDG4: More than the sum of its parts?

There are ten targets within the new global education goal that were negotiated at length to be part of a comprehensive, integrated and ambitious SDG agenda relevant to all countries.

Yet, as many have mentioned, the 17 goals in the SDG agenda, with their accompanying 169 targets, present a significant practical challenge for those now responsible for ensuring their successful implementation.

We all know the zero-sum nature of budgetary discussions at the national level and the difficulty of increasing allocations to education. Meanwhile, UN agencies are restructuring, donors are rethinking aid strategies and NGOs are concocting new global campaigns to reflect the new global goals in a way that suggests internal prioritization.

But, if prioritization is happening which direction is it going to take? This question is particularly relevant as the sustainable development agenda has brought us into a new era where the progress of all countries, and not just developing countries, is being captured.

When the challenge is teaching teachers English

Sarah Wiles is a communications specialist for Voluntary Services Overseas in Papua New Guinea, where she has been living for the past three years.

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is the most linguistically diverse country in the world with over 850 different languages spoken across this remote and rugged terrain. Tok Pisin, an English-based creole, is the most widely spoken language but, when PNG became independent in 1975, English became the official language of state and schooling.  This means that children after elementary age are part of the 40% of the global population that do not have access to education in a language that they speak or understand.  The government’s belief is that it is in the best interest of the child to quickly move away from vernacular language to open up more opportunities for them.

In PNG from the age of seven, English is the language of instruction with teachers bridging between English and local languages, Tok Ples or Tok Pisin. Having English as the main language of instruction comes with many challenges; the biggest is that many teachers who live in remote communities themselves don’t have a strong grasp of English.  In 2013, Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) and the British Council conducted comprehensive research on elementary teachers in four provinces of PNG that showed 46.7% of teachers had limited proficiency and 40.4% had extremely limited proficiency in English language.  

Introducing Bilingual Intercultural Education in Peru

View the original version of this blog in Spanish. Elena Burga Cabrera, Director-General for Bilingual and Rural Intercultural Education (DIGEIBIR of the MINEDU – Ministry of Education, Peru 

In Peru, most Peruvians speak Castilian Spanish at home, but there are also over 4 million Peruvian men and women whose mother tongue is a native language. According to our 2007 census, 16% of the citizens of Peru speak one of the 47 native languages in the country. Among them, 1.4 million are boys, girls and adolescents who study in 20 thousand schools located in or near indigenous communities in the Andes and the Amazon.

Language and learning photo blog: classroom challenges

This gallery contains 12 photos.

In order to celebrate International Mother Language Day, we have collated a photo blog of teachers and students talking about the challenges that language education policies can have on teaching and learning. From Iraq to Vietnam, Honduras and Pakistan, the … Continue reading →

South Africa: proof that language in school can be a source of grievance if not done right

This poster was issued by the African National Congress (ANC) and produced by the Silkscreen Training Project (STP). Source: http://www.saha.org.za

The Soweto uprising is probably one of the most impactful demonstrations for language and learning rights to take place across the globe. It placed the anti-apartheid struggle on an international platform and presented a massive shift in gear for the struggle for a free South Africa. These events took place 40 years ago. We should remember them as we celebrate International Mother Language Day this week.

Students gathered in Soweto 40 years ago to protest the use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in black, but not white schools. The new language education policy was enforced through the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974, which stated that Afrikaans and English should be used in a 50-50 mix as the medium for instruction.

The decree was resented deeply by blacks, because Afrikaans was widely viewed as “the language of the oppressor” as Demond Tutu once famously said. “No, I have not consulted the African people on the language issue and I’m not going to”, the Deputy Minister of Bantu Education, Punt Janson, said at the time.

Around 20,000 students took part in the uprisings that followed, which resulted in international pressure being put on governments to speak out about apartheid.

Murphy Morobe, one of the student leaders and member of the South African Students Movement, the organisers of the march, said “it was clear that the strategy (of the apartheid government) was that Afrikaans would become the language of instruction in all high schools. We felt that […] in the end it is not just about Afrikaans, […]in the end it is a question of white domination in South Africa.”

Language in school: If you don’t understand, how can you learn

How a country chooses the language for its education system is not an easy process. The decision is usually influenced by multiple factors: colonial history, origins of immigrants, legal recognition of minority languages, cultural diversity, political interests – to mention but a few. In some cases, instruction is provided in more than one language; in others the medium of instruction may vary between primary and secondary education.

Underneath this tangled and evolving web of policies and priorities, however, lies an undeniable truth: teaching and assessing children in a language they understand will result in better learning. This is something that has been recognised now for decades. It is written into the 1989 ILO Convention and Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. Our new paper out today, ‘If you don’t understand, how can you learn?’ confirms this basic principle, and yet reports that, despite the overwhelming evidence supporting this claim, 40% are still not able to access education in a language they understand.  It is clear that the complex nature of factors affecting language-education policy still take precedent over the accumulation of evidence.

Countries with colonial histories often find that shifting to bilingual education is complicated, as can be seen in many Latin American contexts that continue to use Portuguese, or Spanish, or in many Francophone African countries, where French remains the predominant language of instruction. Our World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE) shows that this trend seriously hampers students’ chances of learning. In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, 55% of grade 5 students who speak the test language at home learned the basics in reading in 2008, compared with only 25% of those who speak another language.