Understanding the processes related to gender construction requires a multi and interdisciplinary approach. Complexity emerges as a category of investigation and an end to be pursued, giving space to a plurality of voices, interpretations, and points of view. With such intellectual curiosity, the volume's authors questioned the inclusion and exclusion of these multiple voices in education. How has teaching on gender made room for this complexity? What views were included? Which ones were overlooked? What have educational models for children been privileged in the imagination? Which histories and stories have accompanied them in acquiring an awareness linked to gender? Through such important questions and many more, the volume highlights the gender changes that took place from mid-eighteen century to today in various contexts relating to formal and informal education through an international comparative perspective. The multiplicity of approaches, methodologies, and perspectives allows us to read and analyze these changes in a composite way, underlining little-known aspects of gender studies in the historical-educational field.

Women in early modern Britain and colonial America were not the weak husband- and father-dominated characters of popular myth. Quite the reverse, strong women were the norm. They exercised considerable influence as important agents in the social, economic, religious and cultural life of their societies. This book shows how women on both sides of the Atlantic, while accepting a patriarchal system with all its advantages and disadvantages, contrived to carve out for themselves meaningful lives. Unusually it concentrates not only on the making and meaning of marriage, but also upon the partnership between men and women. It also looks at the varied roles – cultural, religious and educational – that women played both inside and outside marriage during the key period 1500-1760. Women emerge as partners, patrons, matchmakers, investors and network builders.

This book is the fourth production from the ESREA Gender network and the third in the ESREA Sense bookseries. Once more, there is an opportunity for readers to gain a better understanding of questions related to gender and adult learning from researchers deeply involved in this specific field of adult education. The notion of informal learning has already been treated as a chapter in the 2003 book, but it becomes central and relevant in this new book with the growing complexity of our society. The editors emphasise “private world(s)s” in the book title, but the content of the book proves that informal learning processes, aside from the self, are combined with contextual opportunities, which have been chosen or not. Their introduction covers the essential concepts of gender and informal learning. The contributors enlighten the debate with their geographical diversity all over Europe, but also with their diverse theoretical systems of references to the diverse social contexts that have been analysed. The first part of this book, entitled “private spheres”, presents and analyses painful gendered discriminations and injustices. We can’t escape to the emotions it evokes, from the soldiers after the war to men’s breast cancer: both relate to men and the specificity of their suffering. This is an interesting and quite new opportunity to question gender. In the second part related to “minorities and activism”, we discover groups who learn through their organised fight against discriminations. Emotions give way to a positive energy when we discover the strategies that feminists, or migrants or also retired men find to question the society in which they live. The authors show us not only what is learned by such communities, but also what their environment can learn from them. The last part of the book leads us to different “contexts of informal learning”, mostly related to opportunities and obstacles in education and work situations. Community training, social work studies, scientist’s work and management school are the contexts chosen to clarify stereotypes and the discrimination along the lifespan for women. From East to West and North to South of Europe, it seems once more that the debate presents a lot of similarities. This book can be considered as original in its area and useful, mostly because it presents a mixture of sadness and hope within gendered learning processes. In this book, it seems that men take their place in the gender debate and its analysis with a new vision of the male realities. More than anything else, this book is a reminder of what has to be done in our society, specifically in adult education, to imagine and to create better pathways, conditions and issues to respect all learners, women as well as men. – Edmee Ollagnier, Ex-University of Geneva, Switzerland

Informal Learning and Literacy among Maasai Women highlights the importance and role of informal education in the emancipation and development of Maasai village women in Kenya. At present, knowledge and research on the impact of informal learning and literacy on community development is limited, and there is a gap between policy level discussions and women’s lived experiences. Using a postcolonial feminist framework, this book sets out to examine linkages between informal learning and literacy, human development and gender inequality. Despite improvements in recent years, access to traditional education remains restricted for many women in rural communities across Kenya. Takayangi’s book is the first to introduce how Maasai village women utilise informal learning and literacy for collective empowerment as well as to sustain their own well-being and that of their families. It presents the perspectives of both local women and institutions and argues that women’s learning is most effective when located within their own socio-cultural and political discourses, and when their voices are listened to and heard. This ethnographic research study is a valuable resource that will contribute to the knowledge of literacy from both theoretical and practical perspectives. It is an essential read for those studying or researching information education, development studies and gender, or education, as well as for teachers, community leaders and aid workers.

This guide, produced jointly by Amnesty International and the Council of Europe, aims at helping design policies and measures to better address female genital mutilation and to pave the way for change. It is based on the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (also known as the Istanbul Convention), which entered into force in August 2014. The Istanbul Convention is the first treaty to recognise that female genital mutilation exists in Europe and that it needs to be systematically addressed (Article 38 of the Convention). It requires states parties to step up preventive measures by addressing affected communities, as well as the general public and relevant professionals. It entails obligations to offer protection and support when women and girls at risk need it most – and makes sure that their needs and their safety always come first.