"Outside my Window"

The Girls Education class that I am participating in through Canvas is a week-by-week class with reading assignments and discussion assignments to participate in. Because I have Mondays off, I did all my work for the week yesterday. Now, I'm just reading the other comments from all the hundreds of participants in our discussion for the week, posted by Dr. Mednick:

For over a decade and a half, I’ve been asking the same question of teachers, worldwide: “What do you see outside your window?  I've customized that question for classes I teach.  It's a great way to introduce oneself to others.

The responses have been amazing - pastoral scenes, brick walls, bars, a lack of a window, rain, the blur from trains, one from a peep hole in a military vehicle south of Baghdad. In 2000, their answers were so compelling that I dropped everything and founded Teachers Without Borders (Links to an external site.). Last year, I wrote the this piece (Links to an external site.) for a book I am titling: “Outside My Window:  Teachers Defying the Odds.”

THIS year, I want to include YOUR responses.  After all, there are a 1,000 of you.  So, here's the question again:  “What do you see outside your window?”  Start with what you actually see.  Then, try make to a connection to girls’ education.  That's when you can get metaphorical about it.  Let's say you describe a scene in which boys and girls are separated - walls, clusters of separated kids, for example.  Perhaps, then, you could describe what that feels like or what you'd like to see.

I can literally say that all the folks who have participated in this assignment to this point have had great insights to share, and all have been incredibly positive and supportive of each other. We have people in the class from all over the world - the US and Canada, central America, India, Pakistan, different places in Africa, Samoa, Australia.... It's incredible to hear each person's individual story.

I keep pondering one particular comment about the difference between education and empowerment, and that education does not necessarily always lead to empowerment. In many instances when we read media that explores the need for education for girls, it doesn't talk about the deeper need for empowerment... particularly something that would be challenging in male dominated cultures. One poster made the point that where she teaches (Samoa), she's experienced that education alone is not enough to change a male dominated culture - and educated women still may not be able to take action or have agency in the same way as men, even when men have less education.

I recently completed I am Malala - the autobiographical story of Malala Yousafzai. It was a wonderful book. I learned so much more about Pashtun culture and about Islam than I had expected - for instance the word for cousin is the same as the word for enemy (tarbur). What I am now realizing I missed is if she went deeper than education being the key to empowerment. I need to reread the book with this lens in place to see if she distinguishes between the two or if she automatically links the two.

I see in my own work with volunteers at the zoo, that education and empowerment are not always the same thing. What do you think? When are they the same thing and when are they different?

So, what do you see outside your window?