This is the third article in the user series by Jhatkaa on YKA called ‘Gender in the Classroom’, where we aim to have conversations that push for an equal and consensual classroom. You can read the rest of the articles here.
Gender sensitisation refers to the crucial process of educating and raising awareness about systemic inequities for marginalised genders. Growing up in Indian households, we are made to imbibe gender-based stereotypes. Educational institutions play an essential role in building a cohort of young individuals who move forward and play important roles in administrative policies. Schools are a starting point for children to learn about gender sensitisation.
During the formative years of their lives, institutions like schools and colleges must make an active attempt to educate them about issues surrounding gender-based stereotypes and prejudices. Hence, gender sensitisation must be introduced when young individuals are growing and learning. With this, they would be able to form positive ideologies and create positive change moving forward.
How Can Classrooms Be Made More Gender-Sensitive?
Interventions such as making workshops and training programs a necessity within classrooms can help create a safe space for gender sensitisation practices to take place in.
A gender-neutral approach to curriculum is also an important way to make classrooms more gender-sensitive. Instead of focusing on a curriculum specifically built for particular genders, for example, home science being delegated to women and mathematics to men, a wholesome approach to institutional curriculum can be a progressive way forward.
Another example of a heavily gendered curriculum is how sports are given more preference for colleges and schools that are either co-education or for boys only than for institutes for girls only. This has long-lasting effects on how the Indian society perceives sports as a “masculine” field, not to be fully utilised by those who are not cis-men. For example, men’s cricket is celebrated while women’s cricket is left behind as an afterthought.
Comprehensive sexuality education, wherein students are taught about their sexual rights is essential as well. The archaic merging of sex education with biology is essentialist and exclusionary to trans and gender non-conforming individuals.
Comprehensive Sexuality Education that covers aspects of pleasure, safe sex, abortion practices, consent, and the different types of sexual relationships is necessary to create a diverse and gender-sensitive classroom. Moreover, including reproductive health rights within the curriculum of sex education in colleges and schools is important to teach students about their rights when accessing reproductive healthcare. This is essential in terms of finding support during sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and examinations like pap smears.
Workshops that aim to arm students and faculty members with proper legal knowledge around PoSH laws is a critical way to address cases of sexual harassment within college campuses. Despite legal mandates, a lack of awareness about grievance mechanisms can inhibit students’ access to redressal of certain crucial issues. A complainant may also find it challenging to approach administrations with their complaints.
This can happen due to a lack of support systems and an inability to understand whom to approach. Toolkits and workshops around PoSH awareness are an important way to increase gender sensitisation and create safety nets like GSCs or Queer Collectives. These can offer a support system to students in a world that is biased against them.
Sensitising teaching faculty about the importance of using gender-neutral language is also incredibly important.
Gender sensitising modules can help educate faculty members about how using wrong pronouns and deadnames for queer students in their classrooms can trigger gender dysphoria to a considerable extent due to faculty members. A gender-neutral approach to addressing students and being mindful of pronouns and names are important to make classrooms more gender-sensitive.
It is also important to introduce mandatory training manuals as well as sessions for teaching faculty.
For example, the recent discourse around an NCERT manual, “Inclusion of Transgender Children in School Education: Concerns and Roadmap”, would be an essential way to create awareness and safer college and school grounds for non-binary students. However, intrusive and irrelevant questions around a board member’s ethics and morals, who was part of creating this manual, led to the manual being scrapped.
Internet trolls were raising the questions. This shows how vital gender sensitisation is within classrooms and is an important indicator of our society’s strong hesitation towards creating a welcoming space for marginalised genders. This also shows how the cycle of perpetuating harmful stereotypes and prejudices against marginalised genders amounts to violence on social media and offline.
Conclusion
Though various administrative bodies have implemented policies for marginalised genders, a lack of understanding of the same can impact access to redressal mechanisms.
Policies like the formation of Gender Sensitising Committees or mandatory ICCs within colleges are an important step but fail to achieve the desired result in making marginalised genders feel safe within college campuses. Scrapping of Ordinance of 15(D) also made the legal tools inaccessible to non-binary students as it removed the gender-neutral approach for the ICC.
Building proper support systems that can encourage gender sensitisation within classrooms and interventions from various organisations is important to create safer and more comfortable college campuses for marginalised genders. The harmful prejudicial attitudes that households and educational institutions perpetuate can be stopped with the help of a gender-sensitive approach to curriculum, programmes and workshops.
With a holistic approach to building gender-sensitive classrooms, the unsafe practices that put marginalised genders at risk can be curbed. Such an approach can also help students and faculty trace the origins of regressive beliefs, and understand the casteist and classist undertones to them. Schools and higher educational institutions are an essential mechanism to break archaic moulds of gender biases and pave the way for a more progressive future for children who will grow up to implement and close gaps in policies for all marginalised communities.