For students from Classes VI to X, the Government of Odisha will introduce gender equity curriculum in the school syllabus from the new academic year.
The School and Mass Education (SME) department and Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) will soon sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for the same and this will help improve gender outcomes and accelerate gender equity by modifying the attitude as well as the behaviour of the students who go to schools.
The programme, which will be implemented from the academic year 2022-23, will require no additional financial outlay and only minimal in-kind support from the state government will be expected. Part of the curriculum will be supplementary textbook for Social Studies and its allied subjects such as Geography, History, Political Science in the first year. But from 2023, the integration of the curriculum into the current SCERT (State Council Of Educational Research & Training) textbooks of Social Students and textbooks of its allied subjects like Geography, History and Political Science will happen.
Officials from the SME department said that the aim is to instil confidence in children and help them dream big.
Through formative research, the gender equity curriculum will be customised to suit the local context. It is across five districts of Odisha that the partner team would undertake a formative study to find out about local nuances for curriculum customisation to the context of the state.
The key knowledge and learning partner is J-PAL South Asia and it will lend its support to the government to measure the impact and to the extent to which the programme has been implemented. Gender resource coordinators will be trained as master trainers who will train Social Studies teachers of all upper primary and secondary schools through a train-the-trainer model.
For the implementation of the programme, the State Project Director of Odisha School Education Programme Authority has been appointed as the nodal officer.
