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ROLE OF WOMEN IN
PEACE EDUCATION
Azerbaijan is a
peace loving country. Peace, for better and safe future of
children start from families and schools. For that we have
to build peace in our mind, peace our family, in our
schools, in social peace around us. In our to gain and to
reach our aim mothers shoulder to shoulders with educators
at schools must fight for peace education. For this purpose
we try to analyse the role of women in social activates and
learn the gender studies.
Women’s and Gender
Studies as an interdisciplinary educational practice
currently searches for a model in a country in which
assuming feminist critical approaches toward existing
culture is next to impossible; in which women’s studies is
viewed negatively as uprooting tradition, and in which an
independent women’s movement in still invisible. In this
context, the task is not only to appropriate new knowledge
and to integrate this new knowledge into teaching. It is
also to become intellectually and politically empowered
through the analysis of women’s relationships to the state,
public and culture, and to learn how to use feminist
theoretical frameworks for the analysis of the present-day
divided constructions of women’s experiences in our society,
thus giving space and historical understanding to women
activists. The perspectives of Women’s and Gender Studies
also have to be viewed in terms of problems of women’s
participation in educational and research structures. Higher
educational establishments have traditionally had a high
percentage of female students and lecturers. Female students
prevail at pedagogical institutions. But the “glass ceiling”
effect has also been evident in academy. Women have been
significantly under-represented in the decision-making
bodies of the institutions of higher education.
Today a woman is
expected to reconsider and prioritise her duties in the
family, which are claimed as the domain of her real power,
although the economic necessity of a woman’s involvement in
the labour market also demands her participation. What is
important is that her workplace at school or at the
university has become the site of the post-Soviet mode of
patriarchal interventionist politics. It is here that a
woman is pressed into another construction of her secondary
position as intellectually devalued other. No wonder that a
woman’s consciousness as an intellectual worker-citizen
(teacher, lecturer, researcher, etc.) is under direct and
indirect attack from indeterminists in politics, the mass
media, and academe and that this situation thus affects the
resulting politics of educational and research priorities.
Another side of the problem is that jobs in the system of
secondary and higher education are among the lowest paid.
Some research structures have simply ceased to exist. As a
result, a number of qualified women researchers have left
and are leaving the academic system for better-paid jobs in
the developing private sector.
The present-day
situation is rather discouraging for developing Women’s and
Gender Studies as interdisciplinary educational and research
projects.
Over the last two
years, we have recorded a gradually increasing interest of
women students in feminist ideas, especially as they choose
topics for term papers and bachelor’s papers in cultural,
literary, sociological, and psychological studies. Some
university professors now tend to broaden the range of
topics by including gender-related issues. On the other
hand, the lack of books and other materials in the Latvian
language and the absence of teaching-oriented networking
initiatives in national women’s/gender’/feminist studies are
challenges that must still be met. These needs have become
imperative, since our classrooms today suffer from the
randomness of access to information. Special attention will
be given to providing our students and young women lecturers
with information about centers of Women’s and gender Studies
in Europe that provide research grants.
Learning,
teaching, educating and disseminating ideas are definitely
of primary concern for feminist intellectuals in Azerbaijan.
The light of knowledge was also carried to the women by the
first higher educational institutions, technical and
vocational schools. And it was women revolutionaries and
enlighteners who were in the lead in the struggle for
education.
The women’s
schools, which were opened on a mass scale, experienced an
acute shortage of teachers. That is why a teacher’s staining
seminary for women was set up even in Baku in 1920. Women
enlighteners put a lot work into this heart of education,
which was to train the first teachers of all socialist
society.
It was a great
event in the life of Azerbaijanian women. Now Azerbaijanian
girls could receive pedagogical education in their native
language. Favorable conditions were also created for
receiving higher education.
Azerbaijanian
women who worked in the village rapidly won good fame fro
their efficiency and high productivity of their labour.
In the period of
the full-scale cultural offensive, the women of
Azerbaijan-teachers and social and political figures-did
honorable work and their merits cannot be overestimated.
There was hardly a
corner in the republic where women teachers were not sowing
a seeds of education and culture. Now they numbered hundreds
rather that dozens. These progressive women who had passed
through the fire of revolutionary battles, who had been
tempered in the crucible of the struggle for freedom, while
performing their social, political and pedagogical
activities, gave young teachers a lead and inspired them to
a success in the socialist construction. They knew that
their students would become scientists, engineers, doctors,
workers of the art and culture. A numerous army of teachers
grew which was able to train cadres for all branches of
culture and economy. |
