Speaker
Description
Many studies, also in science education research, investigate how gender stereotypes (GS) may affect teachers’ teaching attitudes and practices and, also, students’ attitudes and interest towards STEM disciplines. GS may act, implicitly and explicitly, in school context: for example reinforcing the idea that individuals have different chance to succeed in STEM fields on the basis of their gender. Thus GS may contribute to discourage girls to choose certain study areas, such as engineering or physics, that result to be male dominated fields and, at the same time, may discourage boys to study disciplines, such as biology, that result to be female dominated.
Despite the large number of studies investigating how GS influence the teachers and the students, very little of this research filters through and have an impact on school practice, in particular in Italy. To address this issue, supported by a large collaboration of Unified Guarantee Committee (CUG) of Research Institutions and Universities, we develop a wide initiative focused on supporting teachers to develop competences useful to design and implement Research-Based Teaching-Learning activities specifically focused on supporting their students to recognize and deconstruct GS thus to allow students to make more informed choices about their future.
Overall about 90 teachers were involved in our initiative. To assess the pilot edition of the initiative, we collected qualitative feedback from both the involved teachers and researchers. In particular, teachers shared with us notes and observations about the training course and the activities implemented in classrooms. These feedback from these notes and observations will be the base for revising topics addressed in the first edition of the initiative and to improve the co-designed teaching-learning activities. We will present details of our teaching training initiatives describing results from the first pilot implementation.
| Destinatari principali | Docenti |
|---|---|
| Parole Chiave | Gender Gap, Teachers' training, STEM education, Gender Stereotypes |