Teaching Resources | Talking GWS: Reports of the Meetings

Report of the First Teaching Resources Discussion
Focus on Sexuality Culture and Identity

1. Welcome
Co-hosts Takiywaa Manuh and Amina Mama warmly welcomed participants to Accra and to the working group meeting.

1.2 Exercise: Introductions

Each of the participants was asked to introduce themselves by reflecting on the personal and political events that led to their attendance at the meeting. Participants shared their individual, experientially rich and diverse paths to GWS teaching and research. Each narrative was informed by encounters with women's marginalisation and oppression Common themes included the influence of parents and upbringing; influence of education and travel; personal growth and development; the effects of political and historical developments on the continent; increased awareness of sexuality and gender issues through personal experiences of pregnancy, motherhood, rape, abortion, violence against women, relationships with men, single parenthood, divorce, marriage, homosexuality and lesbianism. Participants stressed the importance of good role models (both women and men), as well as the impact of their involvement in politics, feminist activism and resistance.

1.3 Programme
The programme for the week long working group meeting was shared with working group members (see Appendix 2).

1.4 African Feminist Pedagogic Perspectives
Participants were asked to reflect on the following questions: What do we teach? Where do we teach? How do we teach?

African Feminist Pedagogies

Reviewing Feminist Pedagogic Perspectives
Working group members were asked to think about what it means to learn. The facilitator noted that participants entered the space of authority in the classroom, through a long experience of being taught. She invited participants to access that experience through the creation of a short story about learning. This story, entitled the 'Education of Aluta' was created in the group, with each participant contributing a few sentences.

Exercise: The Education Of Aluta

Aluta woke up. She had a headache. She couldn't do anything about it because she had to prepare breakfast for the family before she went to school. Yet again she was being unfair to herself. She decided she would lie down and read her novel. But her mother wouldn't have it. Her mother shouted: "Aluta, get up!" Secretly Aluta wishes she could stay in bed all day and read her book instead of being interrupted and having to go and cook. Her mother doubted her headache. How could anyone with a headache want to read? Aluta's friend, Alessi, came by every morning. "Aren't you coming to school today, Aluta?" Alessi called. Aluta's headache lifted miraculously and she darted through the door, her mother's voice trailing down the dusty path: "Aluta, are you leaving me to do all this work?" Aluta felt guilty. It was that same feeling of guilt that struck Aluta as she stood in front of the professor's desk twelve years later, one hand holding a note trying to explain why her assignment was late, the other hand holding a letter from her mother which spoke of her mothers tiredness, yet in the very same sentence in which it also spoke of her pride in Aluta. Aluta reflected on her past and thought about the struggle she waged to get to where she was. She decided she had to take time for herself in order to deal with the conflicting emotions she experienced. She had to come to some closure and move on with her future. But her immediate problem was to get the professor to accept her work. She had brought it in late and he was being difficult. "To hell with you, I will get the assignment done and get through this course come what may," Aluta thought . That evening sitting at the pub with her male friend Jose, Aluta felt relaxed. Here she was in a space with someone she cared about, someone who allowed her to be all that she wanted to be. The next day she spoke to Alessi about how to get the professor to accept her late assignment. "Well, there are ways to get round it," Alessi said. Aluta stared at her: "How?" "You could allow him to touch your body. He is fond of that; you must just pretend to enjoy it. If you do that you will get him to accept your assignment." Aluta failed that module. She decided that she couldn't choose that option; her education was so much more than a sacrificing of her integrity. She wished that she had more lecturers like Professor Dayton who taught English. She was the only female in the department and she lectured in a way that made things real and relevant to students' life experience. Aluta thought if she talked to Prof Dayton she might find a way of dealing with the challenges she was facing. In the following weeks Aluta discovered that she was pregnant with Jose's baby. As she counted the months, she realised the baby would be due at the time of her final exams. Jose didn't want an abortion. She was getting increasingly desperate. Whilst visiting her mother's village an elderly aunt confronted Aluta with the scandal. "You modern girls enter into trouble and don't know how to deal with it!" She was taken to a neighbouring village midwife who mixed a herbal concoction, which Aluta drank. She lost the child. As she returned to the city, she wondered what she would tell Jose. She wondered whether the baby was a girl or a boy.

Principles and Practices of Feminist Pedagogy
The story highlighted issues concerning learning and showed that dominant learnings take place in attenuated and contested zones. Aluta learns by discussing her problems with friends and mentors; she reflects on the obstacles she encounters in order to negotiate a path through them. Learning takes place in formal and informal spaces and is not always an incremental process, there are zigzags and slippages, and one learns through rebellion and resistance.

In pairs, participants were asked to address the following questions: If you were in a classroom and someone wanted to guarantee that you did not learn in that space, what would they have to do to preclude your learning?

What inhibits or prevents learning?
· A government-imposed curriculum
· Authoritarianism, intimidation and insulting behaviour by people in authority, teachers or fellow students
· Sexist attitudes and gender discrimination
· Teaching methods that are dull and uninspiring, e.g., rote learning
· Peer pressure
· Language barriers.

How do we learn?
· By thinking through possibilities and choices and making decisions
· Through reflection on our own and others' experience
· Through interaction and discussion with friends and peers, as well as teachers and mentors
· Learning takes place primarily in informal spaces, rather than through formal education, and this must be borne in mind by teachers
· Learning always happens, whether intentionally or not, whether structured and formal or otherwise. Resistance and defiance thus also lead to learning.

What encourages and nourishes learning?
· Respect towards students and learners in class
· Patience and listening skills
· Integrity - practising what is preached
· Seeking ways of engaging the class through:

o Humour
o Anecdotes
o Personal experiences
o Positive learning
o Examples from real life
o Connecting activism with what is taught in class
o Learning names
o Participation
o Allowing room for questions and comments

· Owning your authority as a teacher and being willing to be challenged by students
· Interactive learning - recognising students as people who have a life outside the classroom and identifying connections between what they learn in school and what they can learn from their life situations and experiences
· Knowing how students are positioned in the class among their peers
· Mentoring
· Being open to the possibility of students growing and changing
· Imagining ourselves as strategists, constantly improvising and thinking on our feet - introducing alternative methods of learning and all possible resources, peer learning, adult education techniques, radical political involvement, teaching material that is not part of the formal syllabus, filling in gaps
· Drawing interconnections between gender, race, class, ethnicity
· Helping students to be confident about themselves as African, introducing African content into syllabus, challenging western notions of life and culture.

1.5 Teaching Sexuality, Culture and Identity

Looking At Sexuality
Presentation by Sylvia Tamale

Sylvia presented a test case of recent events at Makerere University in Kampala (Uganda) with regard to the issue of sexuality, and specifically homosexuality.

At the beginning of February 2003, Sylvia spoke out in support of including sexual orientation as one of the grounds for non-discrimination in the proposed Equal Opportunities Commission legislation. Since then, she has been subjected to an onslaught of media attacks for her 'irresponsible defence of homosexuality.' Her key argument, that discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is a violation of human rights, has been ignored by the many Ugandans, ranging from academics to politicians, who have condemned her stand. Making several public statements and appearances to explain the relevance of discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation to human rights struggles, the developing debate in Uganda has been heavily skewed towards, at worst, homophobic attacks (as well as attacks on herself), and, at best, naïve perceptions of homosexuality as 'illness'. Sylvia has therefore been engaged in a difficult struggle to establish the status of gay rights as a human rights concern.

This experience prompted Sylvia to begin research in the area of gender, sexuality and identity in Uganda. Preliminary findings revealed that homosexuality existed in Uganda before colonialism, and that it was not 'imported' by the colonisers. Discussions on these issues were not conclusive, but rather opened doors for further exploration and research, and raised questions that were relevant for teaching.

· Is research on homosexuality conclusive?
· Is homosexuality taught, or is it natural (i.e. acquired at birth)?
· What defines homophobia?
· What is the relationship between homosexuality and class, and is there class discrimination?
· Are there two different understandings of homosexuality: one, that it is a gender issue, and two, that it is a human rights issue? Both should be included in any course on sexuality, culture and identity.
· How is culture used by the dominant order to complicate issues of sexuality and stir up sentiment against gays and lesbians? Ignorance and prejudice are also used in this way.
· How does sexuality and marital status affect participants' professional lives, in terms of their employment, the respect they earn from colleagues and superiors, their access to housing, etc.?
· Can humour perhaps be used to challenge students' perceptions of heteronormativity and sexuality?
· How can teachers deal effectively with hostility and antagonism from both male and female students towards these issues?
· And, lastly, how can teachers reconcile the need to assert their own authority with the importance of encouraging debate and discussion among students, as well as resistance against existing norms and values which may be outdated and inappropriate in a new world?

Sylvia's presentation of an extraordinary moment in her life illustrated the power of discourses around sexuality. In this case, the issue caused an eruption and disruption within Ugandan society, creating new possibilities and opportunities. Threatening moments are often the most strategically interesting sites.

Exercise: Silences And Voice

The facilitator noted that it is often difficult to talk about issues of sexuality. Sexuality is a taboo topic, and even within the working group space, (which is seemingly open and non-threatening), there will be silences. If one agrees on the power of sexuality, culture and identity as a strategic discourse towards transformation, then one has to take very seriously the meaning of silence. We don't yet know how to talk about sexuality publicly with the same authority that we talk about other issues. Participants thus felt it was important to create space to explore the meaning of silence.

Silence Wheel
Each person was asked to reflect and then write down reasons why it might be difficult to talk about sexuality. These were written up on pieces of white paper and placed into a big white circle, creating a blank -- representing a silence. The following points were identified as obstacles to talking openly about sexuality:
· Exploration of sexuality reveals unjust power relationships between men and women
· Socialisation, which teaches us not to talk openly about sexuality, as it is taboo
· Fear of disclosing the personal, embarrassment, ridicule, humiliation
· Religious beliefs and traditional customs, repression
· Habit of silence and the difficulty of turning experience into language
· Sexual violence is difficult to talk about because of stigmatisation and cultural socialisation
· In some African cultures, there are special occasions where women are encouraged to talk freely about sexuality among each other
· In other African societies, there are non-verbal ways of "talking about" sexuality.

It was noted that it is an extreme over-simplification to claim that "it is too difficult to talk" (about such matters). Silences are about power relations that have a hold on us and will not allow us to speak. There is a lot to say, but it may be the case that people have decided to be silent. This dynamic manifests in the classroom, and silences therefore need to be taken seriously as we explore the meaning of discourse as strategy in this area.

Participants were invited to engage in a free writing exercise in order to unpack what the word sexuality signified, and then to share their thoughts on what it meant for them. Associations that emerged included:
· Heterosexual marriage, motherhood, domesticity, reproduction, fertility
· Men's use of ideological perceptions of womanhood (cultural, religious, traditional) to control women, particularly deviant women (various forms of violence and limitations on mobility, thought, action, ways of being)
· Homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, etc.
· Health issues related to the family
· Cultural practices related to sexuality
· Sexual desire, pleasure, fun, freedom, adventure, sexual satisfaction
· Women's use of their bodies to negotiate for power
· Government's control of sexuality
· Pornography, consumerism and voyeurism that objectifies women
· Trafficking in women, abuse of women, violence against women
· Abuse of children and paedophilia
· Birth control, prevention of pregnancy, abortions
· Forbidden pleasures and desires, inhibitions
· Socialisation, religion, power of fear of stigmatisation and hatred
· Media messages about older women and older men, menopause, mid-life crises, monogamy, polygamy and polyandry, affairs with younger / older partners

Participants noted the importance of bearing in mind cultural, religious, social and geographical differences between the participants, so as not to create an oversimplified understanding of sexuality in Africa.

This exercise enabled the group to begin thinking more deeply about sexuality. Moreover, it was noted that it was as important to think through individual positionings and differences as it was to establish what the word sexuality meant to the working group as a collective. The group began to move beyond theorising about the complexity of silence and its multiple routes, acknowledging that the recognition of silencing forces does not mean accepting that silence is ubiquitious or cannot be engaged with.

There are many ways of accessing voice, in the sense of speaking and expression. Even if they are not shared, there are routes towards and possibilities for speech. The capacity for speech is and always has been possible, necessary, empowering and radical. Participants were asked to write on coloured paper rays those things that enable voice.

Voice Wheel: What are the routes to speech?
· Hope of transformation, action, commitment to change
· Knowledge, the need to name things
· Surprise, interest, laughter, ease, confidence, courage
· Anger, intolerance, outrage, provocation, radicalism
· Attempts to shock, to confront ignorance and hypocrisy
· Learning and recognizing the speech of sexuality
· Relating social problems to issues of sexuality
· Strategic conformity and resistance
· Sense of the collective, latching onto public debates
· Telling stories that link formal and informal accounts.

Current Theorisations on Sexuality, Culture and Identity
Presentation by Takyiwaa Manuh and Akosua Adamako

The presenters shared aspects of their work-in-progress textbook: Culture and Gender in African Societies. The target group for the text comprises students and teachers in development, education, gender and women studies, as well as historical and cultural studies. In terms of its sources and the literature it cites, it is a sub-Saharan text. It draws on disciplines such as anthropology, history, literary studies, health, sociology and politics.

The book is divided into three sections. Part 1 explores culture as both impediment and resource. It separates culture and gender, examining local, national and continental dimensions. Part 2 examines the construction of the self in relation to space and culture, looking at creation myths, religion, matriarchy, personhood and taboos. Part 3 defines femininity and masculinity, consciousness and agency, and looks at reproduction and women's survival strategies. The textbook brings together politics and culture, encouraging activism.

What kinds of resources would facilitate transformatory GWS teaching in the area of sexuality, culture and identity?
· More texts, more specialised texts, case material, thematic approach or geographically focused?
· Possibility of national reviews, identifying themes within a national and international context.
· Impact of literature written on HIV / Aids.
· Identifying common ground.
· Incorporating earlier anthropological works on sexual identity.
· Resources dealing with violence against women and influence of religion that justifies such violence - importance of regional differences and different approaches used by specific nations.
· Importance of solidarity and women's organisations becoming active in campaigns.
· Difficulty of balancing theory and practice, conceptualisations and generalisations with groundwork, and reconciling the need for solidarity and commonality with the need for specific focus and detail - and how this impacts on the way in which students and school pupils are taught about sexuality, culture and identity.
· Incorporating material from different locations connects us to the rest of the continent.
· Case studies that refer to events reported in the recent media can be useful in illustrating what is happening on the ground.

Bibliography on Sexuality by Charmaine Pereira

Supporting Resources for Identity and Culture - Forthcoming

Debate: Radical or Pragmatic Approaches to Sexuality, Culture and Identity: "To Sex Or Not To Sex?"
Two positions were allocated in setting up the debate on teaching about sex and sexuality.

Pragmatist group:
Input by Dzodzi Tsikata and Charmaine Perreira

The pragmatists felt it was necessary to remove resistance to the teaching of sexuality, culture and identity and to make the issues respectable in a way that would attract support from men and women, and a large cross-section of the student population, thus attracting more students to such classes. The pragmatists felt this could be achieved by focusing on topics of health, female genital mutilation, GBV, motherhood, economics and sexuality, division of labour production and re-production, HIV/AIDS, sexual orientation, desire and the unconscious. In closing, they argued that the radical approach could frighten students away rather than ensuring student engagement and a subsequent impetus for change to occur.

Radical group
Input by Sylvia Tamale and Jane Bennett

The radicals began with a skit about female ejaculation. They criticised the pragmatic approach for obscuring issues of power and being moderate, thus becoming stagnant and impotent. They noted that the word 'radical' is derivative from the word 'root', i.e. teaching holistically, incorporating the body, the mind, the emotions and the spirit. They argued that change and transformation comes through radicalism, not pragmatism and that students are often drawn to the marginal and the extremes, questioning the status quo, this has to be accommodated within the classroom space.

Discussion
As a teacher, one needs to introduce issues of sexuality, gender, and power politics in ways that do not alienate or overwhelm students. Moreover, the practical issues surrounding running a university, winning support and getting funding mean that radicalism can be of limited use in the classroom. It is thus important to be strategic in choosing an approach that works, depending on content of classes, level of education, location of institution, as well as the teacher's own age, gender and positioning in the institutional hierarchy.

Participants also raised the need to design and experiment with models conceptualising the complex relationship between sexuality and gender. While it was recognised that realities cannot ever be fully captured within these models, it was sometimes very useful to have a place to start. One model used by the AGI, was demonstrated. [View model]

One must also be open to change and transformation, and there is value in networking across hierarchies. One needs to engage with subversive and radical positions and to explore how these open students to different methodologies and ideologies. The issues of censorship and self-censorship as a response to lack of academic freedom and political interference in universities, as well as market forces, economic status of country and job prospects for students, were highlighted.

In conclusion, it was agreed that the split between pragmatism and radicalism was artificial, although valuable in this instance for the purpose of generating debate. In fact, much more nuanced strategies are already in play. The need to be sensitive and responsive was underlined, as well as the need for personal resources such as courage.

Exercise: How are we feeling?

Participants each selected a word from a hat and had to use the word to describe how they were feeling. This exercise provided an opportunity to reflect on inner processes in relation to the issues being raised in the working group meeting. Participants noted the importance of recognising and acknowledging the personal, and the difficulties of bringing personal and private matters to the public forum.

The practical importance of the discussion for teaching courses in gender and women's studies, improving existing courses and designing new ones, and building networking links with colleagues across Africa, was reiterated. Participants were asked to keep uppermost in their minds the influence of cultural, religious, political, economic and social factors on education, pedagogy and training methods; the imperative to root theories, ideologies and methodologies in the African context; the value of silence and time to integrate new ideas; and the various ways of dealing with disruptions, challenges, rebellion against the status quo, feminism, activism, radical approaches, and how these can ultimately help in designing courses around sexuality, culture and identity.

1.6 Learnings, Needs and Wants
In moving towards closure, the TWG members reflected on their learnings, needs and wants.

Learnings
· A deeper appreciation of sexuality, identity and culture in African contexts, as a strategically imperative political terrain
· Deprivatising sexuality and bringing it in more centred ways to what we teach
· The politics of teaching and teaching as politics
· Curricula as a strategy for transformation
· The need to strengthen our work in curriculum design
· Innovative teaching strategies, activist learning tools and facilitation techniques
· The use of everyday events in teaching
· Availability of different (African) resources that support GWS teaching/learning - grey material, published texts, books and journals, films, videos, etc.
· The need to engage more widely and deeply, to have more focus and more ambitious dreams, plans and schemes for making this work collectively for our various sites
· Belief in the value of collective input in developing ideas. Working in community enables a range of experiences and skills to be pooled, creating synergies
· Being true to the values we affirm and checking them off against our course designs
· The need to share with each other and to support each other in our work
· Recognising the urgency of the project and the fragility of resources and support systems.

Needs / Wants
· Continued networking at group and interpersonal levels, and across institutional sites, to continue learning and revitalise energies
· More time to reflect and apply these learnings to our own curriculum work, and to work out how to do this
· A clear understanding of how to link sexuality and culture with identity, so that this relationship is appreciated by students
· A clear appreciation as to why sexuality could be a strategic space/place/subject in GWS
· Sensitivity in creating syllabi so not as to objectify women (or men), or to eroticise the African body
· To investigate the connections between theory and practice more thoroughly (more conscious, more critical, more research)
· The TWG report on proceedings
· Feminist pedagogical perspectives
· Case studies on our pedagogy as activism
· Supporting resources that can be used in the teaching of sexuality, culture and identity, including bibliographies, texts, grey literature, film and videos and online resources
· Resource pack for teaching sexuality from an African feminist transformatory perspective
· To address students/community needs through the curriculum
· To pay more attention to the links between teaching, research, disciplinary and students' needs, and those between institutional and community needs
· Laughter!

Exercise: How am I feeling?

In moving towards closure, TWG members were asked to identify an object, reflect on the week's activities and deliberations, and indicate how they were feeling. Members felt stimulated, energised, inspired and excited. Some were fatigued, but all were enriched by the week's deliberations. There was an appreciation of the methodology used, as well as "new" pedagogical techniques. [See key text below for more information]

African Feminist Pedagogies

1.7 Future Directions

Reflecting on the learnings, needs and wants articulated the previous day, TWG members committed to further the thinking and reflection begun at the first TWG meeting. These undertakings related to participants' current and ongoing activities

1.8 Closure

The first Teaching Working Group Meeting ended with thanks to the IAS for hosting the meeting, and to all the participants for a full and enriching week.

Report of the Second Teaching Resources Discussion
Focus on Law, Politics and Policy

2.1 Welcome

Participants were welcomed by Amina Mama of the AGI. The programme for the working group meeting was shared (see Appendix 3).

2.2 Exercise: Review

Each person was asked to introduce themselves, and to share something that had happened in their lives since the first meeting. This exercise allowed participants to reconnect both intellectually and personally. It affirmed that participants played multiple roles and carried heavy work loads. Participants were reminded of the need to make time for themselves in increasingly demanding and stressful environments.

2.3 Exercise: Mapping Our Trajectories

This exercise, facilitated by Shereen, charted participants' development and participation in GWS through the plotting of defining life moments on a time line. Using a GWS ‘engine', participants' personal and professional trajectories were plotted along the time line of the train tracks. The exercise illustrated the different trajectories and supporting factors that brought each participant to the present meeting. Most importantly, the exercise highlighted the breadth and depth of resources and collective experience that the group could draw upon. The timeline illustrated the organic interweaving of elements that individuals drew upon, and showed that most GWS work had been concentrated in the last decade. The colourful and positive illustration of participants' trajectories remained on the wall throughout the working meeting, and members were encouraged to take time to consider each others' contributions or to add to the chart.

2.4 Contemporary African Women's Movements: Strategies and Analysis
Presentation by Shereen Essof

Shereen located herself as a student and reflected on some experiences of the Zimbabwean Women's Movement. She provided snapshots of the movement in relation to the state and civil society. She showed that the women's movement in Zimbabwe had been far from silent within a hostile patriarchal context. During the recent period of social, political and economic upheaval, the movement had predominantly manifested through a form of coalition politics linking different groups across spheres. Coalitions that were opportune, but which have also presented challenges; both practical and analytical challenges. The case showed that women's mobilisations have always expressed demands for full citizenship and rights and it highlighted the tenacity with which women have pursued their interests in the public sphere. The analysis suggested that the formulation of women's interests are intrinsically linked to the formation of women's political identities. Zimbabwean gender politics were revealed as dynamic, contested and were continuously improvised in response to changing national political conditions.

Through her positioning of herself as a graduate student and an activist, the importance of the link between activism and the academy was stressed. She suggested that this link was one of the markers of transformatory teaching.

Discussion

Student engagement

Students have different needs and are taking courses for different purposes. Most are interested in securing employment and are not necessarily interested in a transformatory agenda. Activist students are in the minority, and this impacts on the understanding of transformation and what can be taught within the classroom space. It was felt that encouraging critical thinking was essential but difficult, and the best way to connect with students was to understand what attracts, repels or engages them through timeous course evaluations. The aim of GWS teaching is after all, not to guide students to a pre-determined conclusion, but rather to inform and inspire them to search for their own answers.

Resources

Participants felt it was necessary to go beyond published material, as much African feminist writing that deals with relevant issues and most current activism is neither documented nor theorised. “Grey literature”, unpublished material, current events and NGOs were all seen as valuable resources that could be drawn upon to inform teaching.

Feminist Theory and Activism Resource Listing

Methodology

The limits of concepts need to be understood, both generally and within specific contexts. African experiences need to be incorporated and used to test borrowed paradigms. With regard to women's movements in particular, diversity and difference involve issues of dominance and exploitation. Thus, questions concerning how power is used within women's organisations and movements need to be asked. The gap between the academy and the broader community needs to be bridged to highlight the links between theories and students' daily lives. Furthermore, students should be included in building African feminist theory. Common understandings need to be deconstructed, and in order to engage with transformatory methodologies, teachers require more preparation at the levels of politics, pedagogy and methodology.

The State

Participants expressed discomfort with the fixation on the state as the source of solutions to the woes of African feminist movements. However, a variety of strategies for approaching the state are needed. The ambivalence of legal activism in connection with states that are complicit or perpetrate violence against women should be made explicit. It was asked whether the demands placed on the state were always reasonable and how else issues might be solved.

2.5 Policy Activism: The Women's Budget
Presentation By Debbie Budlender

Since 1995, Debbie has worked on gender budgets in more than 20 countries. Her presentation defined gender budgets, identified categories for assessing the gender-sensitivity of budgets, outlined steps to implement gender budgets and performance indicators, gave examples of government strategies, and concluded with an assessment of skills required to promote gender budgeting.

Gender budgets are not simply about allocating more money for women. They involve a change in paradigm that uncovers issues not seen in general economic analysis. By noting the different axes of disadvantage in a society, a government must focus on those groups who are least able to cater for themselves. This does not (usually) mean making line allocations for particular groups. Instead, it is achieved by focusing on the services that best serve the needs and interests of the disadvantaged. She showed, using sex and gender, how government policy must cater for both, but in different ways.

Three categories for undertaking a gendered analysis of budgets were devised in Australia . These categories were gender-targeted expenditure, equal employment expenditure and mainstream expenditure. This division helps to highlight that if analysis focuses only on the first two, the bulk of the (mainstream) expenditure will continue to happen according to old patterns. Gender budgeting reflects certain assumptions that are made about the shape of society. Equity rather than formal equality should be the objective, as the former is more gender-sensitive.

Debbie outlined five steps in gender budgeting. The first is to describe the situation regarding men and women, and boys and girls in a particular sector. This should assist in identifying gender gaps. In the next steps, policy and programmes are considered in terms of their likely effect on the gender gaps. In the third step one must assess whether the budget allocations for the gender-respponsive policies and programmes are adequate. The fourth step considers how money was actually spent, whether expenditures were made as allocated, what was delivered, and who the goods and services reached. The fifth step considers what the impacts of policies and related expenditures were. It was noted that measuring the outcomes of programmes could be difficult as (a) impacts happen only after relatively long period – not a year, and (b) outcomes are usually the result of a range of programmes and policies, rather than a single one.

Traditional budget theory considers the ‘three Es' - economy, efficiency and effects. Equity is not considered. Including consideration of equity is a means of adding value to the process.

Strategies used in Rwanda , South Africa and Malaysia illustrate how gender could be explicitly built into existing budget formats. It was noted that few governments could produce an ongoing, discursive description of programmes from a gender perspective. Set formats are, however, usually feasible. In-depth input from people outside government, with access to relevant information, is essential to the process of more qualitative in-depth analysis.

Gender budget analysis by NGOs and individuals who have not been co-opted is required to promote an ideal society. These groups should ideally equip themselves with the skills to promote gender budgets instead of relying on outside economists or statisticians, who might not be sufficiently gender-sensitive.

Interdisciplinary skills and multi-sectoral persons are needed for gender budgeting. Extraordinary mathematical skills are not required. It should be acknowledged that many steps will need to be taken to achieve a certain goal, and proponents of gender budgeting need to learn how to negotiate. Protest alone closes doors to opportunities for change that could be achieved through negotiation. It is unrealistic to expect impeccable gender sensitivity from governments, nor is it appropriate to tell them that they are “wrong”. Thus, the ability to negotiate and to find alternative options and solutions is essential.

Where governments supply limited information, this must be utilised to the best of researchers' ability, and they should be honest about the limited results of such work. Finally, it is essential that deadlines are met. Gender budget initiatives must deliver in time, as Ministers of Finance will not delay the national budget for them.

Discussion

Gender budgeting processes should be shaped and sustained by people in a particular country; the sustainability of gender budgeting depends on dynamics in each context. These include issues of partnerships between government and other bodies, funding, and the political context. The difficulties involved in obtaining budgetary and other relevant information from governments were emphasised. The lack of transparency and accountability affects not only gender budgets, but also speaks to larger issues of transparency and accountability.

The country-specific context, together with existing policies, were seen to be the starting point and not the budget itself. As governments prefer to tinker with existing programmes, the focus should be what is being asked of the government rather than a critique of existing programmes. A specific example should be considered in terms of its causes, consequences and possible solutions. It may sometimes be necessary to remedy ill-effects of causes of a situation. Proposed solutions should be tested against existing government policy.

Success stories include South Africa , Tanzania , the Philippines , and Malaysia . Most governments speak of and try to achieve equitable results. Where governments feel they need gender budgets, it is possible to begin working from what the governments are already doing, rather than requiring substantial policy and paradigm changes.

The disadvantages of decentralisation include the increased functions that local governments are expected to perform, with inadequate funding for their implementation. Household or care sectors that produce person-power at no cost to the state were problematised.

Referring back to the timeline, Takiywaa Manuh noted that gender budgets were one aspect of policy activism. Using this as a starting point, participants considered policy activism and its link to GWS teaching and research.

Problems arise where concepts such as policy and gender are undefined, or where there is no national or local government consensus on their meanings or on related policies. Difficulties in obtaining government-held information have fuelled movements to promote transparency. This has led to efforts to find out whether policies are actually applied and to what effect.

Any framework (the five steps in gender budgeting, for example) is based on certain assumptions. The practical issues that influence the character and processes of a state are often not taken into consideration. For example, where state structures are in flux or seriously eroded and sites for growth, duplication or siphoning of resources exist, these would seriously affect the implementation of any framework. Participants stressed that the approach needs to be shaped by the context in which it is applied, and different strategies are needed to link policies, such as gender budgets, to practical reality.

It was felt that GWS teachers and scholars need to move beyond co-opting government, or having government co-opt them into programmes. Other strategies need to be developed in order to move feminists into positions where they can influence decisions. The state has long been a stumbling block and the results of engaging with it have been limited. Students need to problematise this.

The potential problems arising from the co-option of gender activists into state structures were discussed, and a call was made for more emphasis to be placed on the development of alternative strategies, pedagogies and policies.

Students must be encouraged to engage with and critique policies. A broad critical lens should be used to develop their critical thinking and policy analysis skills. Strong and active engagement with policy and critiques of those who create policy should also be encouraged. Government officials who make or influence policy could be asked to speak to classes. Some may refuse to attend in order to avoid questions and accountability, but some might agree to speak to students.

GWS teachers need to understand and to be able to present and demonstrate the limits and contradictions embedded in activism, how it relates to the state and the different strategies used to move between them. It should not be forgotten that some GWS students may become bureaucrats and could one day further the implementation of gendered policies.

2.6 Political Activism
Presentation by Winnie Byanyima (see also article presented on International Women's Day 2004)

This presentation considered the limits of political activism, and was based on Winnie's observations as a gender activist, politician and self-identified feminist. She spent several years promoting women's political participation and is presently studying the impact of this on political processes. More than ten years ago, Winnie founded a NGO aimed at increasing women's political participation and impact on the political agenda. The NGO focused on training women political candidates in the hopes that this would increase their effectiveness in parliament and local government. Her presentation considered women's movements, civil society and their involvement in government in the Ugandan context. The focus of the presentation was the Ugandan experiment with special seats for women in Parliament.

Winnie sketched the context of the Ugandan women's movement. A strong gender constituency still needs to be developed, and a number of constraints affect the credibility of the women's movement in acting as a voice for women's interests. These include organisational weaknesses, leadership primarily by middle-class urban women, and the need to cross class and ethnicities between the leadership and members of the women's movement.

She described the unrealistic expectation that feminist politicians should organise the feminist voice. New processes of re-organising civil society are disturbing because they do not enable the growth of a strong constituency representing women's issues. She felt that the price of engagement with international NGOs has been the loss of civil society's critical edge, and that collaboration with government has narrowed the spaces in which gender battles can be fought.

She considers the women's movement to be a part of civil society, noting that the Ugandan women's movement has been a weak component within civil society. Their capacity to rally around and sustain particular agendas has been limited by differences in culture, history, different responses to the state and weak leadership. Questions about who belongs to the women's movement and for whom the women's movement attempts to speak were raised, and the economic and class differences between members of the women's movement and the poor highlighted.

Winnie suspected that women's organisations had previously shied away from engagement with the state because of the politics of militarization. The special results seats were recently created to ensure the presence of women in parliament. Training of women candidates was undertaken in an effort to develop a feminist agenda and to encourage them to incorporate feminist issues into their campaigns. This training achieved very little, because campaigns degenerated into the women candidates' submission to patriarchal notions. Not only did many of them defend polygamy, they wore traditional garb, bowed to voters and generally promoted the most oppressive aspects of Ugandan culture.

Once women were elected to the special results seats, it became obvious that certain structural limitations applied. For example, irrespective of Constitutional provisions, the system lacked internal democracy, making it difficult to advance any issue in a democratic manner. This has meant that if issues related to women were not promoted by persons who had an interest in them, or who had been privately petitioned, there would be little opportunity for these issues to reach parliament. Where certain gains had been made, such as the introduction of quotas for women, these were achieved by pleading with the government and riding on the back of other reforms being passed by parliament.

Struggles to democratise state processes and efforts to oppose corruption are not recognised as feminist struggles by the women's movement. It is necessary to define and understand the feminist political agenda. Democracy and accountability are steps towards equality, and achieving these is a success for the feminist movement too.

Winnie went on to consider the struggles of five women to illustrate the contexts within which they operated, their challenges, and the way these were dealt with.

In the final section of her presentation, she considered the roles of women in government. It was noted that male leaders used elected women to strengthen their own positions. This was done in a variety of ways. For example, if a leader was threatened by men from particular ethnic districts, a woman would be made a minister in that area to heighten internal divisions, as the men would then oppose the appointed woman. Another example is the use of women to oppose other women in parliament. To this end, women's lobbies shout each other down, achieving nothing for either group other than the portrayal of women as divided and incompetent.

Another illustration of the way government strategies use and weaken the women's movement is found in the President's appointment of women to positions of influence. In doing so, he has created his strongest constituency. Sometimes women are appointed because the President is under pressure to democratise governance. But although these women are placed in powerful positions, they remain traditional and support the President, as they feel grateful for the favour he showed them by appointing them.

Nevertheless, Winnie was optimistic about the potential for women who have entered mainstream politics to influence political processes. Women are generally better qualified in such roles, even though they are less exposed to politics. They may have limited influence in parliament's plenary sessions, but they have a powerful influence in parliamentary committees. Examples of women who lead influential committees were given.

Discussion

Similarities between women's movements and political processes in different countries were noted. In the light of difficulties in advancing feminist agendas through power structures, choices about which agendas would be most effective must be made. Few women are aware of the boundaries that class places on their legitimacy with regard to the constituencies they claim to represent. The politics of identity have not yet been transcended, and this limits the effectiveness of women's movements in politics.

Women in politics and women in civil society distrust each other, yet need to work together and be aware of the forces against them. The co-ownership of the feminist agenda needs to be considered and modes of participation in civil society must not be imposed. Men are adept at manipulating women in power and utilising the fractures between women, so if women are to succeed in politics, they must be opportunistic. Thus, different strategies are needed to play the political game and, as traditional culture limits the space for women in politics, new strategies need to be developed. A mediated route between the aims of the women's movement, political expediency and contextual limitations needs to be found. Accountability applies to both the government and the women's movement itself. Promoting accountability would also strengthen the women's movement.

In teaching politics and GWS, the diverse variants of gender politics need to be addressed. Teachers need to develop students' strategic acumen, their ability to identify key players, and their capacity to improvise strategies. This requires the development of a framework within which GWS and politics can be taught. Future research should trace what women are doing in parliamentary committees, note how the committees are arranged, and the work they do.

Politics and Gender in Africa - Forthcoming

2.7 Legal Activism
Presentation by Sylvia Tamale

Sylvia gave an overview of African legal feminism, outlining ways in which women have analysed and used the law to pursue struggles for gender equality. She went on to link African legal feminism to the aims of the present working meeting. She focused on the need for theorisation and the links between transformation and theorisation.

Law has been perceived as a tool for transformation and women who use law are usually at the forefront of women's movements. Nevertheless, it is important to realise that the law applied is often derived from other contexts, and the challenges of colonial histories need to be considered.

Examples of positive interventions of the legal feminist movement were discussed. In brief, these have included: lobbying for gender-responsive legislation; gender-based affirmative action; legal aid and legal literacy; women's rights advocacy; constitutional equality and class action test cases; research by African legal feminists.

Five significant cases from Botswana, Zambia, Tanzania and Nigeria, as well as the Akayesu decision of the Rwandan International Criminal Tribunal, illustrated challenges to and progress made by African legal feminists.

Despite these and other successes, African legal feminism is plagued by certain limitations in achieving transformation. Its legalistic stance is derived from the type of legal education received. In general, legal education emphasizes liberal legal reform and this limits transformatory goals. Gaps between theory and practice, and between the academy and practitioners, result in the truncation of the legal feminist movement and this means that social transformation is stymied again. Cultural relativism and the tendency to adopt an ethos of sentimentalism and victimisation (even though these may reflect reality) often entrench the subordination of women. These concerns apply to both African legal feminism and to the feminist movement generally. African legal feminism, in particular, is limited by a reactionary backlash against legal reforms. Recent developments relating to Ugandan affirmative action policies illustrate this.

The effect of these limitations is both to curtail the transformatory potential of African legal feminism, and to highlight the need for theorisation. Sylvia proposed that theorising is necessary to assist in understanding systems of oppression, and that this understanding would sustain the movement. Thus, if teaching is recognised as bringing about change and transformation for women, then theorisation is required to enable this effect. For example, the reactions of those Ugandan women who have benefited from affirmative action has been to perpetually thank the administration for the opportunities they have been granted. This demonstrates that strategies cannot be implemented without understanding through theorisation.

In conclusion, it was noted that legal feminist causes are often narrowly constructed and a great deal of bridging between legal theory and legal feminism is still required. As most gender oppression is subtle, understanding it requires theorisation. Feminist theorising should provide different choices to widen understandings of contexts. It should also encourage an evaluation of law as an efficient, but neither neutral nor value-free tool for the feminist movement. Sylvia also noted that there are very few law faculties that offer courses in gender studies. Where these are offered, they are often under-represented.

Discussion

Issues discussed included the kinds of legal theories used, and how legal feminists have challenged or used these concepts. The aim was to draw the need for theory into the building of curricula, in both the present discussion and during the working meeting. Sylvia noted that legal feminists in the Third World have challenged the individualism of liberal democratic theories. She pointed out further challenges, such as the need to build African legal jurisprudence. Further challenges relate to the centrality of group rights. These are often recognised by male leaders who do not see women as a group deserving of group rights. Therefore, with regard to affirmative action for women, individuals rather than groups are considered. Also, the myth that the law is a neutral objective tool that applies to everyone persists. This perspective ignores the origins of laws, the history of colonisation and the ways, both blatant and subtle, that it affects the positions of women in society. Differences between formal and substantive equality tend to be glossed over as a result.

Sylvia's example of how women are excluded from group rights points to the important of confronting oppression, especially when developing curricula. Feminism is about the cross-fertilisation between theory and practice, so the law is needed to highlight, strengthen and bridge the gaps between theory and practice. The challenges to legal feminism have come more from politics than from legal theory. An understanding of how the law fits into society seems to be missing from legal academia, lawyers and law students. This understanding is essential to develop the law as a tool for transformation. It is ironic that African feminists have used the law to achieve change even though the law itself was circumscribed in ways that did not allow the status quo to be challenged effectively.

The question of how to teach theory in classes was raised. Reading and talking about experiences does not illustrate how participants actually teach theory to their students. One method was to develop students' consciousness of theory by asking them to identify theorists. However, the existence of vacuums or gaps in theory makes it difficult to address these concerns. One of the challenges in teaching legal feminism is resistance to dealing with gender within the legal discipline. It is often felt that justice is not about gender or plurality. African legal feminism is meanwhile under-theorised and has limited itself to certain subjects. Violence, property rights and constitutional rights have been concentrated on, to the cost of land reform and labour rights. Sylvia's presentation gave a certain sense of homogeneity within African legal feminism, and it was asked whether different attitudes and different ways to theorise existed.

Exercise: What Do We Teach The President?

Facilitated by Shereen Essof

It was reported on the morning news that the president of an African country had decided to return to the academy in order to take an eight-week course on gender, policy and legal activism. Participants separated into pairs to consider which themes they would want included in such a course. The following issues and themes were suggested.

The course should be a general introduction to GWS, and the teaching methods should include regular assessment. Furthermore, the course should be rooted in the social context, and the teacher's philosophical position needs to be defined. Expectations, both of the President and of what the course could achieve, should be realistic. The course should have a vision of society or a paradigm that could be worked through and towards and the President should, as far as possible, be actively engaged in the learning processes. Its content should be determined by what the President does and what his needs are. This involves acknowledging the power he wields and the knowledge he already has. The teacher should assume that the President has come to the class willing to learn new things but with a knowledge of gender that is limited to policy pronouncements. The course should cover the following themes (among others): patriarchy; masculinity; sexuality in organisations; introduction to women's civil society movements and processes; systems of oppression, their links, effects and the way these lead to the politicisation of issues; the way gender processes affect and are affected by privatisation, economic empowerment of women and structural adjustment programmes; and ethical issues, including transparency and accountability.

2.8 GWS and ICTs
by Joanne Henry

Why the need for ICTs in teaching GWS?

One of the aims of the GWS Africa project is to address the isolation and the structurally weak position of women in tertiary education as well as confronting the major challenge of access to African centred information and critical research that supports the teaching of relevant and cutting edge GWS programmes on the continent.

There has been much talk and exploration around the use of technologies to support and facilitiate collaboration and learning in educational contexts. There is consensus that the ideal strategy for the use of ICTs is a blended one where there is a combination of face-to-face and online interaction to encourage learning and support networking.

But what does this mean in African contexts? In African contexts there are challenges to ICT infrastructure and challenges around technological access. There are differing levels of capacity across the continent. These disparities pose challenges for the meaningful use of ICTs. Within the GWS project the approach has been one of a combination of face-to-face working meetings and continuing collaboration online via email and listserve sharing and discussion.

The process

The initial concept for the GWS project involved a strong ICT component which would take seriously the issues of ICTs in supporting curriculum development. While at this stage utilising a full online learning environment is not possible, we would rather use the existing tools in a dual strategy of making resources available in hard and electronic form to support our overall goal. Thus the resources generated as part of the process will be made available on the GWS website for people to access. This will be complimented by the production of a limited number of hardcopies.

The following ICTs have been employed in order to support this process. The use of email among individuals; the use of a dedicated teaching working group listserve discussion group were people shared work in progress for feedback and discussion and a website for the publication of the resources.

Learnings and gains from this process:

Collaborative work in an online environment is particularly challenging. It requires high levels of commitment and an invested interest in the outcomes for it to have a chance at succeeding. Working together online, one faces competing demands which are not as easy to ignore as when one is away at a face-to-face discussion in Accra or Cape Town . Face-to-face meetings help with reconnecting individuals and the work process and facilitates progress in both areas.

The TWG Listserve space created on online community space through which the collegiality of the face-to-face meetings could continue. Because people had already met with each other and worked together, this space could be quite an intimate one. The sense of community created could continue in the space, but very importantly, also the sense of sharing and learning and exchange of ideas and information, strategies, techniques and contexts. Documents of work in progress were shared for discussion and feedback in this listserve space.

Younger, less experienced teachers had a sense of confidence to interact both in this space and in their own institutional spaces because of the confidence they had gained from attending the meetings and contributing and gaining from those spaces. They also felt supported by this network when facing challenging in own institutional spaces. There had been a sharing of knowledge and experience and a sense of solidarity.

A general feature of online working environments is an increase in the demands on one's time. We are no longer just restricted to face-to-face interactions which generate the work and engagement we do, instead we join an open space where demands on ones time actually increase. Online learning environments generally equate to higher levels of interaction both among “students” and between “student” and “teacher”.

2.9 Designing Curricula

African Feminist Pedagogies

Great energy characterised the work and discussion on curricula. This process was a creative means of developing new ideas and approaches to teaching. Cross-cultural issues were revealed and inter-disciplinary enrichment of resulting curricula was promoted. Participants were thus challenged to think in new ways. Participants noted the importance of a collaborative process when thinking through curricula design, as this is generally a solitary exercise.

Participants identified the following issues and ideas as recurring throughout the working meetings. Particpants established the following framework that consoliodated discussions on curricula development and that would further guide participants' development of curricula.

Learning Objectives

•  Feminist theories

•  Theory building

•  Increasing gendered African knowledge

•  Assessment of existing reformist or transformative strategies and their variations

•  Giving students tools to develop critical analytical skills, thinking and theories

Pedagogies

•  Participatory

•  Experiential

•  Take diversities into consideration

•  Politically transformative

•  Grounded

Participants also noted that approaches should be contextual, historicised, deconstructive and empowering.

Content

•  Deconstruct patriarchy

•  Gendered understandings of health, work, economy, globalisation, privatisation, politics, land, rights, militarism / security, education, culture, sexuality, law, policy

•  Take students' backgrounds and positionings into account

•  Self-evaluative

•  Content should have a thematic core and detachable foci. For example, law could be either the focus or the starting point of a course

•  Activist case studies need to be written up and their use encouraged. There is no formal formula for the documentation of case studies.

General Guidelines for Curriculum Design

Each course outline should be adaptable for a range of class sizes (the reality is that they may be anything from 15 to over 100 students). Each should include the following:

Introduction

· a brief statement of the course rationale and subject matter.

· Should mention context and relevance, and indicate content – the Why questions (as in “why teach about ‘sexuality' or ‘identity' or ‘culture' or ‘politics' or ‘policy' or ‘law' - in African gender studies classes”)

· level of target students and key assumptions regarding levels of competence in GWS.

Course Objectives

· Bullet points outlining core aims of the course, specifying what you expect learners to acquire, go away with (intellectual, practical and strategic skills, understandings of particular areas of content), core concepts that you will expect learners to acquire competence in.

Methodology

· a statement of the pedagogical methods indicating teaching style, expectations of learners, lecture or seminar format, kinds of resources utilised, and mode of assessment (see attached guidelines for thinking through pedagogy)

Outline

Module structure and weekly plan indicating objectives, subject matter for each session; required source material, plus other recommended resources (films, websites, additional texts).

A common format includes:

· introductory sessions outline core concepts and historical background

· a middle section that covers much of the content and reiterates the core concepts in various ways, perhaps across a range of contexts or arenas.

· A final section that synthesises the main learning objectives for the course

Assessment and Evaluation

· what kind of assignments and or projects will students be required to undertake for assessment purposes

· an indication of how students will be required to evaluate the course and their participation in it.

Bibliographies/Allied Resources: Elements For Consideration

Members of the working meetings also made a commitment to developing bibliographical resources to support the curricula. These would take into consideration the African theorists noted, and materials would be drawn from a wide variety of sources, noting what is taught and how it is taught. These would focus on the areas of:

•  Feminist Theory, Strategy and Activism

•  Sexuality, Identity and Culture - Forthcoming

•  Politics and Law - Forthcoming

Lists of further resources, such as websites, journals and videos would be welcomed.

Exercise: How do we feel?

A number of objects were placed on a small table. Participants were asked to choose an object that connected to their feelings or reflections about the present working meeting. Each participant then shared these with the group. The exercise encouraged participants to crystallise and verbalise their responses to the various processes and dynamics of the working group. It highlighted challenges, perceptions and the general sense of enthusiasm and hope that was felt for this GWS project.

2.10 Evaluation of TWG Meeting

Participants were asked to complete an evaluation form for this working meeting (see feedback section). Pieces of paper were stuck onto participants' backs. Each person wrote a comment, note of appreciation, or farewell on the pieces of paper. This fun exercise meant that each person was affirmed by the group, and the meeting ended with strong feelings of cohesion and commitment.

2.11 Thanks and Closure