“Tracing Tarbiya” is a feminist conceptual history of education and upbringing as they were articulated by intellectuals writing in Arabic between the last decades of the Ottoman Empire and the outbreak of the second World War. It focuses on women writers raised in the educational crucible of Beirut and Mount Lebanon who moved to Cairo and Alexandria around 1900 to become theorists of tarbiya, an old Arabic word for cultivation and upbringing that came in the nineteenth century to refer to new structures of formal schooling, new pedagogies, and the feminized labor of childrearing, moral cultivation, and subject formation in the home. Through the work of these writers and others, the concept of tarbiya moved across gender, geography, and sect to enable new political imaginaries: upbringing became the way to shape men and women fit for representative politics, to produce an Arab world capable of facing rising European power, and to refashion Muslim, Christian, and European intellectual traditions for a new age. "Tracing Tarbiya" makes three main arguments. First, while scholars have highlighted the ongoing importance of affective and embodied practices of subject cultivation within the Islamic tradition, this story shows how new pedagogies based around affect and embodiment captivated both Christians and Muslims between 1860 and 1939. Second, this work traces the ongoing power of discourses about motherhood and childrearing to show how writers in Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria came to identify tarbiya as the foundation of successful reform, making women, children, and the family into a primary site for political argument and action. Finally, “Tracing Tarbiya” puts gendered discourses about upbringing at the center of the history of representative governance in the Arab world, proposing that a non-Western political concept might help us to better understand the disjuncture between the promises of representative democracy and its actual outcomes in Egypt, Lebanon, and beyond. By adopting conceptual history methods, it shows how debates about tarbiya identified women's capabilities as childraisers as a way to bridge two contradictions central to actualizing liberal political ideals: first, the contradiction between legal equality and human difference, and second, the tension between the promises of mass politics and the desires of reformist elites.

Guided by the emerging interest in gender of siblings as one important sociological component in American family studies, the major objective of this study was to examine the effect of sex composition of siblings on women's levels of educational attainment in the Japanese setting. The present study hypothesized that the presence of brothers poses women a greater obstacle to a high level of educational attainment than the presence of sisters. For the purpose of gaining more depth in understanding Japanese women's education, this study also investigated other factors which differentiate the patterns of educational attainment between men and women. Two major methods were employed for the exploration. First, in order to examine the effect of sibling gender, this study analyzed quantitative data obtained from a sample of 518 young women. Second, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 15 mothers and 15 young women individually. In the interviews, in addition to several issues surrounding women's education, the mothers were asked their experiences about their children's education whereas the young women were asked their own educational experiences. The quantitative results identified gender of siblings as one important family characteristic in explaining women's levels of educational attainment. While providing some support for the quantitative findings, the qualitative data revealed the importance of other factors including parental attitudes toward gender role ideology and the notion of an appropriate marriage age. Implications of the findings for future research are discussed. / Graduation date: 1996

The Bolivian Law of Educational Reform, which was passed in 1994, included interculturality and gender equity among its many various components and objectives. In this dissertation, the author investigates the promise and paradox of official recognition of culture and gender through an exploration of the prevalent educational discourse in the context of the reform, which aimed to promote social equality and participatory democracy. Based on qualitative interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Bolivia, the findings elucidate how this equality-oriented education valorized indigenousness as rural and traditional but gender equality as urban and modern in a manner that was counter to its own prevailing ideas of educational success for indigenous children and girls. The research explores how these representations served as the basis for attributing the problems of implementing both ethnic and gender equality in education to rural indigenous people. It also examines how the concepts of citizen, nation, and development configured in the discourse of educational reform to promote untenable patriotic obligations for indigenous women and men but not for nonindigenous citizens. / text

No description available.

Over the ages, rural women in subsistence and near-subsistence economies have maintained a sustainable relationship with the environment. This has been manifested in their different roles as users, producers, managers, and income providers. However, the introduction of Western-style development emulating the growth patterns of the North has not only overlooked the needs of the environment but also the needs and knowledge of women. The uninhibited exploitation of nature through development has started eroding the environment. In addition, with the marginalization of women from development schemes, women's cultural, social, economic, and legal status has regressed even further than it was. With no appropriate education, these women have been left defenceless in their confrontation with a changing and frequently adverse environment. / Although literature abounds with studies on women, education, and the environment, few studies attempt to link the three together within the framework of sustainable development. This information gap seems to have hindered development projects from implementing education programs targeting women and focusing on the environment. / This study seeks to fill this information gap. Based on rural women's holistic vision of development, it highlights the necessity of empowering women with a participatory, multifaceted, and integrated nonformal education, which targets gender equity as well as environmental protection and regeneration.

Knowledge production or research in South Africa, as elsewhere in the world, does not occur within 'innocent' spaces devoid of personal, social, political, economic and cultural contexts. Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences has been largely the domain of white, male academics operating within positivistic, western, or eurocentric paradigms that have consequently cast all differing modes of knowledge production as 'other'. Research has been 'normalised' within particular frames of reference that have often served to marginalize knowledge production emanating from other contexts such as a feminist perspective or a black perspective. This thesis presents a critical analysis of the participation of women academics in research in the Humanities and Social Sciences in South Africa. I argue in this study that the discourses and practices of the academy have traditionally operated to marginalize, and continues to marginalize women effectively excluding them from the arena of research. Whilst there are many studies that have been conducted investigating women in academia, the emphases have been essentially on establishing baseline data such as the numbers and positions women occupy and explanations for the situations that exist. There are, however, very few studies that have extended the analysis to focus on women as researchers and knowledge producers within academia as is the case with this study. I also advance the analyses by arguing for a shift from the widely accepted conceptions that cast women academics as the problem and focus attention instead on the often hostile culture or climate of academia. I argue further that the historical exclusion of women and more especially black women, from the production of knowledge or research has contributed to the exclusion of women from positions of power in the social, cultural, political, economic and academic contexts. My own passion for these issues is directly linked to a conviction that in its public absence, and in the assumption that knowledge about gender is largely irrelevant to the possibility of social justice, lies some of the deep roots of women's complex degradations. This study grew out of my participation in the former Centre for Science Development's (now part of the National Research Foundation) audit of women academics and researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences in South Africa and was carried out in three phases. The first phase entailed a secondary analysis of the audit data, drawing comparisons between the national findings and the findings for the province of KwaZulu-Natal. Besides conducting a general analysis the data was also disaggregated according to the historically designated racial categories to establish how black women, in particular, were faring. Having established a statistical picture, the second phase was concerned with exploring the qualitative understandings of women academics in research, through the eyes of six black women academics from KwaZulu-Natal. The six women in the study were selected from the University of Durban-Westville, the University of Zululand (both historically disadvantaged institutions) and the University of Natal (a historically advantaged institution). Although it is my contention that all research is necessarily autobiographical, the third phase of the study turned my 'subtext' of being the researcher who is simultaneously 'other' into 'text'. In the autobiographical data I author and reflect on my own experiences as an academic and researcher who is 'other'. Conducted in a style that challenges the mainstream or what is described as 'male-stream' conventions and understandings of research practice, I inscribe the personal into the 'scientific' by employing an autobiographical, feminist 'gaze' throughout this study. The narrative style of communicating parts of the study to the audience, and my attempt to blur the divide between researcher and researched, express a significant feminist desire to infuse the generic aspects of feminist theory, feminist methodology, feminist practice and feminist politics into each other. Finally the insights gained from this study about the general participation of women academics in research and more especially, the position and experiences of black women academics, including myself, achieve many objectives. Not only does it provide baseline information for the province of KwaZulu-Natal in relation to the national trends but also serves to unpack this baseline information with respect to the historically designated racial categories and deepens our understandings of the problems through insights into the day-to-day lived experiences of black women in particular. All of which are integral to informing equity and redress initiatives designed to bring about transformation and democratisation in the arena of research in the humanities and social sciences. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Durban-Westville, 2000.

Abstract not available. / Thesis (M.Ed.) - University of Durban-Westville, 1995

While most schooling in the Philippines currently takes place in a coeducational setting, it seems apparent that, although they are attending the same high schools, boys and girls are not getting the same education. In many areas of the Philippines, boys' dropout rates are almost three times that of girls'. As more females graduate from college, women are rapidly replacing men in many fields. / However, this does not mean that women are leaving their traditional responsibilities in the home. Quite the opposite, women are now finding themselves faced with double the work while men essentially find themselves without the training or skills to adapt to a changing society. / This dissertation looks specifically at the schooling of two communities in the central Philippines. Looking at one school from a very rural village and another in a larger city, I examine the historical and sociological traditions of the Philippines and the island of Panay specifically. I investigate the reasons for girls' success while also looking at some reasons for boys' failure. I look closely at students' relationships with their schools, their teachers, their families, and with each other; I am trying to get a sense of how they perceive themselves and their world. / This dissertation uses qualitative research methods including lengthy observation and interview of students, families and teachers. It draws from the traditions of phenomenology and grounded theory, and is constructed in an interpretive anthropological tradition in which the narration is in first person singular and, where possible, the present tense.

No description available.

This thesis explores the education of women in the pre-modern Middle East, particularly in legal matters. The goal of the work is to show that women in the pre-modern Middle East not only had access to education but were also learned in jurisprudence (fiqh). The work begins with a detailed discussion of the pre-modern system of learning. The first chapter explores not only the educational institutions and methods of instruction, but also the avenues and opportunities for education available to and utilized by women. The second chapter concentrates on the lives of two female jurists (faqihat). The purpose of this chapter is to explore in detail the methods by which these women acquired a legal education and obtained their status as female jurists. This work is a rudimentary effort at investigating the role of women in the pre-modern system of learning and their access to and acquisition of a legal education.