Muslim Women Disrupting Traditional Gender Discourses with Vina Adriany, Hani Yulindrasari, and Raden Safrina

Drs. Vina Adriany, Hani Yulindrasari, and Raden Safrina are academics from Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, a higher education institution in Indonesia. Their research began in frustration. Despite the three scholars’ engagement in doing research on gender in early years, they noticed few changes actually taking place in the field of early childhood education. They adopted feminist participatory action research! They explain:

“This was our attempt to move from our comfort chairs as academics. We decided to do an action research together with nine teachers in kindergarten, who in this research act as our co-researchers.

This research is conducted in Indonesia, the highest Muslim populous country in the world. Hence, without any doubt despite the fact that Indonesia is not an Islamic state, Islam plays dominant roles  in everyday life. We use our reflexivity as women, academics, and Muslim women as departure points to understand the complex experiences of our co-researchers who are also women, kindergarten teachers and Muslim women.

Our reflexivity also allows us to negotiate the power-relations between our co-researchers and us.  We believe that our research contributes a unique perspective in our exploration of feminist participatory action research at the intersection of gender, early childhood, and religion.

We  integrate our own personal narratives with the co-researchers’ multiple perspectives on gender flexible attitudes to illustrate how feminist participatory action research creates space for collective reflection. It is our hope that  in doing so, the readers can see the meaning, relevance, and transformational potential for undoing gender in the early childhood center. 

Please read on by clicking on the following link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14767503211044007.  The article is currently  available outside paywall.