Vulnerability-based gender transformation pedagogy: rethinking girls’ and young women’s education

This article proposes a vulnerability-based pedagogy of gender transformation, aiming to motivate educators, girls, and young women to navigate the affective dynamics of gender-based vulnerabilities and engage in gender justice work. It frames vulnerability as both a consequence of social marginalization and a shared human condition, encouraging young women to critically recognize oppressive power formations while validating diverse modes of knowing and acting. Vulnerability, when mobilized, becomes a resource for educational work, forming alliances to support subjectification and transformative efforts. Two pedagogical principles are outlined: (a) fostering affective attentiveness to map gender-based vulnerabilities by recognizing dissonance between social norms and embodied experiences, and (b) validating diverse agentic actions developed to navigate vulnerabilities, moving beyond notions of passivity. This pedagogy addresses young women’s tendency to trivialize gender-based vulnerabilities, leveraging them as a transformative affective force to empower engagement in gender justice work by attending to their relational aspects in educational settings.