Celebrating the Twenty-Year Anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Seminar 8)

Children’s Rights and Gender

Facilitators:
Professor Glenda MacNaughton (Centre for Equity and Innovation in Early Childhood, Melbourne Graduate School of Education) and Mercy M Musomi (Executive Director of Child and Girl Network, Kenya)

This seminar will explore the importance of critically evaluating the gender dynamics and effects of whose voices are heard and whose are silenced when we move to a children’s rights model of curriculum and of policy change and development. We will share case studies from Kenya and from Australia that point to the need to ensure that listening to children does not silence gender and its effects in what children know and how they express their knowledge and desires in a child’s rights model of curriculum and of policy change and development. Mercy will explore and raise questions about the challenges that girls in Kenya and in general Africa face in their endeavour to achieve education. Glenda will focus on the challenges for young Australian girls of achieving gender safety and gender fairness in early childhood education.