Working Meeting Report | Curriculum Strengthening Working Group
1. Project Context
The African Gender Institute (AGI), at the University of Cape Town, was established in 1996. The main goals of the Institute are to strengthen African researchers', writers', and scholars' understanding of gender analysis and its importance for social transformation on the continent, and to support the emergence and growth of African scholarship, writing and research.
Over the past five years, the AGI has developed strong connections with a number of national, sub-regional and continental partners and networks. These connections and its own continental and national programming, have kept the AGI fully alert to challenges facing higher education on the continent. Expanding efforts to institutionalise strong and relevant programmes in gender studies in African universities have been hampered by several key challenges, including the structurally weak position of women in tertiary institutions and the very limited resources for teaching and research in gender studies. There is also a dearth of home-grown gender research that addresses the poorly understood realities of African gender relations and cultures.
The AGI developed the project 'Strengthening Gender Studies for Africa's Transformation' in response to the above challenges. The project sets out to strengthen emergent African-based teaching and research in gender studies by bringing together teachers and researchers in African universities in a series of strategic training, research and publishing activities. It aims to enhance the intellectual quality, the strategic relevance and the applicability of African teaching and research in the field of gender studies. Furthermore, the project aims to generate a strong community of locally-grounded gender-competent faculty, equipped with the analytical and policy advocacy skills required to ensure the delivery of relevant curricula design, teaching and research that will ensure gender justice in African contexts. This collegial network will enable more sustained intellectual and policy dialogue in the field of gender, bringing some coherence to the hitherto fragmented community of scholars located all over the continent.
The project has evolved through different forms of action. One arena has involved consultation, discussion, theorization and networking within workshop contexts. Here, individuals with long histories in the field of GWS teaching and research have explored the current challenges and developed strategies to sustain, energize, and stimulate diverse GWS work. In 2001, a survey was conducted by the AGI. Its aim was to track down and identify those currently engaged in GWS in African higher education institutions as well as to gather information on the institutional capacity, areas of specialisation and the ICT capacity of various centres . The results identified 13 different sites for teaching and researching gender and women's studies on the continent.
As part of an effort to strengthen transformative teaching and research in the field of GWS and to enhance its relevance to the particular challenges of African contexts, a curriculum working group (CWG) was convened to support the design and delivery of two curriculum strengthening working meetings. The CWG was comprised of 12 experienced teaching faculty from GWS centres in six African countries, including Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa. The working group meetings were aimed at developing conceptual frameworks, methodologies and teaching resources for teaching in core areas, identified on the basis of their central importance in strengthening transformative practice, writing, and research.
2. Methodology of the Curriculum Working Meetings
Two CWG meetings took place, one in Accra, Ghana in May 2003, and the other in Cape Town, South Africa in September 2003. The working group was committed to exploring the emergence and institutionalisation of GWS teaching through country-specific case examples; developing a deeper understanding behind existing teaching programmes, and the conditions under which they operate; working towards developing pedagogical strategies, intellectual capacity and resources for curriculum development in the areas of sexuality, identity and culture, and politics, policy and the law.
The design of the programme began early in 2003 when a concept document on the curriculum working group meetings was circulated to members of the CWG. A small Western Cape meeting discussed and explored South African GWS teaching practices, and a series of internal meetings at the AGI led to the further conceptualisation of the curriculum strengthening strategy.
The programme design was intended as a framework for intensive discussion of questions of sexuality, culture and identity, in the first instance; and politics, policy and law in the second. The decision to foreground issues of sexuality, culture and identity was rooted in an understanding of women's oppression and patriarchy that sees these issues as key potential barriers to gender equity and equality in all spheres, including those of politics, policy and the law. The meetings were designed to engage participants in a variety of ways, including reflection on experience, group and individual exercises, commentary and discussion on historical and currently located theoretical debates, and direct experimentation with curriculum building.
The programme was designed to address the identified themes and to leave substantial time for discussion around the best possible "outputs" from the workshop; those which could realistically serve to strengthen GWS teaching in diverse African contexts. Several CWG members worked as resource persons to give specialised input into the design and delivery of these outputs.
In preparation for the CWG meetings, the AGI commissioned a review of literature on the area of sexuality, culture and identity. Relevant papers and articles were made available to CWG members. Members were also asked to bring and share materials that they felt were useful and relevant to their own teaching and research.
3. Objectives of Working Group Meeting
The broad goal of the CWG meeting was to strengthen transformative teaching and research in the field of gender and women's studies (GWS) in African higher educational institutions (HEIs).
This goal was translated into the following broad objectives:
i) The teaching of more relevant and intellectually developed GWS in African
HEIs
ii) Enhancing the uptake of African research in GWS teaching
iii) Improving teaching methodologies
iv) Identifying and strengthening of core teaching areas for African gender
studies programmes (Initial reviews of the literature and teaching profiles
of the 27 surveyed sites suggested two key areas that would enable the project
to address the most pressing needs through the two working meetings)
The first meeting was held in Accra from the 25 - 30 May 2003. The meeting as hosted by the Institute for African Studies, University of Ghana, and was attended by 13 CWG members (for the full listing, see Appendix 1). The meeting was co-facilitated by Jane Bennett and Amina Mama, with support from Takyiwaa Manuh and Shereen Essof.
The broad objectives were translated into the following daily aims:
· Share and review feminist pedagogic perspectives locating sexuality,
culture and identity as strategic areas in strengthening GWS teaching
· To deepen understandings of current debates and theorisations on sexuality,
culture and identity
· Consensus-building around teaching sexuality, culture and identity
· Experiment with the demands of curriculum
· Critique/review curricula
· To consolidate future tasks in preparation for the next meeting
· To evaluate, review and reflect on the meeting, in order to build a
base for the next meeting.
In order to meet these objectives, the programme designers recognized that
several different arenas required exploration and consideration. These included:
· The power of GWS teaching as a transformational tool
· The trajectories within which current models of GWS teaching have been
developed
· Questions concerning African feminist pedagogies in general, and those
applied within GWS sites in particular
· The location of sexuality, culture and identity within current GWS
teaching and curriculum design models
· The power of questions concerning sexuality, culture and identity
· The colonial/historical legacy faced by African feminists engaging
with sexuality, culture, and identity
· Current and diverse debates animating engagement with questions of
sexuality, culture and identity, in connection with gender equality
· The challenges of integrating material on sexuality, culture, and identity
into GWS curricula.