Public Mantras, Private Murmurs: Gender and Teacher Education in The Gambia

Abstract

Despite teachers being seen as crucial agents of change in the eradication of inequality via education, gender tends to hold a marginal position in initial teacher education programmes (Coffey & Acker, 1991: Skelton, 2007).This qualitative research aims to centralise issues of gender in teacher education by exploring Gambian trainee teachers’ experiences of gender in their pre-service training. Using a post-structural framework based on the concepts of power and performativity, it examines the overt and covert gender training that Gambian trainee teachers receive and how they reflect on it. It explores the struggle that trainee teachers face in navigating the gap between public discourses of gender equality evident in government and college policy, and the private discourses of differentiated gendered roles that reflect Gambian family life. It examines how issues around language and understandings of the nation contribute to this conflict. It concludes by suggesting that gender training programmes must engage more meaningfully with the private or domestic sphere realities of trainee teachers’ lived experiences if they are to contribute to the transformation, rather than the reproduction, of traditional gender norms.