El patrimonio conceptualizado desde la educación

There are distinct advantages associated with using the notion of ‘educated subjectivities’ to explore the outcomes associated with women’s participation in development scholarship schemes. The focus on hybridity and conflict between competing aspirations is particularly relevant to the exploration of women’s identities, because of the ways in which the tensions between their dual reproductive and productive roles so strongly shape their educational experiences. Walkerdine et al. (2001) argue that the notion of conflict and reinvention has long been central to the construction of feminine subjectivity:

It is women, of course, who have faced reinvention so obviously. The transition from mother to housewife in a long-term monogamous marriage to a working woman often bringing up children alone is a large one. If we also add that women have long been invited constantly to remake themselves as the changing object of male desire, then it becomes clear that women have long had to face the recognition that the unitary subject is a fraud and that constant and perpetual self-invention is necessary. (Walkerdine et al., 2001:9)

As noted in Chapter Two, existing research on the experiences of Third World women who undertake higher education overseas indicates that role tension, and the resultant anxiety, confusion and social stigma that accompany it, are integral parts of the development scholarship experience for many women. Thus, the decision to take up this type of educational opportunity is often experienced as both an opportunity and a loss for many women. Earlier models of educational change that focus on one aspect of women’s experience (reproduction or production), or one political outcome (submission or empowerment), tend to rely on a dualistic view of reality that makes it difficult to capture the complexity of women’s experiences.

Postmodernist social theory has many critics, however. While many fear the loss of explanatory power associated with a view of the world as ‘constant flux’, others fear the loss of political unity associated with the destruction of the idea of a coherent, rational identity. Certainly, the early detailed studies of the relationships between education and positive changes in women’s lives produced by feminists within the ‘education for production’ and the ‘education for empowerment’ traditions, the compelling Marxist and indigenous critiques of the cultural and economic destruction caused by colonial education systems, as well as the current push for global consensus around objectives for improving women’s educational access, all lose a significant amount of their force in the face of the political and epistemological relativism that characterises much postmodernist theorising.

Despite the many valid critiques of the limitations of liberal-humanist approaches to education, it is worth remembering that these ideas have acted as powerful motivators for the establishment of international consensus around the need to address social exclusion in all societies. Even in colonial times, for many education campaigners, the provision of equal educational opportunities in the Third World was conceived as a way to break down entrenched class hierarchies in the new world, in the same way that had broken down these barriers within Europe. And it was for this reason that, in the same manner that many resisted education for the working classes in Europe (Fagerlind & Saha, 1983:37), more conservative sectors of society also resisted the establishment of schools in the colonies for fear of that they would raise the expectations of the ‘natives’ and ferment dissent (Altbach, 1987:50).

This thesis explores the potential of a research approach that seeks to build upon the relative strengths and contributions of different approaches to understanding the relationships between gender, education and development. While the task of bringing together multiple-genres of scholarship is challenging, I believe that there are considerable benefits associated with efforts to do so. The five discourses discussed in this chapter have provided important contributions to our efforts to understand the impact of tertiary education opportunities on the lives of women within Third World societies.

Work within the ‘education for reproduction’ and ‘education for production’ traditions has contributed influential comparative statistical analyses of the relationships between higher education for women and the ability of societies to meet development goals related to health, education, and economic prosperity. This large-scale comparative work has played an important role in the establishment of collective development goals designed to increase women’s level of educational attainment. The ‘education for submission’ genre has highlighted the importance of paying attention to the ways that education functions to reproduce social inequalities. The ‘education for empowerment’ discourse has not only foregrounded the need for more holistic, people-centred approaches to understanding educational experience, it has also provided compelling explorations of the utopian potential of education to promote conditions of ‘hope’ within disadvantaged communities. While, finally, the ‘education as experience’ discourse contributes a powerful analytical tool for exploring the ways in which individuals experience and negotiate their way though competing ideas about the value of education in their lives and communities.

Table Two provides an overview of the five discourses and their strengths and limitations. At the end of the Table, I have sought to identify five guiding principles that could be seen to represent a potential synthesis of the strengths of these five approaches to educational experience. These principles include 1) the need to document women’s own perceptions of their educational experiences; 2) The need to produce ‘holistic’ explorations of women’s experience that examine all dimensions of their lives; 3) the need to explore both intrinsic and instrumental gains associated with higher education for women in developing countries; 4) the need to consider the role of education of as an institution responsible for reproducing social privilege; and, 5) the need to consider the individual losses and conflicts associated with higher education, and how individuals negotiate these challenges.

The first principle acknowledges the need to correct the exclusion of the voices of female development scholars from academic explorations of the impact of development scholarship schemes. Thus, it foregrounds the feminist commitment to treating women as experts on their own lives. This principle also offers an important corrective to the traditional over-reliance on quantitative explorations of women’s educational realities within the development research community, as discussed in Chapter One. Principle