Vignettes of Gender Equality, Wellbeing and Teaching

Substantive progress has been made in recent decades to ensure gender equality as a fundamental human right. More girl children are attending school, there are more women in key leadership positions in business and government, and child marriage is declining. However, still, no country in the world can claim full gender equality. Women experience disadvantages in many sectors of society. Women are predominantly bearing the brunt of household responsibilities, income inequalities are pervasive, and lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic increased the risks of violence against women and girls. Sustainable Development Goal 5 on gender equality highlights the fact that in 18 countries of the world husbands can still legally prevent their wives from working, that only 13% of agricultural land holders are women, and that laws that protect women from domestic violence, despite high prevalence rates, are lacking in 49 countries. The aim of the chapter is to contribute to the global discourse on gender equality as it pertains to sustainability, wellbeing, teaching and teacher education. The chapter draws on the experiences of an all-women research team from South Africa and Austria within the Teach4Reach project, which explores the ways in which teacher education can be leveraged to support the goals and targets on gender equality in the 2030 Agenda. By utilising the theoretical lens of eudaimonic wellbeing, the study adopts vignette research as a data collection strategy in this multi-national research project between Europe and Africa. Hence, data is analysed phenomenologically and presented as vignettes of scenes from, and of experiences, in educational settings. The study posits that, similar to gender, wellbeing can be non-binary and also multi-layered. Wellbeing may thus manifest on a continuum which in itself presents in a multi-layered way. The study foregrounds the complexities of gender representativity and the importance of intentional research design decisions.