FEMINISM
At school, Miss Stansfield has begun to help create equal opportunities for the female and male refugees included in the Kennedy Club project. Miss Stansfield described her urge to do more to help, she wanted to find a way to give the Afghan female refugees a skill to help them feel less isolated and more welcome in our modern and fast paced community. Thus, Miss Stansfield explained how she set about teaching mothers and older women to use computers and the internet, things they had never experienced in their rural towns in Afghanistan. Of course, this was no simple job with the difficultly of a language barrier, teaching the sometimes-complex idea of tech was not straight forward, however soon the women felt confident using computers, through the inspiration ignited by Miss Stansfield to realise their huge potential. With such success This has led to many great things including a summer camp for the younger girls, hosted at St George’s, showing them great examples of the freedom in roles women can have in our society included having the right to education and taking positions of leadership, breaking down barriers. When asked, why she picked to do a masters in gender equality, Miss Stansfield explained that through her personal experiences and in her career, she felt truly involved in this pivotal topic. In seeing how driven girls are in the environment of St George’s with a female headmistress she is determined to help find
a way to reflect this nature in society in which there are still huge problems being faced. She finds equality needs to be grounded throughout all of society with the issues faced effecting all genders. This drive directed her to work for the Northern Irish assembly, due to her passion for Politics. Miss Stansfield talked of her most recent responsibility for the Youth Forum of Dame Arlene Foster’s new venture, the Together U.K. Foundation. She and Dame Arlene, who was the former First Minister for Northern Ireland, will be working to celebrate and highlight the achievements of young people from every nation in the U.K as well as giving them a voice. Dame Arlene assumed her position in the House of Lords in November and Miss Stansfield spoke of her huge delight and excitement to be working alongside her. Their joint hopes are to ensure young people’s opinions are heard in decisions being made for them about their futures, despite them not being able to vote yet. Miss Stansfield has a strong belief in how important it is to enable females to enter areas such as politics which are regarded as male dominated careers and spoke of her huge admiration for Dame Arlene as ‘it is extremely useful to have strong female role models, who are willing to mentor and help’. Finding this amazing quality reflected through the teachers and students at St George’s College has had a reaffirming effect on her decision to use her skill set as a teacher.
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