Women's /gender studies as a tool for empowerment 118

Women's studies, averred Dr. Mira Chennik at a March 2005 conference at Beit Berl, Israel, are "an alternative paradigm for regular and traditional academic studies, developing out of the pervasive and critical examination of that which exists and characterized by the combination of disciplines.

Women's and gender studies curricula began to appear in the 1960s. In Israel, however, these departments developed gradually as of the 90s.

Women's studies exist in diverse academic institutions such as Universities and colleges but their place is still marginal.¹¹⁶ From the outset they were perceived as a passing fashion, and at the worst as amateur and lacking academic legitimacy (Friedman, 2001). This very marginality is the source of power that is likely to motivate social change.

Traditional academia is based on an ideology of excellence and thereby becomes itself elitist and inaccessible (Shadmi, 2006). This ideology contradicts the targets of women's/gender studies that belong to the ideology of education for all. Women's/gender studies departments demanded change in the curricula that was based on patriarchal ideology, and to encourage the programs that include, and focus mainly on, the female experience and contribution and other marginal groups within and alongside the traditional academic part (Harris, 1999).

The practice of feminist pedagogy indicates the connection between 'knowledge' and 'strength' (Connell, 1987; Hooks, 1994) and thus sees women's studies as a means to attain personal and social change. The alternative that women's/gender studies suggests is based on:

1. In the researcher's opinion accessibility means, amongst other things, everything that formerly afforded a barrier (money, time, physical place, previous education, and academic threshold demands), or, as Chennik (2003) avers, the emphasis on classifying the students (as a remnant of the elitist approach) by personal quality and the learning ability in a group, and not necessarily on academic achievement (such as scores).

2. Personal focus: Personal adaptation to the learner, focusing on personal growth and discovering inner strengths and their use to attain the personal goals (empowerment), expose these strengths using pedagogy that positions itself at the center (Shadmi, 2006) and setting a personal example (modeling) (Nodding, 1988, 1995).

116 Belong to diverse faculties with a status of 'program', 'unit'/track' and not as a separate area of study

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3. Pluralism: Nurturing sensitivity, awareness and appreciation of the different and diversity; arousing a feeling of social responsibility and activism amongst the learners (Chennik, 2003). The knowledge in general and academic knowledge in particular, belongs to the community (Shadmi, 2006).

4. Openness and containment: Creating an open, supportive and enabling atmosphere, encouraging profound discussion while developing a critical perspective from the gender point of view (Chennik, 2003). Insistence on talking at eye level (Shadmi, 2006), i.e., the ability to translate more complex theories…into simple words, but not simplistic. The ability to convert abstract and distant concepts into language that people understand.

5. Relevance and identification: A redefinition of space and its boundaries (separating the classroom from life) (Shadmi, 2006), as is usually customary in the academe, providing legitimacy for personal experiences while connecting theory and actualities that create a daily politic.

6. Flexibility: Both conceptual and research flexibility, establishing suitable and changeable boundaries based on a multi-disciplinary approach, while changing the learning framework that emphasizes egalitarian circular and supportive learning that changes and empowers the learner (Kitch, 2002).

Chenick (2003) notes that gender studies were selected not only as a track for attaining an advanced academic degree but also for personal development and empowerment. The reason for this, she believes, stems from the increased personal awareness of women of their place in modern and post-modern society with its complexity, creating a search and the need for answers to personal and social questions that focus on the place of the woman in society and in the family.¹¹⁷

Shadmi (2006) maintains that studies provide more than pure personal empowerment. She notes that the studies afford a "process of revelation", in which the learner discovers her strength in her dialogue with the texts and the critical tools acquired with a supportive and cooperative atmosphere created within a learning group. The learner will eventually become a source of knowledge, with the authority to create knowledge based on theories, research, the lecturers and study cohorts.

117 Chennik bases her observations on a study conducted amongst graduates of the women studies program at Lesley College in 2003

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The learning and research afford a process of social change, a spiral process that moves between the classroom and the outside world, with constant examination and adaptation. One may assert that gender studies move in a circle between theories to learning to personal and group experience to politics and back to start (Shadmi, 2006).

The deeper this researcher delved into feminist pedagogy and its application in gender studies, the greater her insight that this pedagogy is remarkably similar to that of informal education. This latter enables personal development and a moratorium, and is applied comprehensively during adolescence through informal educational and social frameworks inside school. This point leads to noting the need to examine the domain as leading gender education and its introduction through this gate to school education.

The researcher would like to focus on the aspect of empowerment as a product of gender studies. Empowerment is a personal process that reflects onto the social aspect. It is manifested in internal and external attributes, and is manifested in a feeling of capability, creativity and freedom of action, that lead to realizing human potential (Robinson, 1994).

When assessing the change and contribution of higher learning to the lives of the learners, one tends to refer mainly to empowerment in terms of the academic, professional and instrumental benefit. In gender studies, or in learning in feminist pedagogy, emphasis will be placed on the benefit and the changes in the expressive aspects, particularly as regards self-image and self-esteem, and the feeling of power and the ability to make a change (Macalister, 1999).

The empowerment aspects that were created following studying feminist pedagogy in gender studies departments will be apparent at two levels (Chennik, 2003):¹¹⁸

1. Expanding the personal-professional repertoire: Professional change or focus on a profession, to which this writer would add that such change will be a change in attitude, regarding recognizing the right to enjoy, to have conditions, appreciation and compensation; striving to develop a career, manifested in aiming for success and advance;

2. Acquiring and applying skills and tools that will find expression in family life, the community and at work, but which are unfortunately not yet applied in the public-political domain.

118 Chennik bases her observations on a study conducted amongst graduates of the women studies program at Lesley College in 2003

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In the change model mentioned previously (section 2.5.1), the stage of developing awareness or the knowledge stage is a condition for the last stage – that of knowing, on which Belenkey, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule (1987) focus when discussing the way of expressing the knowledge stage amongst women.

Women organize their knowing in defined stages of gradual (not necessarily) linear development en route to personal and professional change, en route to empowerment. These embrace

1. The silence stage

2. The attention stage ( received knowledge)

3. The stage of subjective knowledge or that of the "inner expert"

4. The stage of procedural knowledge

5. The stage of constructed knowledge (Belenkey et al., 1987)

The female learning empowerment process, described above, describes a transition from a passive situation to an active situation, suitable to the description of learning and growth in general. However, when considering this description on the background of the previous learning process experienced by women, that combine the socialization process, which is informal, and that of accumulating knowledge and attainment that is a formal process. The combination of these two processes will lead to the conclusion that the description of growth described by Belenkey et al. (1987) is a type of relearning of another world of concepts, engaging other experiences. Such learning necessitates a type of erasing of previous knowledge or a breakthrough and overcoming its existence, while the social and family environment does not change and does not encourage this step, or even tries to return women to their previous place.

This conflict in which women find themselves does not conclude in the formal learning domain. Despite the changes and feeling of empowerment they feel in that framework, it is possible that no change may be achieved in certain areas. The knowledge and the awareness are likely to worsen the frustration and, with it, the pain (the Tree of Knowledge dilemma in the Garden of Eden).

2.6.4.5 Empowerment courses for women

Education has an empowering influence that enables personal development and clear growth as it was mentioned in the previous section. The formal education framework, geared to people up to the age of 18 years, has seen no change in attitude and it continues to create a 122

stereotypical gender division and to perpetuate the existing discriminatory situation. Traditional academic studies also do not contribute to improving the situation and this is proven daily, when academic professional expertise does not enjoy an egalitarian attitude or is free of gender discrimination.

Most women do not turn to women's/ gender studies as part of their academic courses, since they do not focus on entry to professional domains or are not recognized as such. Until there is change in the gender focus and emphasis is placed on equality between the genders as a value and a deed by the existing educational systems, another means of attaining the "correction" is needed. Thus alongside the programs for gender studies that developed in the academic world, and also prior to the introduction of these curricula, the absence of a lever for change created the need for developing extra-academic and partially, extra-institutional intervention programs. Some of these programs included courses, termed empowerment courses by this writer that, like many programs grew – from the field to the academic world. The advantage of such programs who take this path compared to those born in committees is manifested in their writers not always being aware of the disparity between the reality and the laboratory.

Empowerment courses, that began to operate together with the start of feminist activity, appeared and appear under different names, such as role training, leadership, activist (volunteer) courses, self-awareness, change etc. but their objective is identical – to empower women to attain meaningful social change (even if they have not defined this as such directly and clearly).

It is possible to discern two patterns of female empowerment in the framework of community activity (Pardasani, 2005):

1. The personal development model: Focusing on eradicating the basic discrimination experienced by women, that affects them and their basic rights. The purpose of empowerment is to attain a respectable level of life, freedom and respect.¹¹⁹

Empowerment activity will strive to impart women with professional skills and to construct a support network in order to free them from absolute dependence on men. These programs advanced women and improved their life conditions, but did not succeed in changing the basic inequality between men and women. Women's social and family status did not improve, and in fact patterns of thought and

119 Based on Maslow's needs theoryand adopted by the U.NHuman Rights Declaration on 10/12/ 1948

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culture based behavior did not change and remained almost as they were (Pardasani, 2005).

2. The feminist model: Empowerment is intended to create a process in which women will intensify their power at the personal, inter-personal and the political levels in order to choose and to take decisions connected to them independently and considering the price of their decision.

The empowerment programs should therefore create significant improvement in the subjective activity space (Pardasani, 2005) that includes change in social norms, values and status. Such activity is not sufficiently flexible and is sometimes liable to lead to isolating women from the broader community, while creating conflict, tension and even violence.

3. The dialogue model¹²⁰: Empowerment will be conducted through multi-directional dialogue that is non-hierarchical interaction intended to advance and deepen understanding of the subject or defined area, without any commitment to reach agreement or to solve any problem, while expressing diverse opinions and proper attention, without judgmental attitudes and prejudice. The dialogue, as a tool, contributes to the connections between people from different backgrounds and roles, who, in a different situation would not meet.

This researcher concludes from Pardasani's (2005) comments that the dialogue to which she refers is intended to serve as a link between empowerment at the individual level – the stage of the individual process of change, which is personal change that reveals the inner strength, and the stage of the process of social change, that is divided into community change (change in which a group of anonymous women become a 'community' with a shared critical attribute¹²¹ (Sadan, 1993).

Empowerment at this stage emphasizes providing knowledge that will help to define problems and to raise the issues relevant for women, (awareness) converting them to a 'community of women'; and systemic change in which the 'community of women' directs the dialogue towards the immediate environment in which the women live, in order to enter and integrate in the community life at all levels at decision-making foci.

120 term offered by this researcher to a third empowerment model suggested by Pardasani (2005)

121 This attribute in the broadest sense is the fact that they are women, and as such they suffer from discrimination. The more critical attributes are, the more cohesive a community atmosphere will develop (women with a disability, single woman parenthood, unemployed women, new immigrants women of the same profession, same town etc). Thus perhaps the need for further remaining in a group is created in order to feel the sense of belonging to a community that does not itself have a limited and distinct critical attribute, because the group of women is very large.

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The connection between the individual and the community empowerment process has been discussed in previous sections.

Since the empowerment courses are external intervention,Dr. Ester Herzog sees social empowerment as having a role tending towards political activity resultant from the reality as she said at the adult education conference at Beit Berl in 2005, since it is not enough to conduct leadership and empowerment courses. It is important to build woman-based infrastructures and networks with a commitment to advance women to positions of power.¹²²

MacKinnon (2005) asks in one of her lectures how the difference between men and women is created, and what are the power relationships that this difference structures. To be more exact, how does the difference serve as a pretext for justifying disparity in power? This is a political question that deals with the division of power in society, and therefore the necessary change must stem from conscious change, through activities at the field level to raise consciousness for achieving, sharing and cooperating at foci of power and resources.

One of the field activities mentioned by MacKinnon (2005) focuses on the courses known as 'empowerment courses' or those intended to provide empowerment. Their main purpose is to translate the reality and its conceptualization by recognizing and understanding the existing power structures as reasons for the weak position of women. This is followed by creating motivation for changing the situation, and finally developing modular coping strategies for achieving the change and its assessment.

Empowerment courses for women are a practical tool (female activism), intended to create change in attitudes, in approaches and in behaviors that have became rooted over the years in a broad variety of cultural contexts.

The courses conducted in the past and today are intended for women only for which reason the researcher will term them "feminine space" derived from three worlds of content:

1. Pedagogy of informal education, that affords a means for primary socialization;

122 For example, Herzog mentions the process that occurred at the municipal level and the connection between the leadership course with a local political orientation in 1995, 1996, that produced a female mayor in the town of Herzliya in 1998. She remarked on those things at the Adult Learning Conference, at the Beit Berl College of Education in March 2005.

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2. Wide life education - as manifested in adult education, constructed in consideration of the value of social mobility following learning at every age;

3. Users of integrated feminist pedagogy that identifies knowledge as a means for social mobility that does not need to be gender-dependent, and thereby in fact, enables secondary socialization or re-socialization. This is a combination of the caring pedagogy approach with its four components and that of critical pedagogy, striving for social change.

Courses of feminine space are founded on the theories regarding the need for an environment lacking overt or covert sexual behaviors that afford such barriers as: The need to find favor and to satisfy others; being good;

the need to receive permission; being loved by a male as a source of identity and security; the need to demonstrate inferiority and dependence as tools to attain objectives (the Cinderella and the child syndrome).

Empowerment courses for women entail a process of imparting knowledge that does not answer the criteria of pure 'academic knowledge'. The process of learning developed in two aspects - that of 'learning to know' and 'learning to do' as mentioned before. However, Cohen (2006) asks whether the last two elements of adult education, 'Learning to be' and 'Learning to live together'¹²³ are manifested in these empowerment courses held for women? The current study is interested in examining these empowerment courses in view of the reality in the field, focusing on the State of Israel through analyzing the case of the town where the researcher works.

In document ARE EMPOWERMENT COURSES FOR WOMEN A TOOL FOR SOCIAL CHANGE? THE SITUATION IN ISRAEL (Pldal 126-133)