Gender Transformative Education: What is it All About?
Despite the improved outlook on gender stereotypes in modern society, these issues still pose a problem in today’s education. Girls are still believed to be unfit for logical subjects. Boys who read books are still considered weak (Brussino & McBrien, 2022). These stereotypical gender views may highly affect students’ confidence and performance in learning, hindering their growth as a result. Therefore, it’s essential that institutions attempt to teach students regarding gender diversity to free them from limitations posed by gender stereotypes in education. One such way to do that is by using Gender Transformative Education.
What is Gender Transformative Education (GTE)?
Adhering to its name, GTE reimagines education in ways that remove gender challenges and stereotypes. By promoting inclusivity and equal learning possibilities, it can greatly benefit students, allowing them to gain knowledge and discover their capabilities without limiting themselves to what they should or shouldn’t be.
This is why it’s so imperative to apply a gender transformative approach to education, as it promotes inclusivity for every gender in the educational field.
How to Apply Gender Transformative Education?
Comprehensive Sexual Education (CSE): Comprehensive Sexual Education deepens young people’s knowledge about various issues regarding gender and sexuality. This can teach them to show compassion and treat others with kindness and respect, despite differences in social status, race, or gender, among other things (What is Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE)?, 2024).
Period Education: Education about periods can stop the negative stigma surrounding periods in academic settings. This means that girls can have the chance to properly take care of their period health without any surrounding judgments.
Informed Consent: Understanding about informed consent can encourage students to direct themselves and make their own choices with responsibility.
Tackling Toxic Masculinities: Removing unhealthy stereotypes surrounding masculinity can help cultivate good mental health and an open-minded view of gender among students.
These however, are just a few means of applying gender transformativeness to education. There are plenty more methods which can be implemented to support equality and respect between genders, which is very necessary to support students’ learning experience.
Conclusion
Even in modern society, gender discrimination in educational settings is still prevalent. This reveals that there is still plenty of room to grow for the current educational system. We must realize that having access to education does not mean that there is quality education. Therefore, it is important to apply Gender Transformative Education to dismantle harmful classroom behaviors while transforming educational environments into diverse and transformed spaces for vulnerable students.
Edited by: Suksan Yosela