Section 3 - Educating and Partnering for CEDAW

Chapter 2
Teaching CEDAW
It’s been said that the more things change, the more they stay the same. In this
fast-paced, globalizing world of rapid change and development, inequity and
discrimination persist, embedded in everyday life as well as in institutions. As
such, there is growing recognition that challenging deeply-entrenched constructs
and practices, which underpin gender-based discrimination, requires sustained
action in various fronts.
For the University of the Philippines Center for Women’s Studies (UPCWS),
the educational system is one crucial arena in the struggle for gender equality.
According to Odine De Guzman, a UP faculty and Deputy Director of the UPCWS,
“Education is an important means of improving lives – economically, politically,
socially and culturally – in the final analysis, it should be a means of promoting
social justice.
“We believe it is important to integrate gender-fair principles and issues of sexual/
gender discrimination, human rights and women’s human rights issues in our
teaching because education is knowledge production. It is necessary for us
to ensure that the knowledge we pass on to students is extensive, critical and
relevant,” she points out. “Evidently our understanding of who and what we are,
is based on our wellspring of knowledge and on our socialization; next to family
and religion, education is a highly influential socialization process.”
The UPCWS leads efforts to anchor education and curriculum reform on
CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
Women. For over a decade now, UPCWS has been in the forefront of gender
mainstreaming, particularly engendering the academic curricula. Their project to
“integrate CEDAW” is part of the UNIFEM CEDAW South East Asia Programme
with support from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA),
builds on previous work they’ve done on gender mainstreaming, Gender and
Development (GAD) and Gender Resource Centers (GRCs). GRCs are sub-national
networks composed of 70% academe and the rest government agencies and
non-government organizations established to provide local governments with a
variety of services (GAD training, consultancy and technical assistance) in at least
nine regions. Taken together, these efforts seek to develop and institutionalize
what they call “gender-fair education.”
117