How long shall we deny

Pakistan is an over populated country. This sentence itself contains a manifold reality. In a country of more than 20 million people almost half of the population is female. In terms of statistics this could have been a strength of women in the society, being almost equal in numbers. But one after another report in the recent years has revealed the status of women safety and security in Pakistan being one of the weakest around the world. Pakistan ranked bottom 4th in Women Peace and Security Index 2019-20. The phenomenon of violence against women has multiple layers to it and sadly you can witness all forms of violence against women in one or the other area of Pakistan. A very difficult position is that we yet not have a social acceptance for the existence of this phenomenon. The report, published by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security in partnership with the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, claims that about 27% of Pakistani women have faced violence from their intimate partners. Yet it is also reported that one in three married Pakistani women face physical violence from spouse or from someone dominant in the household. Women in Pakistan experience violence in many forms and ways. Most of the reported cases are under the following seven categories

1. Physical abuse

Physical abuse does not only mean that they are being beaten rather depriving women from basic needs such as food health and hygiene is also to be mentioned as physical abuse. It is common in most parts of the country that male members of the family get better food and have access to health facilities which women do not have.

Hurting

Physically beating a female is most commonly witnessed in domestic violence especially in case of married women. Cases are reported of physical abuse by father, brother or any other male in the family as well but these are lesser in number. It is traditional and religiously interpreted and believed by majority that a husband has the right to beat wife. This mindset encouraged physical abuse to a larger level. Having unconsented sex and bearing children even when she is not physically and mentally ready for it is yet not considered abusive. In many cases drug addicted or alcoholic male members of a household regularly beat and physically abuse women which they rarely talk about. Acid throwing and burning or ruining a females’ appearance by cutting or damaging her body parts are the forms of physical violence which have been reported and seemingly decreased in past few years, yet are not fully controlled.

Killing

In past few years cases are being reported more frequently as murders, which were not counted as murder for decades in Pakistan. Most of the cases were either reported as suicide or accidental deaths. While now with more awareness and implementation of women protection act such cases are being reported as murder. Honor killing is another form which is yet not realistically assessed and reported in many parts of the country. Same is the case of female infanticide.  

2. Sexual Abuse

Sexual harassment to molestation and rape is neither fully reported nor counted in the current social scenario. Sexual harassment and molestation is found everywhere including home, educational institutions and workplace. With the spread of education and awareness, girls and young woman now report such incidents yet very few of them actually are sorted out and the culprits are rarely penalized. The ultimate form of sexual abuse is rape. Yet there is no database available to get exact figures of rape cases reported in various parts of the country. In the month of March 2020 it was reported that during first sixty days of 2020 seventy three incidents of rape had been reported, including 5 gang-rape cases only in the city of Lahore, which is one of the most developed cities of Pakistan. Within past few years many young girls were reported to be abducted, raped and killed brutally in various parts of the country. Throwing their dead bodies on roadside or in trash, made this even more horrible and gave a shock to the whole society.

3. Verbal and Emotional Abuse

Experiencing emotional or verbal abuse in a country like Pakistan is not even categorized yet. If a woman is continuously said negative and shameful remarks, she is being tortured continuously. It ranges from body shaming to insult and scaring of being killed or left alone. Humiliation on the one hand and fear factor of isolation or of being physically abused on the other hand keep females stressed persistently.  Threats of hurting oneself or loved ones is a common way of exploitation and abuse but these are not even reported or recorded until an actual physical abuse occurs.

4. Financial Abuse

In most of the less developed parts of the country and many of the urban communities as well, women are supposed to be responsible for household chores while men are the bread earners. This divide of the gender roles has been so for many decades in Pakistan and was given a religious ground as well. This had been a huge barrier in the way of women to work in professions beyond a very limited scope.  Even if they work they cannot spend their own earned money by themselves. Females in Pakistan’s rural areas have the least financial rights. Financial abuse is another category where women surrender very easily because it is interpreted to them traditionally and religiously to forgo their financial rights to the male member of the family. Mostly the male members  act as if taking over the finances is a way to make life easier for women, yet the women are being unknowingly financially abused. Even the wages received by the women against their hard work are taken over by men. They often explain that females have less ability and skills of financial management. Some of the common ways of financial abuse include refusing to give access to their own money and property, fixing a small amount or giving no amount in hands of females. Questioning about smallest expenses and making financial decisions against the will of females.

5. Digital Abuse

For a long time in Pakistan the traditional households never allowed females to even pick up a landline call. With the spread of mobile networks and especially now with the access to smart-phones it became another source of abuse. Access to computers or phones made women more vulnerable and easily accessible for the people with negative intentions. The digital abuse ranges from unwanted calls, messages to sexist multiple media messages and pressurizing to share nude pictures or videos. Digital abuse also relates to emotional abuse when women are forced to do a lot gains their will and are threatened if they do not do so

6. Marriages against will

Only recently it is realized that getting a girl married without her will is not less than forced sex. For decades it has been a tradition across the country to fix a girls marriage without her consent and if she tries to refuse she is not only insulted, shamed but also forced into a marriage. Girls are given as a penalty and reward to other families and tribes. Minority girls are reported again and again to be abducted forcefully converted and married. These cases are not dealt with regular abduction and forced sex cases, rather these are manipulated as religious conversions and marriage with consent.

The details mentioned above make it evident that violence against women is not limited to the level of household or family; women, particularly in the underdeveloped areas of Pakistan are in the hold of a tribal or feudal code which has gained considerable strength with the passage of time as the indoctrination was strengthened over past four to five decades. The phenomenon of power in the land ownership has added multiple dimensions to violence against women for instance a daughter usually has to forgo her share of land if she is being married out of the family. While the spouse and the family tortures the women even more to get the share of land. In such conflict the girl faces the emotional, verbal and physical abuse. To keep the land in their families, feudal will make incompatible matching of young boys and older girls or young girls and elderly men. Females in the families having huge land ownership face severe danger, some of them are kept unmarried and some are declared insane or killed to transfer the land to the men’s name. In many parts of the country a woman is not a human being in her own right but a commodity, a piece of property. Giving away women and girls as a penalty or reward is more common in rural parts. The woman given away in such cases  is treated like an animal, or a domesticated pet where she loses all her rights as a human being. 

During the 16 days activism in November each year we read news and articles, yet we deny and we let all this happen around us.

Sources

https://www.womenshealth.gov/relationships-and-safety/other-types

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2176406/70-rape-cases-reported-2-months

https://www.dawn.com/news/1294475

https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/177182-Cases-of-violence-against-women-increase

https://www.endvawnow.org/en/articles/296-forms-of-violence-against-women-.html

Morning thoughts on Formal Education and Curriculum Planning

Formal Education systems over the centuries were shaped into structural and functional classrooms and institutions. The sequential and gradual promotion of a child from one level to another formalized so much so that we got stuck into K-12 formation in terms of primary, middle and high schools. Then we reengineered it to establish new structures of early childhood education, elementary education and secondary education as well as further and higher education. Technical, vocational and professional education remained another sphere which rooted out of the formal education and remained as a parallel stream but was not really integrated. By the end of twelve years schooling our children get into the age of 16-18 years but have no skill developed to begin economic activity. Then came the technological interventions which disrupted the configurations of rigidly designed educational systems and broke the grids. Multidisciplinary approaches breaking through the specified timelines  and clustering of subjects made us realize that education is now evolving and the next generation education has to be different from older models. We need to enable our students for meeting personal, local and global needs in an era of science and technology.

Curriculum can be perceived in the meanings of a framework, roadmap or a document that guides the whole educational activity in a country, state or province. It is not possible that within the process of educational development, curriculum and approaches to curriculum planning may remain the same. As a policy framework or a document, it needs to be revised and it cannot be separated from the changes happening around us. Civilization, industrialization, globalization and digitization or any other revolution comes through and influences the process of education in one way or the other. Today while looking at the educational scenario with the lens of digital transformation I see how teachers, learners, educational managers and stakeholders are ready to take a leap; but unfortunately the educational planners and policy makers in Pakistan are not ready to take off the older hats and colored glasses.

I have witnessed a huge effort to revise the primary school curriculum in past 4 years. I have been somebody working in the periphery of this planning phase. The most worrying part is that other than a few progressive minds, most of the teams working in the planning phase were stuck to the idea of singular indoctrination. After many inputs and revisions came out the document with title phrase of “single national curriculum” and then I heard people calling it “uniform national curriculum”. I am unable to understand why do we need “singularity” or “uniformity”; while the world is moving on with multiplicity and diversity. We use the words like critical thinking and creativity within our curriculum documents but then we move back to the tradition of textbook culture which leaves least space for critical and creative thinking to develop in classrooms. We use the jargon of diversity and inclusion in our curriculum documents but then we define and state the reality in our own terms which is never inclusive. When we say culture we mean the dominant culture, when we say religion we mean dominant religion, when we say values we mean dominant values and when we say narrative we mean dominant narrative. We have not yet given space to multiple cultures, religions, values and narratives to be included and let learners think independently…

TO BE CONTINUED!

Teacher education, teaching and learning in Pakistan

Teacher education in Pakistan went through a major reform in 2010 when after having the professional standards for teachers in 2009 a huge funding was provided by USAID to reengineer the teacher education programs in Pakistan. Teacher preparation in Pakistan was reformed in the form of 4 year teacher education undergraduate degree programs. But soon after the launch of two years Associate Degree and 4 years undergraduate program, the country wide debate started about bringing the graduates of 14 and 16 years degree holders in other subjects into teacher education programs. Thus some exit points and entry points were recreated. Now cutting the long story short we have 2-3 year ADE and B.Ed 4 year offered after 12 years of schooling, B.Ed 2.5 after 14 years of schooling, and B.Ed 1.5 after 16 years of schooling. I see myself looking at this picture which looks almost the same as 10 years ago when we had PTC, CT, B.Ed and M.Ed. The only huge difference we made during these 10 years is that we closed down the Teacher Education Colleges which were affiliated to the universities and worked closely with local schools. Today I see a huge gap created between the schools and universities that are offering the aforesaid programs.

Another amazing intervention was made couple of years ago in some parts of country where they inducted teachers with none of teacher education degree or certificates, and implemented an induction training program. No evidence so far came to my notice how these teachers are performing in comparison to the teachers with B.E, M.Ed or any other degree. Initially when I conducted an interpretive analysis of this reform during 2011-2013, I felt very hopeful because the training provided to teacher educators at colleges of education emphasized some crucial aspects such as – avoiding the use of textbooks and collecting new materials and research articles to share with prospective teachers, enabling prospective teachers to become reflective practitioners, developing their IT  skills, communication skills and introducing new assessment techniques, etc. Then we closed all those teacher education colleges and sent those teacher educators back to district school systems to teach their relevant subjects at schools or colleges of general education.

Now we come to in service teachers’ professional development. During past 20 years I have seen multiple interventions one after another coming in and phasing out. The provincial and federal departments of education tried out various models of teachers professional development but end of the story is that none of them has been sustainable, reason being project oriented approach, based on foreign or local NGO funds. None of these professional development plans rooted from grounded data of teachers needs assessment. Research institutes in Pakistan where M.Phil and PhD students graduate every year and present their research work at National and International conferences; majority of them at the end of their research reports give a list recommendations and I have seen one of these recommendations is always for professional development of teachers and head-teachers. We do not use any research data until it comes from a study of UNESCO, USAID, World Bank, British Council, etc. We belittle our university students and faculty members at every forum when we belittle the research work they conduct and present but we highlight even small scale but hugely funded research from INGOs. I have been attending almost every other conference in Islamabad may it be in a university or in a grand hotel organized by one of the funding agencies. I am not sure when we will be able to realize the worth of qualitative grounded research to have localized curriculum, instruction and teacher education instead of merely experimenting with one after another borrowed models.

The challenges today are huge. The teachers in public as well as mainstream private schools know nothing about 21^st century teaching and learning. Philosophy of education being adopted at teacher preparation and by the teachers in practical teaching is still mostly based on behaviorism and cognitivism. Very few classrooms are witnessed to be based on constructivist approach but the teachers do not really know how to handle it. In the beginning of 21^st century the philosophy of education unfolded itself around the world with the emergence of collaborative and cooperative learning supported by the postulation of connectivism. People in this time and space were learning more through online resources than text books during past two decades. But we in Pakistan remained as resistant to this change as we always are. Teachers themselves lacking IT skills and public as well as private schools least bothered to invest in provision of IT resources found it easier to retain the culture of one book one teacher and a brick wall classroom that remains no-go area for any outsider. We keep preparing our children at school to read from a book, copy it in the notebook, add some more to it if the teacher tells to and then memorize this as much as possible to reproduce in class tests and final exams. We build other activities in classrooms as co-curricular activities but we never came out of this rigid model in which phenomenon of learning  is minimized and reduced only to reading, writing, memorizing and re-writing or orally narrating what we have memorized. This model definitely cannot and does not prepare any student after 10 or 12 years of schooling for any creative, productive or responsible activity in society.

It is claimed by every other government that curriculum is revised and that new text books are being provided to the students; but in my opinion only changing text in books after every few years cannot bring the real curricular reform. We need an overhauling of the whole structure and function of teachers preparation and professional development with the curricular change if we really wish to bring a reform in the coming years. Teachers today need to have stronger content knowledge beyond text books, pedagogy beyond classrooms, curriculum planning beyond lesson plans, and multiple media content development to enrich the teaching learning processes. They need to come out of teacher centered and content centered paradigms. For developing independent and critical thinking among next generations, first the teachers need to liberate their own minds from rigid mindset. They need to completely flip the order of teaching and learning. They need to put the learning at top priority and build strategies using online, offline, indoors, outdoors and textual as well as non-textual learning experiences. Until and unless we do not redesign our assessment processes we cannot assume that all these practices and culture will change. Now when the schools are closed for COVID-19 management, almost every school claims to provide online learning. Here again the phenomenon of distance learning is reduced to onscreen reading, lecturing and testing. Online or blended distance learning does not mean that a learner may only be sitting down in front of computers and doing everything on screen. It makes use of real life situations which could never be used in a classroom. It broadens the horizons but only if the teachers and material developers know how to use multiple forms of instructional technology effectively.

I see this scenario as an opportunity where we can stop for a while, rethink, readjust, reset and renew all old systems. Let us make an effective use of this time and enable the system to adapt the updates required for the years ahead. Help teachers, head-teachers and teacher educators realize what they don’t know and what they don’t do. Stop assuming that we are doing fine. Let us tell ourselves and our teachers to press the button of restart with all updates allowed to install.