This article explores Bolivian schoolteachers' attitudes and practices surrounding gender in the context of a national educational reform law that mandated gender equity. Teacher interviews and primary school classroom observations indicate teachers' discourses and practices reflect a sometimes paradoxical blend of advocacy for gender…

This article examines the lived experiences of women in Ethiopian higher education (HE) as a counterpoint to understandings of gender equity informed only by data on admission, progression and completions rates. Drawing on a critical qualitative inquiry approach, we analyse and interpret data drawn from focus group discussions with female students…

This paper is based on the findings of a 3-year, qualitative study funded by the Research Consortium on Educational Outcomes for Poverty. It uses Sen's [1985. "Well-being agency and freedom." "Journal of Philosophy" 82, no. 4: 169-221] capability approach and Bourdieu's [1991. "Language and symbolic power."…

In a number of countries in Africa, young women who become pregnant are excluded from school. This article presents a critique of policy and practice in this area drawing partly on Diana Leonard's scholarship concerning the relational dynamic of gender, generation, social division, and household forms. Much of the policy prescription of large…

This paper focuses on rural and indigenous girls and their mothers in Peru, examining how they position schooling and education in their current life and future aspirations, in order to better understand girls' increasing participation in education. It is argued here that the high educational aspirations girls and their families have are not only…

Reporting on a study of mature women training to work in childcare, this article demonstrates how some women choose to be part-time mothers, workers and students, wanting "the best of both worlds". It presents a theory of integrated lives that contrasts with customary deficit models and shows how a series of reciprocal links bind the…

Visual images of students and academics in the UK have traditionally featured men, reflecting the historical predominance of men in these positions. When women were represented, sexist imagery and traditional constructions of femininity were not uncommon. This article explores the ways in which students and academics are constructed in a selection…

At the time when Diana was writing " A Woman's Guide to Doctoral Studies" (2001), she was supervising a number of female doctoral students. She drew on some of their experiences in the writing of the book, and they in return benefited from the extensive insights she had about the politics of academic life that she portrays in her…

This qualitative research explores women's experiences of accessing higher education (HE) in England, through the mother-daughter relationship. Women's pathways to university and their funding histories are presented from both past and recent generations, to contextualise an understanding of funding HE in light of the 2012 tuition fee…

Official statistics from several resources in Iran indicate that female enrollment and achievement in Iranian universities has recently exceeded that of male students. Despite the fact that a religious government has been ruling the country for three decades, and despite many regulations against women, Iranian women have managed to overcome…

The present article examines the situation of girls in Spanish academic secondary education during the first Francoism. It outlines the measures introduced by the Franco Regime that maintained the traditional access for girls to the same academic curriculum followed by boys, although in separate schools. Later, it examines the various projects put…

The purpose of this article is to elucidate how the girl who chooses technology came to be the symbol of the non-traditional pupil's choice in Sweden. In the early 1960s it was hoped that girls would enter workshop training and then commit themselves to engineering mechanics jobs at a time when Sweden was characterised by economic growth which was…

Maria Edgeworth's pedagogical short stories "Mademoiselle Panache" (1800, 1801) and "The Good French Governess" (1801) portray contrasting French instructors, and illustrate a transformation in English girls' education in French at the end of the eighteenth century. While "Mademoiselle Panache" looks back to the disingenuous French instructors of…

Forty-five years have passed since Kenya gained independence and almost 30 years since the feminist revolution ushered in a global gender and development agenda. While Kenya's development agenda had a functionalist orientation aimed at modernisation, the outcome of efforts to promote education development cannot be understood without an…

This article discusses the creation of space and time for feminist approaches in higher education in the context of shifting community and employment relations and the restructuring of higher education space-time. It draws on the reflections of three feminist academics concerning aspects of their work biographies in two very different higher…