Kathryn Moeller, a UW assistant professor of educational policy, is interested in how corporate funding impacts girls’ education.
In early March, Moeller wrote an article in the Huffington Post arguing against the idea of prioritizing girls’ education as a means of economic change. Instead, she advocated the promotion of girls’ education for their own intrinsic benefit, she said.
“As a feminist I had always been concerned with questions surrounding gender equality,” she said.
Moeller is in her second year as a professor at UW. She came to campus after completing her doctorate at University of California-Berkeley and serving as a post-doctorate researcher at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society.
When she began graduate school, she started looking at literature about the crisis in girls’ education from a more critical perspective, she said.
Prior to her return to graduate school, Moeller was a high school teacher in both the United States and Honduras. She taught in both formal high schools and out of school study programs, she said.
Since coming to UW, Moeller focused her research on girls’ education. She is working on a book titled The Girl Effect: Corporations and the Politics of Ending Poverty, due to be released in 2017. Moeller said the book looks at how and why corporations are investing in girls’ education. She said large corporations’ investments may have both intended and unintended consequences.
In several academic articles, Moeller examines claims she will expand upon in her upcoming book. In one study, Moeller wrote about Nike’s program “The Girl Effect,” which promotes interest in girls’ education.
In these articles she wrote these programs, corporations like Nike support the idea that investing in poor, adolescent girls will help to reduce fertility, decrease poverty and stimulate economic growth. However, this approach can turn these girls into economic tools.
The approach to girls’ education needs to change, Moeller said. She said girls deserve high-quality free education promoting their learning as critical learners and as citizens in a larger democracy.
The Huffington Post piece was meant to serve as an intervention.
“I wanted to make an intervention in the larger discourse about girls’ education and the ways that we talk about girls,” Moeller said. “The way we talk about girls reproduces a set of inequalities surrounding their lives.”
As Moeller continues her research, she is preparing to travel to Brazil in the 2015-16 academic year. Moeller plans to continue to focus her research on the effect of corporations on education, but will focus on Brazilian corporations and public education. She received the Fulbright Award for the 2015-16 academic school year in support of this research.
“I hope to turn this study into a larger transnational study which will include the U.S. and another country in Latin America,” Moeller said.
Editor’s note: This article has been amended to more accurately portray the intention of Moeller’s research. The original article inaccurately presented research published in her academic articles as part of The Badger Herald’s interview. We regret the error.
