This session called for the need to establish a national center for educational curricula in partnership with official and non-official parties
The Palestinian Association for Empowerment and Local Development—REFORM held a dialogue session on the Palestinian educational discourse and the extent to which it takes gender issues into account. The session was attended by Dr. Nader Wahba, a researcher in educational issues and Director of the Educational Formation Unit at Al-Qattan Foundation, Mr. Sadiq Al-Khudour, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, and Ms. Amal Al-Barghouti, coordinator of the citizenship programme at the Teacher Creativity Center, along with the participation of a number of young men and women beneficiaries of the “Insijam” Initiative. This session was held with the aim of discussing the extent to which the educational discourse responds to women’s issues and its role in creating awareness that limits gender-based violence, addresses it and promotes equality between women and men.
The Initiative’s coordinator, Mrs. Esraa Obeid, started the session by welcoming the participants and indicated that this session follows what was previously presented in REFORM’s radio programme, “Citizenship Issues Under a Microscope,” which discussed education from a gender perspective. Mrs. Obeid added that this session is important to enhance the response of educational policies related to issues of gender-based violence, in a manner that perpetuates an educational discourse that contributes to creating equal power relations between males and females.
The session facilitator and researcher, Mr. Najeh Shaheen, reviewed the main concepts of discourse in the educational and gender context, indicating the complexities surrounding the discourse that does not serve issues of equality and gender justice to include the concepts of power and control. He also added that the educational discourse should focus on the concepts of freedom, justice, equality and human rights, especially women's rights, in light of its decline in reality.
Meanwhile, Mr. Sadeq Al-Khadour discussed the features of the gender-sensitive educational discourse, saying: “The matter is not limited to books, but extends to extra-curricular activities,” stressing the Ministry’s commitment to establishing an effective partnership with civil society organisations. He also added that strengthening the discourse is not the responsibility of one party alone. Mr. Al-Khadour further stated that there is a vital need in activating the partnership between the Ministry and civil society to create the National Curriculum Center, stressing that the current Palestinian curricula took into consideration gender discourses and that the Ministry is ready to discuss any objective observations.
On the other hand, Ms. Amal Barghouti addressed the discrimination in the right and quality of education on the basis of gender and listed many pieces of evidence of discrimination that make women subservient to men. She also indicated the continued male dominance over certain disciplines defined by social and educational reality as being specializations for men, while women are excluded from these fields. Hence, this keeps women away from forming a large percentage of the labour market, which remains largely restricted to men with an overwhelming percentage of more than 80%.
Further, Dr. Nader Wahbeh reviewed the literature that deals with educational curricula, indicating that textbooks differ between the title and the content, and stressed the importance of aligning the content with the title. Dr. Wahbeh criticized the formal method followed by research studies, of counting the frequency in which women appear in textbooks and the random changes of pictures and content in textbooks, which come as a reaction to those studies without a clear vision leading the process of change. Dr. Wahbeh concluded by clarifying the difficulty of unifying the educational discourse, calling for the building of an educational vision that allows for the plurality of the discourse, as it enriches reality and opens horizons for the possibility of dialogue between different perspectives, allowing the development of reality by benefiting from the different interacting opinions.
At the end of the session, the participants came up with a number of recommendations, the most important of which are:
1. reflecting the concepts of gender in educational discourse,
2. preparing capacity building programmes for employees within the educational institution, Ministry and civil society organisations on gender issues
3. inclusion and development of participatory tools that contribute to transforming the issue of equality from an idea into a culture at the class and school levels
4. the importance of creating partnerships between all official and non-official parties in establishing the National Curriculum Center and strengthening inclusive national partnerships with regard to curricula topics and their observance of gender issues.
This activity comes as part of the “Insijam” Initiative, implemented by The Palestinian Association for Empowerment and Local Development—REFORM within the “Naseej: Connecting Voices and Action to End Violence Against Women and Girls in the MENA Region” project, co-funded by Oxfam and the European Union. The Initiative aims to develop the capacities of participants in understanding the cultural and structural dimensions around societal and cultural contradictions that reduce gender-based violence and increase their skills to lead transformation processes in their communities and become agents of change in their communities. The Initiative also seeks to empower and increase the participation of young women and men in local and national efforts to combat prevailing social norms and gender-based violence.
