Identifying and overcoming barriers to gender equality in Tanzanian schools: Educators’ reflections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reports on an action research study that took place during a one-week professional development course focused on establishing gender equality in primary schools, held in a Teachers’ College in Southern Tanzania (June/July 2015), in which 28 educators and administrators participated. I draw upon Sarah Ahmed’s (2005) theoretical framework of gender orientations to explore understanding of gender. A feminist, participatory, action research methodology using multimodal methods (Jewitt, 2008; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) was used to collect and analyze data. Highlighted are salient aspects activities and discussions in which the participants engaged concerned with constructions and orientations of gender, and gender-based oppression, violence, and discrimination and how these impact girls’ education. I also report on participants’ personal and professional knowledge, understanding, and insights into barriers to, and opportunities for gender equality and their proposed approaches for bringing about change through initiatives they articulated in the gender-responsive school action plans they began to develop. Findings indicate that despite the participants’ interest in learning more about gender constructions and orientations – conceptually as well as practically – and the implied expectation from policies than educators essential in bringing about transformative change leading to gender equality in society, the participants had had little, if any, exposure to policies, initiatives, resources, or professional development to guide and support them. Recommendations including provided professional development opportunities in gender-responsive pedagogy and programming at all schooling levels, and to include educators’ voices, as experts of their own contexts, in future policies, programming, and initiatives.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".