Girls + Education Photo Campaign

Thirty one million girls do not have a school-based education and two out of three illiterate adults are women. Though we, students at Hamilton-Wenham, are not as exposed to the hardships women face in attaining an education, it is important for us to raise awareness and fight for women’s education rights. Going to school for us is an obligation, rather than a privilege, but in many developing countries, poverty, pregnancy, violence, early marriage, discriminatory gender norms, and religion are widespread factors that prevent women from gaining the opportunities we take for granted. Education is crucial, and not only improves individual lives, but the development of societies. Despite progress in women gaining opportunities for education, there are still huge challenges that women and girls face in exercising this basic right.

This past week, we asked HWRHS students and teachers to respond to the prompt, “Girls + Education = ,” and had them write down what women’s education meant to them. Our goal for the photo campaign was to raise awareness of the injustices that women around the world face in attaining an education and to encourage discussion and action to fight for equal access to education. Many of the parcipitants had attended our event with Frank Elbers of Barakat (http://barakatworld.org/), an organization providing education to women and girls in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India through five different schools (see last blog post for more information about Barakat). The students who had heard Frank speak took messages from the presentation and incorporated the ideas they learned into their responses, something we were happy to see. We were also very impressed to see that many students went further than writing one-word answers, and were eager to participate in and discuss the campaign.

Though most reactions were positive, we were also disheartened to see some students not recognize the relevance of this campaign and belittle the importance of it. This should have been expected, as most of the students at our small, suburban school have not experienced being excluded from education because of their gender. Although these responses were at first disappointing, we recognized that without this type of reaction, our campaign would have been futile; if our goal was to change perspectives on women’s education rights, we would need the perspectives for us to change. Of course we would have preferred for there to be no need for us to do this type of campaign at our school; it would have been great if all the students were activists for women’s education. But seeing this response proved the necessity of the campaign, and an opportunity for us to reach our goal.

We can’t be sure that our quick, 40-minute photo campaign changed the opinions of individuals at our school, but we sparked ideas and conversations about women’s education rights and exposed students to their peers who are passionate and thoughtful in their ideas about women’s education. Overall, we consider this campaign an overwhelming success. The responses pictured below are all filled with meaningful, raw opinions of the Hamilton-Wenham community that we are so grateful to have captured. Please take a minute to look through the pictures and reflect on what Girls + Education means to you. We are proud be a part of Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School and look forward to furthering Outreach’s work here, together. Thank you to everyone who helped.

#reflection #photocampaign