The Girl Rising Curriculum and Learning Development: How Students and Teachers Challenge Colonialism in the Classroom
By: Lindsay Robinson (she/her/hers)
The idea of girl power – of empowering girls to save the world – is increasingly pervasive in both popular culture and global governance. The global development industry, in particular, has embraced this notion of “girl power” – largely made popular by the Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect, and their rhetoric of “invest in a girl and she’ll do the rest”. As one iteration of this discourse, the US-based non-profit organization, Girl Rising (GR), and their Girl Rising Curriculum (GRC), has remained largely unexamined in academic literature. Their popular film, curriculum, and lesson plans focus on the lives of nine adolescent girls situated in various spaces across the two-thirds world, and who share experiences of gender-based discrimination in education; in the film, we watch as these nine girls one-by-one challenge and eventually overcome these discriminations to pursue their schooling.
The GRC is a free curriculum developed by GR and the Pearson Foundation, and is available in English, French, and Spanish (soon to also be available in Arabic). Teachers can voluntary enroll in the curriculum to teach at seemingly any grade level and subject (including history, geography, and even math). Upon doing so, teachers have access to a range of lesson plans and information packets to teach as separate units lasting a few weeks or to use sporadically throughout the duration of their classes. Because GR largely targets the United States with its associated pilot projects and marketing, the GRC has been most successful in US schools. For their part, GR claims that their curriculum teaches students about the value of education, which is framed as a vital turning point for girls in the Global South, especially if they want to become successful (and employed) young women.
With a focus on empowering and educating young girls – something many of us consider to be a desirable normative goal - why should we be skeptical of GR and its curriculum?
As post-colonial feminism reminds us, seemingly positive messages – of empowering ‘third world girls’ to escape poverty, hardship, and oppression - serve to conceal the insidious colonial logics that underpin them. While outwardly inspiring, the GRC relies on drawing binaries between us and them – between already empowered and educated Western girls here, and ‘Third World’, disempowered, uneducated girls over there. Through its film and curriculum, GR paints Southern girls as a symbol of failed girlhood, who are victims of myriad oppressions, and who (we imagine) only hopes to become like their already-empowered Northern sisters. In so doing, GR and the larger development industry, maintains their colonial and economic control over the two-thirds world, while attempting to uphold the myth of normalcy, advancement, and modernity associated with the Global North. The latter works to ensure that girls, racialized folks, and any unique combination of intersectional identities do not question the ways in which they experience structural oppression in the North.
Of particular novelty to this paper, is its centering of the classroom space. What I refer to as the Western classroom is symbolic of a series of classroom sites across the Western world, largely in the US, and is where the GRC teaches Northern students about Southern geographies and girls. Here, we reveal the complicated dynamics of what I call, ‘learning development’. Through this process, educators and students both reinforce colonial and capitalist logics, while they simultaneously question and alter them. This paper, then, uses post-colonial feminist discourse analysis – investigating data from the GRC, teacher’s lesson plans, and students’ reflections of it (publicly available on the girl Rising Website) - to illuminate these complicated dynamics of reinforcement and contestation.
Although GR has not received the same attention and criticism as more well-known development programs, it can no longer remain off the hook. As my project illuminates, the ways in which the development industry has expanded into the everyday space of the classroom is worrisome, especially for its reinforcement of colonial dichotomies between North and South. In the GRC, Southern girls are only valued when they are truly extraordinary, resembling ideal capitalist subjects, while it dismisses the structural nature of intersectional oppressions that persist in the West and US.
It is important to note, however, that teachers and students do not passively accept Girl Rising’s logics, but instead go beyond the official GRC by introducing additional lessons and conversations into the classroom. Students and teachers reinterpret the GRC within their own understandings, where they use additional content to make the curriculum relevant to the broader course in which it is incorporated. This resembles what Shakya and Rankin (2008) call subversive agency, where subjects reinterpret dominant cultural knowledges, discourses, and signs within their own social or moral frames of reference, ultimately changing their meaning. Teachers, for example, include lessons of the ongoing history of European imperialism and colonialism, thereby problematizing GR’s outward, colonial gaze when talking about the two-thirds world.
This element of subversive agency provides us with tentative optimism. We should not underestimate the unlikely ways in which powerful discourses and ways of thinking are unintentionally altered, largely through the unexpected subversive agency of everyday folks like students and teachers. Ultimately, this paper highlights the need to account for the transformative potential of unanticipated spaces and people, and the ways that they creatively alter the workings of global capitalism and colonial relations of power.
Read the full article: Learning development through the Girl Rising Curriculum: discursive colonialism and subversive potentials
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Lindsay Robinson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, with specializations in gender and diversity and international relations. Her research interests center on questions of childhood and girlhood subjectivity and agency, especially as they relate to the recent “turn to the girl” in global development. She is currently completing her Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded thesis, “Everyday Politics beyond Resistance: A Decolonial Feminist Re-Thinking of Indigenous Girls as Agential Subjects.”