Abstract:

Currently, there is widespread concern about the relatively small number of students in general, and females in particular, who choose science and technology as fields in which to develop their professional future. In other words, there is a low representation of women both in higher education and in careers related to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) areas. This situation raises an initial problem, which is the low participation of the younger generations of women in current science and technology, and an additional problem related more to economic and gender inequalities as well as social injustice. Notable factors that could be influencing the decisions of women to opt out of STEM fields include stereotypes and biases associated with gender that are transmitted from different areas of society, including the educational sector. In this sense, it is necessary from the standpoint of scientific education to promote critical thinking about these socially relevant and, in many cases even controversial, issues. Here, the proposal is to work in this line, for example, in an effort to project an image of science and technology as useful and beneficial for society; developing female referents in science and technology as current and close as possible, revealing the real contexts where these referents build or construct science, with their failures, their personal and family situations, as well as promoting the linkage of positive emotions to the teaching-learning process in science, avoiding associating it with negative emotions. With this background interest, we are developing a research project that asks whether the textbooks in STEM areas help reduce the problem of the gender gap or whether, on the contrary, they worsen the problem. At the moment in this project, after a thorough documentation phase, we are generating an instrument for the educational analysis of the teaching-learning units of science textbooks in different areas, considering the point of view of the gender perspective they have implicit. In this work, we describe in detail the construction of three of the categories that the instrument comprises: image of science, knowledge of female referents, and emotions involved in the teaching-learning process in science. For each of these categories, different indicators are proposed, which are valued at three mutually exclusive levels. The image of science is broken down into seven indicators, the knowledge of female referents into three indicators, and the emotions involved in the science teaching-learning process into six indicators. In addition to describing these indicators, this work will justify its proposal based on the bibliographic sources available in the literature.

Keywords:

Gender perspective, STEM, textbooks, secondary education, image of science.