GENDER MAINSTREAMING IN TEACHING: ANALYSIS OF STEM STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION

Autor: Montserrat Alsina Aubach, Mireia Ventura, Amaia Lusa García, Elisabet Mas de les Valls Ortiz
Přispěvatelé: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament de Física, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament de Matemàtiques, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament d'Organització d'Empreses, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. GREENTECH - Grup de Recerca en Tecnologies Renovables, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. TN - Grup de Recerca en Teoria de Nombres, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. SCOM - Supply Chain and Operations Management
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
ICERI2020 Proceedings
ISSN: 2340-1095
Popis: The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, UPC-BarcelonaTech (UPC), is currently doing significant steps towards the gender mainstreaming in teaching. Indeed, some years ago some teachers already started individually to introduce gender dimension in their teaching, but it is not until the pilot project named Gender Dimension in Teaching, when a cooperative approach was adopted to reach such mainstreaming in all Bachelor and Master degrees at UPC. Within this project a group of 35 lecturers worked during one semester focusing on the four pillars of teaching (i.e. contents, classroom management, methodology and assessment), which were revised from a gender perspective. Within each pillar, gender issues were identified according to the experienced perception of the project participants. However, uncertainties aroused concerning the reliability of such a perception. Indeed, teachers’ perception might be influenced by stereotypes and prejudices that could alter the identification of gender issues. Hence, it became obvious that more reliable data concerning students’ perceptions was needed. In order to assess this issue, a survey design, test and improvement process was carried out [1]. The first consensual version of the survey was answered by 548 students, 30% of which are women, from 3 Bachelor and 4 Master STEM degrees. The percentage of women was similar to that of the UPC students’ community (27,2% in 2018-2019) but significantly higher than 20,70%, what corresponds to the women’s proportion in the 7 studied degrees. This first comparison already makes evident the different degree of awareness related to gender issues, where women capture more biases than men. Indeed, these differences have been found in most of the survey’s answers related to the students’ observations on attitudes and facts in the frame of UPC degrees. Within the survey, different aspects such as teacher’s gendered attitudes, gendered roles in the teamwork and male and female referents are analysed. Surprising results are found, such as the fact that 76% of students have frequently detected one of the following issues: different treatment by the teacher, use of sexist language, use of stereotyped images or a biased assessment. Also, the results regarding referents are interesting, showing a significant gender bias in both the number and type of referents. Indeed, despite the number of male referents is low (54%), the number of female referents is really scarce (24%) and, to our opinion, devoted actions to provide female referents are required. Moreover, women have more referents in the personal circle whereas men have more internationally known and actual referents. All these aspects have been analysed for each of the participant degrees providing valuable information to define degree specific actions to improve gender mainstreaming in teaching. Moreover, the detailed data analysis has allowed to identify the correct wording of the key questions and the type of available answers in order to build a new survey to assess students’ perception all along UPC experience. This work has been carried out within the framework of the Gender Dimension in Teaching project, at UPC-BarcelonaTech, and GEECCO project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 741128. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official point of view of the UPC-BarcelonaTech nor the European Commission.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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