Women and Power: Education, Religion and Identity

1. The Methodology

1 The Methodology This chapter describes the theoretical framework that undergirds the study reported in this book, and the research tools that were employed for data collection and analyses. Theoretical Framework One broad theory that takes a full view of the character of the teaching-learning process in schools; what is taught, the hidden curriculum and the effect of religion on the formation of consciousness, and the cumulative effect of all these on the female identity, is the feminist pedagogy. This theory has a vision of what education might be, but is frequently not. Feminist pedagogy, according to Schrewsbury (1998), is a theory about the teaching-learning process, that guides our choice of classroom practices, by providing criteria to evaluate specific education strategies and techniques …. The evaluative criteria include the extent to which a community of learners is empowered to act responsibly toward one another and the subject matter and to apply that learning to social action (p. 167). Feminist pedagogy focuses on the experiences and, in particular, the oppression of women in the context of education (Merriam and Cafarella 1999). Two models of feminist pedagogy have been pulled out of the many strands of feminist pedagogies. They are the liberatory and the gender models. The liberatory model is said to draw from structuralist, postmodernist, Marxist and critical theories. It is the view that institutions of learning and the classroom itself reproduce the power structure that is found in the larger society, and so, liberatory feminist educators ‘attempt’ to recover women’s voices, experiences and viewpoints, and use these to make systems of privilege, power and oppression visible. They also pay attention to the structured nature of power relations and interlocking systems of oppression based on gender, race and class, which 2 Women and Power: Education, Religion and Identity are reinforced by education (Merriam and Cafarella 1999). In the gender model, attention is on how female identity has been socially constructed to be one of nurturer and how the individual woman can find her voice, becoming emancipated in the personal psychological sense. Educators therefore look at how the educational environment and the learning transaction can be constructed, so as to foster women’s learning. In this model, a connected approach to learning is advocated, where life experiences are valued, where a woman can have a voice, and hence an identity. Merriam and Caffarella indicated that Tisdell identified four recurring themes in feminist pedagogy: how knowledge is constructed; the development of voice; the authority of the teacher and students; and dealing with difference. They also observed that Tisdell found the liberatory model to be strong on differences based on race, class and gender, although she also thought they focused too much on structures, and did not account for the individual’s capacity for agency, the capacity to have some control outside the social structure. Tisdell thought that the gender model, on the other hand, tended to emphasize similarities among women and did not take account of differences in power relations based on class, race, sexual orientation, etc. Tisdell further indicated that the way to take account of the recurring themes in the feminist pedagogy literature was to have a post-structural feminist pedagogy, which synthesizes both the psychological model with the structural factors of the liberatory perspective. It is from the post-structuralist feminist pedagogy framework that this study proceeds. This is because it appropriately addresses our concerns about: institutions of learning as some of the social institutions that reproduce the power structure in the larger society; power relation in the teaching-learning situation and the construction of female identity; women’s internalization of these constructions ; and, resistances to the constructions. Finally, the vision of feminist pedagogy gives hope. It throws up the possibilities that formal education may, at some point, begin to serve women better because ‘it ultimately seeks the transformation of the academy, and points toward steps, however small, that we can all take in each of our classrooms, to facilitate that transformation’ (Shrewsbury 1998:168). Research Method This research was undertaken mainly from the qualitative perspective. Our strategy was a phenomenological reading of the problem of the low social status of Nigerian women. Bakare-Yusuf (2003a) made a strong case for a phenomenological reading of African women’s everyday experiences. Drawing who drew from the phenomenology of embodied existence developed by Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, she opined that phenomenology ‘seeks to analyze existence and lived experience outside of the distorting influence of [3.144.172...