Education: What Makes It Feminist?
It’s been over 20 years since I started working on women and adolescent girls’ literacy. Twenty years, and I still continue to feel that letter writing is a significant pedagogical tool in the teaching-learning process of any literacy or education programme.
In Part Two we discuss the limitations of anger, the potential for empathy instead if accompanied by rigour, and the underrated merits of using joy pedagogically.
This is a reported piece on the student groups at IITs, who work on educating and building awareness around caste-based discriminations in Indian institutes of eminence, particularly engineering institutes. These groups work under the larger aegis of Ambedkar Study Circles, which exist outside campuses too.
“Education must be spoken about outside the school. Being a student is easier outside the school,” believes Saba, who has been running the Savitribai Phule Fatima Sheikh Library with a team of educators (ex-members of the library) in Bhopal since 2010. She was referring to the library and its potential to be an educational institution, perhaps one that is more inclusive than a school itself.
It is a warm April day in New Delhi. The session we are about to conduct is our third with girls who attend a bridge course in a resettlement colony. The course helps girls who have dropped out or never enrolled in school to come on a par with the literacy and learning levels of those in school.
In this 28-minute documentary, we meet Umra and Kulsum originally from Banda, Uttar Pradesh, and now firmly finding their feet in New Delhi. Between theories of gender and migration, diktats of danger and safety, lie the lived experiences of young women in big cities, pursuing an adventure as big as the skies they build their one room homes in.
Weaving your way through the clamour of crowds and vehicles, you pass by Mandi Crossing Chowk everyday on your way to work. Eyes glued to the ground, in your rush to get to the other side what all do you see, what slips away- you never have time to pause and think about all this.
