Regional meeting on gender equality in teacher education

In 2015, UNESCO launched an initiative to strengthen the education sector’s responsiveness to gender equality focusing on teacher education in the Asia-Pacific region, under the UNESCO-HNA Partnership for Girls’ and Women’s Education. The five-year project “Enhancing girls’ and women’s right to quality education through gender sensitive policy making, teacher development and pedagogy in South, Southeast and Central Asia” involves five countries, namely Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan.

The project started with the first component to diagnose gender issues to identify barriers and factors that perpetuate inequalities in teacher education. The second component focuses on enhancing the awareness of education policymakers and planners on the significance of gender equality issues in facilitating girls’ and women’s education, as well as their capacity in formulating gender-responsive education policies focusing on teachers. The third component aims to promote gender mainstreaming within teacher education institutions through the integration of gender awareness and responsiveness into teacher education curriculum and pedagogy.

UNESCO in close collaboration with the Ministry of Higher and Secondary Specialized of the Republic of Uzbekistan is convening a regional meeting to serve as a platform for project countries to learn from one another’s practices and experiences in relation to their journey towards mainstreaming gender equality in teacher education.

The regional meeting aims to share experience and lessons learned from the training workshops on gender mainstreaming in teacher education for policy-makers and planners in the five project countries, and discuss the draft outline of a course on gender for pre-service teacher education in teacher education institutions.