Conference Program

Many studies, especially in science education research, investigate how gender stereotypes (GS) may affect teachers’ teaching attitudes and practices [1-3] and, also, students’ attitudes [4] and interest towards STEM disciplines [5]. GS may act, implicitly and explicitly, in school context [6-8]: for example reinforcing the idea that individuals have different chance to succeed in STEM fields on the basis of their gender. Thus these stereotypes 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 results to be female dominated [9].

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. This is mainly due to structural shortcomings in teacher training that in our country fails to offer teachers structured training focused on enabling them to access the latest studies in the field of Research in Education and in Science Education. This clearly emerge from the analysis of the curricula of the courses for Italian perspective teachers including only 16 CFU (1 CFU ranges from 5 to 8 hours of lessons) addressing discipline content and, only in some cases, pedagogical content knowledge [10].

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.

We considered that many different and intertwined causes contribute to the existence and persistence of GS: the socio-economic context in which individuals live, family context, teachers’ and peers’ attitudes and ideas, etc. As these factors are related to many different research fields, we involved colleagues from different research areas – e.g. sociology, psychology, linguistics, etc - in teachers’ training to support participants to delve deeper into the latest results from research addressing GS in different areas. Researchers and teachers co-designed activities to be implemented in classrooms. These activities included the design of a structured interview protocol that students’ will use to interview male and female STEM researchers. All the interviews will be part of a Podcast sponsored by the network of the involved CUG.

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 pilot implementation.