Every month, one in three children aged 11-15 is experiencing violence in school. While in many parts of the world, education is celebrated as a pathway to empowerment and opportunity, for many children, schools are not the secure sanctuaries they should be. Girls especially face a troubling reality of insecurity, discrimination and violence as gender roles and norms, as well as cultural practices, normalise violence against girls and women. However, through teacher training on gender-responsive pedagogy, these figures can be reduced as the evidence from VVOB’s three-year "Teaching for Improved Gender Equity and Responsiveness" (TIGER) project suggests in Cambodia.
What is considered violence and abuse?
To ensure schools are safe spaces, everyone involved – principals, teachers, and students alike – must share an understanding of what being safe from abuse and violence means and why it matters. School-related gender-based violence, defined by UNICEF, counts as “acts or threats of sexual, physical or psychological violence occurring in and around schools, perpetrated as a result of gender norms and stereotypes, and enforced by unequal power dynamics”.
According to UNESCO, school violence can take a number of forms, which may include but is not limited to corporal punishment, bullying, sexual comments, physical fighting and psychological violence by peers such as fellow students or by adults such as teachers.
Verbal and physical aggression by teachers as disciplinary or corporal punishment methods leads to high rates of emotional and physical abuse. In Cambodia, research by VVOB found that almost half of teachers surveyed (45 percent) believed that male and female students should be disciplined differently for the same misbehaviour when VVOB launched the TIGER project in 2017. A three-year project, TIGER addressed issues of school-related gender-based violence through teacher training on gender-responsive pedagogy in Cambodia’s north-western province of Battambang.
The project
Gender-responsive pedagogy involves teachers considering the specific needs of both girls and boys and actively using educational principles and practices that promote gender equality. For example, the teaching methodologies, language use, educational materials, classroom set-up, interactions, and physical environment should all be gender-responsive and learner-centred in a gender-responsive school. Based upon an Action Guide which offered relevant ideas, tools, and information to transform teaching practices and school leadership in a gender-responsive manner, the project’s capacity development activities were conducted with 40 primary and lower-secondary schools, reaching a total of 480 teachers, school leaders and school support committee members as well as teacher education college teaching and management staff.
A key component of the project was its research to measure the effectiveness of the project. The research included a baseline study before the project and a postintervention study after the project measuring the changes in beliefs, attitudes, and practices. This data collection was supported by the University of Leuven in close collaboration with the Royal University of Phnom Penh. Two groups were part of this analysis – one, the treatment group, comprised teachers who participated in the TIGER project, and the other, the control group, comprised teachers that did not participate in the project.
The results of Teacher Professional Development
To examine teachers’ beliefs about acceptable forms of discipline, they rated a series of examples of discipline. Examples included but were not limited to “shouting or cursing at a child” or “laughing at a child”. To understand what they considered unacceptable forms of emotional abuse, they were asked how acceptable these forms of discipline were to them. For acceptable forms of physical abuse, teachers were asked how acceptable particular forms of discipline were to them such as hurting a child.
To measure teachers’ changes in practices, they were asked the same questions for (un)acceptable forms of discipline but rating them on how often they used these forms of discipline.
The findings revealed that, compared to the control group, participants in the project significantly rejected more forms of discipline defined as emotional abuse or physical violence as acceptable. The impact of TIGER on the ratings of the teachers’ “acceptable forms of discipline” was substantial.
A decreased use of emotional abuse or physical violence in daily teaching practices was also reported. The findings here were modest but significant, concluding that TIGER had a small effect on reducing the incidence of teachers engaging in emotional abuse or physical violence.
UNESCO also emphasises the critical role that teachers play in mitigating school violence through “creating psychologically and physically safe school and classroom environments” and their relationship with students to prevent and address school violence. For Yin Orn, vice director in one of the participating primary schools, this new understanding on positive discipline and how to keep a school safe led her to work closely with teachers and do classroom observations, inspiring her to change gendered teaching practices, focussing on the language use of teachers, seat arrangements in class, and the students participating in sewing classes. “In the past, sewing class was only organised for girls, and basic repairing class was organised for boys,” she said. Since her training on gender-responsive pedagogy however, female and male students are doing the same subjects.
Conclusion
While there is ample evidence supporting the positive impact of Teacher Professional Development in enhancing teacher quality and boosting student performance, there is much less research on the effectiveness of Teacher Professional Development in the field of school-related gender-based violence. But the TIGER project has taken steps to address this research gap.
Although Teacher Professional Development plays a pivotal role in addressing and eliminating school-related gender-based violence, as evidenced, it is not enough. Research shows that violence perpetrated by peers is more common than by teachers and other school staff. This is why a “whole-school” approach is needed, where school leaders like Orn, as well as parents and the students themselves also play a vital role in creating a safe environment.
“Students in my school changed their attitude ... they are no longer calling each other bad names,” says Orn. “We asked them to put themselves in their classmates' shoes, how they would feel If they were to be bullied.”
A research article detailing the findings and methodology is published in Springer’s Asia Pacific Education Review.
