Gender structure and women’s agency: toward greater theoretical understanding of education for transformation

Abstract

Under the research radar, and yet highly influential in transformation of practices concerning the social understanding and enactment of gender, are women-led non-governmental organizations (WNGOs). Their continued efforts to reconfigure gender identities and their impact on public policy formation have expanded notions of citizenship and democracy as well as moved social justice to greater levels of concreteness. This article seeks to contribute to the literature by probing the role of WNGOs as educational institutions that both create and disseminate knowledge about gender inequalities and gender justice and, in so doing, foster the formation of assertive individual and collective identities that subsequently influence the public arena through their advocacy of measures to reduce inequalities between women and men. The work by these WNGOs confirms the theoretical premise that to effect social change, new knowledge must be created by the very groups that seek to alter the disadvantageous conditions that confront them.

Keywords:

• nonformal education
• transformative education
• gender
• women’s adult education
• informal learning

Notes

1. This report was prepared by a panel comprising 26 ‘eminent persons’— mostly government officials from several countries; only one such person had an academic position (this in development economics).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nelly P. Stromquist

Nelly P. Stromquist is professor of international development policy in the College of Education at UMD. She specializes in areas linked to gender, globalization and adult education, which she examines from a critical sociology perspective. Her most recent book is Globalization and culture: Integration and contestation across countries (2014), co-edited with K. Monkman.