Browsing by Subject "Schooling"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Complications and complexities in the schooling experiences of young Northern Nigerian women living in Zaria
    (2010-07) Jatau, Phebe Veronica
    The purpose of this research was to share and interpret the stories of young women in Zaria, an urban city in northern Nigeria, in order to illustrate how their unique positions framed their identity and their attitude toward schooling. There has been a huge concern about the increasing school dropout rate among women in the country, particularly in northern Nigeria. The gender gap and inequities that pervade the educational system have remained daunting challenges. Many stories have been told and are still being told about these women and their ability or inability to access formal education. Most of the literature that examines this phenomenon comes at the problem from a quantitative research approach which beclouds important nuances. As such, a one-size-fits-all approach has been used to promote women's education in Nigeria without recognizing difference. In my research, the complexities and complications involved in the schooling process of these women were uncovered in order to deepen understanding about the issues that they grappled with as they went to school. Qualitative research methods, particularly interviews and deep conversations, were used to elicit the seventeen young women's (between the ages of 18 and 30) experiences. I chose these women purposively using criterion sampling and snowballing. Some women self-selected themselves to participate. Postmodernism, postcolonial feminism, socio-cultural perspectives on literacy, and funds of knowledge were theoretical frameworks that helped me to understand the forces at work in these women's schooling. These forces included poverty, ethnicity, religion, and lack of proficiency in English language, which together informed their identity construction and in the end complicated their schooling processes.
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    Embodying Empowerment: Gender, Schooling, Relationships and Life History in Tanzania
    (2016-05) Willemsen, Laura
    This dissertation explores the interplay of education and empowerment as it is lived by seven young Tanzanian women and developed at a unique all-girls’ secondary school in Tanzania. Drawing on interviews and participant observation from eight trips over four years, this study offers a longitudinal, ethnographic exploration of the school, Sasema Secondary School for Girls, to explore the rationale and production of curricula, pedagogies and practices that draw on global, national and local notions of empowerment and education. This study illuminates the tensions, vulnerabilities, feats and aspirations in young women’s lives through employing a life history approach focusing on three young women’s complete life histories. It examines the role that schooling has played, and has not played, in what these women describe as a contingent movement from vulnerability toward increasing security and well-being. This dissertation advances two main arguments: First, by exploring the practices and pedagogies at Sasema that young women have found to be valuable in their lives both at and beyond school, it demonstrates the significance of, and possibilities for, emotional and social learning through schooling while underscoring the importance of care in schools. As such, this research reinforces calls to conceptualize educational quality beyond the metrics of academic knowledge or vocational skills, traditionally thought of as schooling’s raison d’être, toward more holistic notions of education for the whole person. Second, this study complicates and adds nuance to accepted notions of empowerment through education by offering deeply contextualized portraits of young women’s lives as they understand them to be unfolding. Although empowerment is frequently analyzed in economic or political terms, this work reveals that, for these young women, empowerment is also profoundly psychosocial and even corporeal. Furthermore, additional forces, such as family, religion and community, are at play in their notions of processes that advance their well-being and the well-being of others. As such, this study reveals disjunctures between empowerment through education as it lived by young women in Tanzania and as discussed by scholars of international development, education and gender.