By Sohini Bhattacharya

Every year, when September 5 comes around, we see articles on Savitribai Phule in newspapers as the first woman teacher in India. Savitribai was also a feminist, a social reformer and activist, a voice against caste discrimination, a philanthropist and a poet — everything that a teacher could aspire to be and every role that a teacher can easily play within a school system. I have seen many teachers playing these roles time and again. Be it Hema didi who stops the underage marriage of a girl in Uttar Pradesh, or Sanjay bhaiya who spends his own money to send a poor girl in Jharkhand to a higher secondary school, or Jitender sir who wrote a poem on girl power in Punjab, or the ASHA didi, Sarita (all names changed), who lashed out against gender-based sex selection in Haryana. The unsung teachers who not only teach but also build the infrastructure for holistic education in our country are often nameless and faceless.

Teachers are the lever for ushering in gender-transformative school systems anywhere in the world. They are central to the education system for the key roles they play in the transmission of values, knowledge, and the development of human potential and skills. Teachers are influential members of their communities due to their access to the government system and resources, their role in most last-mile initiatives (vaccination drives, voter ID registration, etc.), their strength in numbers (at 5.7 million, teachers are among the largest government-employed workforces in India) and in their ability to influence the thinking and behaviour of adolescents.

The teachers’ own attitudes towards gender norms and their inability to engage in critical dialogue about gender inequality within classrooms or when approached by students with curious questions about existing gender norms is one of the key challenges in their demonstration of gender-positive approaches in their interaction with students. Traditional meanings regarding masculine and feminine persist and continue to be reaffirmed by the teachers’ behaviours and attitudes. There is a need to nudge teachers towards more gender-equitable behaviour in the classroom, make sure that such behaviours are incentivised and recognised, and that there is complete buy-in from the authorities.

While concepts and theories on gender might be included in the teacher training curriculum, teachers need to learn to examine and understand how gender is constructed and how it affects the lives of women and girls by drawing upon their own life experiences and by building their capacities on examining these experiences critically through a gender lens. Teachers should be aware of gender roles and gender-based discrimination in classrooms; they need not differentiate between boys and girls in classroom settings; they continue to have increased conversations with girl students to support/encourage them to continue their education; they abstain from using gender and/or casteist slurs in addressing students; they should continue asking girls more questions and push them towards STEM education; they should encourage girls to play sports and have a career.

Unfortunately, the need for teacher training is often underlined through the evidence of poor learning outcomes in Indian studies and reports. However, there is a need to identify other markers for teacher competence than just the achievement of academic outcomes, such as their attitudes and beliefs, especially as exercised in the classroom. We need to institutionalise capacity building of school leaders/principals and teachers on gender equitable attitudes and behaviours by creating additional resources, WhatsApp nudges, and follow-up by trained gender champions. Creating common pools of information and knowledge from such life experiences that they can also build up from their experiences of applying these learnings in the classroom can be a tremendous resource for other teachers. Efforts to train them will make them aware, reflect, and change their mindsets and behaviours. This is possible with support from the school leaders and administrators within the system – from the Principal Secretary to the Master Trainers.

The block and district-level education departments and Cluster Resource Centres (CRC) are the most important spaces for teachers’ empowerment. This is where teachers share notes on innovative learning tools and practices. There are assigned human resources within these structures like DEOs and BEOs, Cluster Coordinators, and Master Trainers who are tasked with training and monitoring the activities of the teachers also. This is where the school system needs to become a gender transformative system – gendered barriers are considered as root causes when administrators design their interactions with teachers; spaces are created for individuals to actively challenge gender norms; power inequities between persons of different genders within the system become points of consideration and gender-related outcomes and impacts are monitored regularly.

The other problem in this whole system is the roles of the women teachers within the system. When it comes to school leadership, a 2018 National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA) report shows that 13 states and Union Territories have a higher or equal representation of women as acting heads, vice-principals and principals and are under-represented in 19 states. Interestingly, 20 states see more women as vice-principals than principals. The factors coming in the way for women range from school management refusing to have a woman lead it to a perceived higher degree of family commitments of women, to the downright refusal of some women to take leadership roles. For progressive gendered policy to be implemented successfully, a dynamic shift in approach within such a system is required. From that of the school administrator to the teacher, to the adolescent in the classroom, the learner must develop an ability to question relations of power in society, as well as an ability to overcome the disadvantages of discrimination and unequal socialisation.

The transformative power and crucial role of teachers cannot be bypassed as we continue to make efforts to build a gender-equal world. It is important to empower teachers to become agents of positive change in society that can lead to a more inclusive and equitable educational experience for students, parents, and the communities that they come from.

[Sohini Bhattacharya is the CEO of Breakthrough]