More, Different and Better

Leading up to International Women’s Day – 8 March 2013 – NIACE has invited international and UK writers to contribute to a series of guest blogs on the theme of women, learning, literacy and liberation. Today’s contributor is Professor Shirley Walters – Director, Division for Lifelong Learning, University of Western Cape, South Africa.

Recently, many of us around the globe arose and stood proud in support of One Billion Rising – a virtual campaign against gender based violence. Many girls and women across social classes are subject to physical and emotional abuse.

Jenny Horsman shows that violence impacts learning in important ways – in her book ‘Too scared to learn’ she describes the impact of violence on both teachers and students. She elaborates that repeated trauma can lead the brain to view all novelty, excitement or anxiety as a threat. As a result, students who attempt to learn in violent environments may be defiant and pick fights, daydream, be listless or play truant. Often they may be diagnosed with disorders and learning disabilities. This can lead girls and women to withdraw, becoming fearful and not wishing to attract attention to themselves. It is often through violence that girls and women are taught to know their place and not to put themselves forward. So how can we expect girls and women to extend themselves into formal leadership positions? Violence of all kinds is widespread.

Leading and learning are closely linked when we consider the question of who creates knowledge and whose knowledge counts? We may recognise that we, of course, are all creators of knowledge but as Dorothy Smith said back in the 1970s:

“Women have been largely excluded from the work of producing forms of thought and the images and symbols in which thought is expressed and ordered. There is a circle effect. Men attend to and treat as significant only what men say…That is how tradition is formed…From these circles of knowledge production women have been excluded…”

Much of this is still true today as it is mainly what men do that is valued; what girls and women do is often viewed as less important.  We are seen to have the ‘soft skills’ while men have the ‘hard skills’, with the judgement of their relative worth implicitly imbedded in that language. We often unconsciously conspire to reinforce these realities too by not challenging these understandings.

When we contemplate ‘leaders’ in society, what and who do we think of? Do we immediately think of women or men? Are they young or old, black or white, able-bodied or disabled, rich or poor, rural or urban, educated or uneducated? And if we go into a family homestead or a community, in the towns or villages, who do we see running the kitchens, the class rooms, the crèches, the clinics, the community organisations, the economic enterprises, the offices? Who is mediating the violence, the pain, the illness, the food production, the poverty? In many cases, it is women who are leading and ensuring sustainability of families and communities. But society continues to reinforce the notion that we do not have many women leaders – why is this so? Why do we not challenge the understanding that it is mainly men who lead? Is it that our notions of leaders and leadership are so narrow that what female leaders provide, is invisible?

The reason we have achieved International Women’s Day, is because movements of girls and women around the world have and continue to contest dominant patriarchal views. Together we are showing that women do not have to be passive acceptors of traditional views of learning and leadership. We are producing new knowledge about what it means for women to lead and to learn. These are critical elements in our striving to overcome gender-based violence in the long term.