Disrupting the Pathway: Girls' Education, Empowerment, and Equality Policy Discourses in the Millennium Development Goal Era (2000 - 2015)
Open Access
- Author:
- Anderson, Emily Williams
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Theory and Policy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 25, 2016
- Committee Members:
- Dana Lynn Mitra, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Dana Lynn Mitra, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
John Evan Roberts, Committee Member
David P Baker, Committee Member
Susan G Strauss, Outside Member
Alexander W. Wiseman, Special Member - Keywords:
- comparative education
policy discourse analysis
new media policy studies
girls' education - Abstract:
- Using evidence from policy documents, interviews with strategic policy actors and new media texts, this dissertation explores the construction, diffusion, and negotiation of girls’ education policy discourses during the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) era (2000-2015). Three girls’ education policy discourses are investigated: the dominant discourse, the parallel discourse, and the disruptive discourse. The structural relationships between education, empowerment, and equality pursued by these three discourses are conceptualized as pathways. This dissertation describes how girls’ education policy discourses were constructed diffused during the MDGs explains explain policy actors’ complex negotiation of these discourses during the SDG transition. As policy discourse, empowerment is constructed as an achievable outcome of education. Rowlands (1999) discusses how the focus on girls’ education to advance women’s economic and political status as “an instrumentalist approach to achieving the economic growth of the developmentalist discourse, where the placing of emphasis on women becomes a means to a particular end.” (p. 13). The “particular end” of MDG 3 is explicitly framed as women’s participation in economic and political spheres (Tembon & Fort, 2008). When applied to empowerment-focused discourses, power is at a premium. By exclusively focusing on parity enrollment as an indicator of access, the structural barriers that limit girls’ mobility to secondary and tertiary education were obscured. The policy targets advanced by MDG 3 aimed to shift the focus away from primary to secondary and tertiary education through the inclusion of “all levels”. Still, girls’ access and opportunity to and in secondary education were not specifically referenced. This silence, in effect, legitimated gender parity and primary education as the policy priorities (Lewin, 2001). This dissertation demonstrates how policy actors in girls’ education policy and international development critique and coexist with girls’ education discourses as they implement school and community-based empowerment programs comparatively and internationally. It also evidences the ways in which policy actors subvert dominant discourses to more appropriately target school-level policy and programmatic reforms in girls’ education