The pedagogical problem with Shorifar Golpo and a few recommendations for NCTB
While the hotly debated chapter rightly promotes inclusion, ensuring more pedagogical and cognitive alignment by revising the contents and materials will make this book more meaningful and coherent
A recent controversy over the firing of Brac University adjunct faculty once again triggered the debate on the transgender-hijra categorisation and, albeit, resurfaced the issues and politics related to transgender sensitivity and inclusion.
From the social media and news media, I came to know that the faculty of BracU's School of Philosophy tore a section from a chapter of Class Seven's Itihash O Shamajik Bigyan ("History and Social Sciences") textbook that introduced the students to differences and similarities across different cultural and social communities, including the hijra community, the officially recognised gender subculture of Bangladesh.
Just a disclaimer: I am not here to comment on the ongoing tension around transgender discourse. I would like to draw on the pedagogical aspects of the section in question and make some recommendations for future editions of this textbook.
As a social being, it is crucial to teach the students aspects of inclusion, respect for differences and avoiding any kind of judgmental demeanour so that the students can grasp the essence of justice and rights from an early age.
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Moreover, as a pledge to nurture tolerance and acceptance for individuals and groups with ethnic, linguistic, racial, religious and cultural differences, this chapter introduced Bede, hijra and 'cleaner' community.
As this book is titled "History and Social Sciences", introducing these communities as socio-cultural groups is essential and aligns with the assumed objective of the textbook. It will also help the school children realise how people with different socio-cultural and gender expressions are just the right-bearing citizens of our society, hence no aliens.
This sensitisation of social and cultural identity is expected from a seventh-grade textbook.
However, while this chapter effectively introduces gender sensitivity, critiques gender role fixation, promotes freedom of expression, and nurtures empathy for different marginal communities with interactive stories and activities, introducing critical concepts like gender dysphoria (in a playful manner, though), biological essentialism, performativity, gender and becoming, and last but not least, "wrong body" discourses to the almost pubescents might pose a very stressful psychological dilemma about their own gender identity.
While these concepts are helpful for a better understanding of how gender is perceived and construed, Class Seven is not the appropriate age for such a cognitive introduction.
If we rummage through our memory of popular culture, we will notice how Meena Cartoon introduced only the aspects of gender equity and discrimination from a social perspective and similarly entertained the kids.
Though gender cannot be separated from the socio-cultural components, introducing critical gender discourses at the age of 12 or 13 is, in my opinion, a pedagogical flaw. Any critical discourse should come after a supposed mindset of acceptance and sensitisation.
Pedagogy is a progressive process of teaching and learning, and we need to think about the alignment of pedagogy with age, grade and prior knowledge. Therefore, while by introducing the hijra community, this chapter will help the students to see the hijras not with fear and stigma and hence facilitate hijra inclusion into mainstream society while at the same time maintaining an acceptance for gender-diverse people, some critical discourses mentioned in the chapter in a dialogic manner will only confuse the students, as they are not expected to have relevant knowledge on gender formation.
In the long run, this might create a cognitive fallacy and a truncated conceptualisation of gender, which might be even more harmful to these little kids.
My recommendation for the NCTB would be to revise this chapter, keeping it within the conceptual framework of social sciences and introducing critical discourses on gender in the future formative years, when students will have the cognitive maturity to understand the complexities of gender construction. This is not to imply removing the content from different communities but rather to keep the scope within the introduction of communities, not their critical gender formation.
Moreover, the subheadings of this chapter are all similarly aligned with the same typeface and size, which might not help the students grasp the concepts in a coherent manner. For example, subsections like " Cheleder jinish meyeder jinish" " Lingo boichitro O genderer dharona" and " Peshajibi shomproday" all fall into the same page formatting, making it difficult to conceptually distinguish.
Keeping pace with the ongoing socio-cultural transformations and nuances is seemingly one of the objectives of the writers of this textbook; just ensuring more pedagogical and cognitive alignment by revising the contents and materials will only make this book more meaningful and coherent for our children.
Kazi Ashraf Uddin is an Associate Professor (on leave) at the Department of English, Jahangirnagar University. He is currently doing his PhD in Gender Studies and is a Postgraduate representative at the School of Law, Society & Criminology, UNSW Sydney.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.
