Gender and Education (1998-2006)

Focus Areas

While advocating for gender-aware systemic change through educational reform process, the Network Women's Program (NWP) also encourages the development of independent teaching and research on women, including gender studies.

Empowering Education

The Empowering Education (EE) Program, which began in Ukraine, has operated as a network program since 1999. EE is coordinated jointly by the Women’s Information and Consultative Center (WICC) and the NWP. EE is an innovative grassroots popular education program that develops awareness and sensitivity of gender and human rights and builds self-esteem, conflict transformation, and critical thinking skills. The largest target audience for training sessions is still secondary school students, but the program also works with many other diverse groups, such as disabled people, journalists, lesbian youth, rural families, ethnic minorities, refugees, religious leaders, "pregnant parents," HIV positive people, and IV drug users.

The program has a network of trainers who conduct trainings in schools, some universities, and non-formal settings in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. In 2002 and 2003, trainings were also conducted with Burmese diaspora working in Thai border areas, and with Indonesian activists and Afghani educators. Participants from Armenia, Mongolia, and Russia have also taken part in some network events in the past.

As the coordinating body of the program, WICC provides advanced training of trainers and technical assistance to individual countries in order to strengthen the local training capacity, and hopes to create a cadre of global trainers.

To learn more about the Empowering Education initiative, please visit http://empedu.civicua.org.

Gender Equity in Education

In 2003, the NWP and OSI’s Education Support Program (ESP) collaborated to produce Open Minds: Opportunities for Gender Equity in Education in Central/South Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, a regional overview on gender equity in education in Central Europe, South Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. Filling a major gap in current educational reform debates, Open Minds provides policymakers, administrators, teachers, parents, and advocates with a useful tool to influence policy change.

The report provides specific recommendations for advocacy and practical interventions at both the policy and school levels, such as calls for increased gender balance in texts, teachers’ practices, and in school leadership positions. It outlines necessary changes in the education policy-making, implementation, and monitoring processes, including increased analysis of education statistics and augmented roles for teacher-training institutions, international organizations and NGOs in generating new education policy and practices. Open Minds argues that while there are significant challenges to gender-sensitive educational reform, there are also resources within the region on which to build. These resources include a strong commitment to educational reform, a focus on critical thinking, and a body of knowledge on curriculum development and innovative pedagogy developed within gender studies programs and women's NGOs in the last decade.

Gender Studies

The NWP believes that gender/women’s studies programs instill critical thinking skills, serve as an analytic resource for the women’s movement, and help promote women’s perspectives in emerging democracies. In partnership with many of the Soros foundations, the NWP has supported the development, introduction, institutionalization, and networking of such programs in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union since 1997.

In 1998, the NWP organized the inaugural conference on gender studies for countries in transition, bringing together 140 women from 30 countries, and also created a Library Core Collections program and a Translations project. The three-year library program awarded more than 100 collections of approximately 50 books each to gender studies programs, libraries, and NGOs. The four-year Translations project awarded more than 80 grants to translate classic texts each year into local languages, focusing on such themes as advanced gender studies works, women at risk, ethnic/minority women, women in Muslim societies, and globalization.

In 1999, the NWP collaborated with Central European University’s Gender and Culture Program to produce the region’s first Gender Studies Directory and also convened the first regional women’s history conference in Minsk, Belarus, which resulted in the publication of the anthology Gendered Histories from Eastern Europe. The NWP also co-funded grants to seed gender studies programs, and awarded women’s studies fellowships to 36 scholars from Albania, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Moldova, Mongolia, Russia, Ukraine, Slovenia, and Serbia to recognized women’s studies centers in nine cities, including Kharkov, Prague, Moscow, Bucharest, and Budapest.

Mainstreaming gender studies into higher education has been a priority, both for sustainability and the transformation of educational systems in reform. In 2003, the NWP supported the launch of two regional gender studies efforts: (1) the South Eastern European Network for Gender Studies in collaboration with the Research Center for Gender Studies (Macedonia) and the Belgrade Center for Women’s Studies (Serbia); and (2) a gender studies network focused primarily on Central Asia and the Caucuses in development with the Institute for Gender and Social Policy (IGSP-Russia) and the Women’s Program of Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation-Uzbekistan (OSIAF-Uzbekistan).

In collaboration with IGSP and OSIAF-Uzbekistan, the NWP sponsored the "Gender Education: Theory and Practice" conference in November 2003. Over 100 participants attended the two-day conference, which engaged gender studies and Empowering Education scholars/practitioners in examining the next stages of development for gender education in Central Asia and the Caucuses, Mongolia, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine. Among the priorities identified were: regional summer schools; cross-border collaborations; databases of experts, trainers, and literature; translation of texts; Internet and information resources; curriculum development on women in Muslim societies and women in post-conflict zones; regional networking and exchange, among others.

For the upcoming years, the NWP’s primary focus in gender studies will be on institutionalizing high quality programs in two regions—South Eastern Europe and Central Asia/the Caucuses/Mongolia.

Women’s Oral Histories

Central to the NWP’s mission and programs on gender and education is the belief that open societies cannot fully develop without the contribution of women’s critical thinking and perspectives. The Women’s Oral History Program in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia and Ukraine supports national and regional women’s oral-history projects to preserve the "unofficial" realities and experiences of women in post-Soviet regions. Women’s oral history work often allows women to speak about difficult realities that are impossible to articulate in other contexts, and it is an accessible and empowering tool for preserving and presenting women’s realities to their own communities, to international academic and politically informed audiences interested in the region, and to global women’s networks. The process is empowering for both the interviewer and interviewee. (The Women's Oral History Collection 1999-2004 is available through Central European University in Budapest.)

In addition to supporting oral history workshops since 2000, the NWP includes an ongoing mentorship component, linking researchers with workshop faculty. The NWP and the national women’s programs have supported over 10 research projects/publications, including a methodological reader, a nine-volume multi-ethnic study of women in Georgia, and a compendium of original research.

In 2003, the national Central Asia/Caucasus/Russia/Ukraine women’s oral history research projects were published and distributed in local languages. The NWP produced a booklet, To Look at Life through Women’s Eyes, which provided a small sampling of these projects. In addition, the NWP and the Women’s Program of the Soros Foundation-Kyrgyzstan published and distributed the sub-regional women’s oral history reader.

In 2004, the NWP will disseminate Volume II of the Women’s Oral History Reader, including country research results (in Russian and some English translations). The publication will be organized around key themes that emerged in many of the interviews: women as members of ethnic minority groups; women in conflict and post-conflict situations; the impact of transition on women; violence against women; rural women; and women’s memory and history.

Priorities for the upcoming years include integrating oral history research into gender studies curriculum development and teaching in established gender studies centers and programs; supporting seed grants for projects that focus on minority women and women’s cross-ethnic experiences; adding new regions and promoting cross-cultural women’s oral history action research projects.