How do you explain complex institutions at an everyday level? Anyone who teaches underserved populations almost certainly considers this question daily.
At the beginning of April, Fellows Aashritha, Arbeena, and I embarked on an illuminating exchange of workshops, supported by AIF’s Professional Development Grants. The three of us work with young girls, particularly, Arbeena and I work with girls at risk of child marriage. In this context, Arbeena was able to answer this question for me.
As a student at Columbia, I was a part of the Black Student Organization. An offshoot was created by a friend of mine, a reading group centered around black academic works. Columbia is situated in the middle of Harlem in New York, a historically black area. As black students, many of us felt uncomfortable with the position we were in; acting in a way as oppressors to a population we also identified strongly with.
As a solution, I suggested we open the group to the surrounding community, and that they be included in the discussion. But one frustration stayed with me– the papers and works written by black academics were full of jargon, so convoluted with concepts and theories that it was sometimes impossible for me to understand. What was most ironic, though, was that all of these convoluted, jargon-y concepts and theories applied more to the Black people around Harlem than the black people inside Columbia.
As a Banyan Impact Fellow at Vikalp Sansthan, I work with around 20 girls who are completing a BA for the first time in their village. So, while teaching the girls in my cohort, I often strayed away from abstract and large concepts like patriarchy or intersectionality. Rather, I let these concepts appear wherever they naturally occur, and discuss them as such.
Enter Arbeena. At my cohort in Gogunda, with extreme grace, Arbeena explained concepts like Gender as a social construct, differences between gender and sex, and Patriarchy, all in under two hours. With analogy and metaphor, she explained the absurdity of gender roles. First, she made a list of things associated with girls and boys. Then, one by one, she debunked each of them. “Girls are born with a different body, we all agree. But we are not born with some buttons on our arm where we press them and we know how to make Chai,” she explained. She mimicked pressing her arm, and the girls giggled.
Boys are strong, was one of the things written on the board. “But when you have your period cramps, you still do everything even in immense pain.” The girls nodded, considering this. “Women give birth,” she argued, “when men are given a machine with that amount of pain, they can’t handle it at all.” She mimicked the men bending over and crying, and the girls laughed again.
“Simply put,” she explained, “sex is your body, and gender is all these things expected of you.” From there, she explained that men are considered above, and this is called Patriarchy.
With simple pedagogical tactics, Arbeena explained large feminist concepts. I know my mentees well at this point, and from their expressions, I could tell she had reached every one of them.
Watching Arbeena, I realized that avoiding large jargon-y concepts was not necessarily the answer; they could be explained and given names, but they needed to be broken down not only to a basic level but to a context-specific level. Arbeena did not say women are expected to shave their legs, she said they make Chai; she chose an expectation specific to these girls. She asked the girls if men’s hands were different in some way that they were unable to make Chai. From the laughter in the room, she could understand when her comparison was relevant and understandable. She pivoted as necessary to continue finding relevant examples for these concepts.
It is tempting as humans to categorize, name, and box everything up into neat packages. But when you are teaching, it is important to look back and see if your students are following you up the chain of jargon. There is power in identifying large concepts and knowing that others have studied the things you face every day. But, knowing how to identify those things for each context is necessary for a teacher to truly connect those concepts to the people they teach.
What Arbeena did was make a large concept bite-size and simple. Concisely, she gave a way for the girls to explain the concepts themselves going forward using funny and engaging examples like buttons on an arm.
From a privileged background, it is sometimes easy to get caught up in the academia of oppression. But experience on the ground shows you that life and problems are in everyday issues. Explaining the concepts is connecting the dots. Why do you make Chai but your brother doesn’t? Why do you go to your husband’s house after marriage? Why are you not allowed to go outside because your brother ran away with a girl? These are everyday problems, and it requires the tact and skill Arbeena had to explain that. Not only are these all connected, but they also have names, and are well recognized by women up and down the academic ladder. With this, the girls feel validated that their experience is universal, and they can explain institutions to others using common ideas. Arbeena’ pedagogy was a great example of one of the many ways we can stop gate-keeping academia. She showed during this session how to bring the problems back to the people, and therefore, put the solutions back in their hands.
