The Significance of Gender
Educated to Retreat: How Educational Settings Hinder Female students' Leadership Development
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yijie Wang
That females remain underrepresented in the field of leadership is a well-documented phenomenon. This paper argues that part of the reason lies in educational settings. The Chinese educational settings are examined based on evidence of various sources (including literature in the past 15 years, author’s personal experience and so forth), and it turns out that the protective approach teachers adopt towards girls, the reserved and unworldly female images exhibited by textbooks, as well as the improper view of leadership girls tend to develop through classroom-based leadership experiences, combine to damage girls’ leadership potential. The aforementioned mechanisms are usually unintentional and hard to detect, which means part of the solution lies in the promoted awareness of teachers and educational leaders. If girls are to become future leaders just as boys do, they should not be treated any differently in schools, and it should be recognized that any gender-based differential treatment, even if apparently harmless or displayed as privileges, may end up blocking girls’ access into future leadership careers. Meanwhile, it is important to note that the above issue is not merely about equal treatment for both genders; rather it is broadly linked to what our construction of leadership is. In an ultimately sense, the educational setting is expected not only to produce equal number of "great women" and "great men," but also, partly through its explorations of how to cultivate the female version of ‘great man’, contributes to the update and advancement of the leadership concept and practice as a whole.
Introducing Gender Diversity in Brazil’s Countryside Schools: Learners’ Achievements and the Drawbacks of Casualised Labour and the “Gag Law”
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Else R. P. Vieira
This contribution initially situates the groundbreaking gender diversity dimension of the Newton Trust-funded Project “Gender and Education in Rural Brazil” (2015-2017), within the context of the country’s legalization of same-sex relationships (2013), whilst also aligning this historically conservative space with world-wide gender equality developments as well as filling in a gap in the syllabus of countryside schools in Brazil’s state of Paraná in consonance with the forward-looking Parameters of the National Curriculum (1997). It will then focus on the learners’ achievements, along Paulo Freire’s lines, as producers of knowledge and educational resources specific to their historically conservative cultural context. It will further elaborate on the project’s political role as a spectrum of resistance to the obscurantism epitomized by the Bill 7180/2014, in Congress, designed to warrant a nation-wide value-free education. This major pedagogical intervention, however, while successfully “disrupting the consolidation of conservative narratives on gender diversity amongst participating adolescent rural agents” (César 2017), has also faced the challenges of concomitant encroaching austerity-related casualisation of teaching jobs. How to maintain learners’ engagement and promote continuity in a context of conjoined labour “precariat” and fear of expression in response to the Bill, popularly known as “The Gag Law”?
