Abstract:

While efforts to encourage women to pursue STEM careers are valuable for cultural transformation, they haven't been sufficient for the pedagogical transformation that often perpetuates traditional gender roles. Studies have documented how women in engineering face numerous obstacles in collaborative environments. The problem is exacerbated because professors commonly understand teamwork as any activity carried out by groups of students within an educational context, and therefore believe that exposing students to different collaborative activities with their peers will implicitly lead to the development of teamwork skills. In light of this evidence, several pedagogical approaches with a gender and diversity perspective have been proposed to foster equitable participation within teams. "Engineering and Science: A Shared World" is part of a group of courses offered to all students at the Los Andes University as part of their comprehensive education. Given its focus, the course explicitly addresses transversal skills such as teamwork. The course has two objectives: first, by identifying the specificities of engineering and science as disciplines and their methods, students can analyze and propose multidisciplinary solutions to global problems associated with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Second, students identify the fundamental elements of teamwork competence and use tools to monitor its development throughout the course. The question guiding this research is: what aspects of the power relations established within the hegemonic gender binary are challenged by the implementation of the teamwork pedagogical strategy? To collect the information, the team's contracts developed at the beginning of the project, individual final reflections, and a survey sent to all participants the following semester were used. The data from the course materials did not directly address gender issues, and the survey employed strategies such as anonymity and indirect questions. Through analysis of collected data, we identified that the implemented strategy for teaching teamwork creates tension between two aspects inherent in the hegemonic gender binary: 1. the way work units are formed, shifting from heterosexual pairs to multidisciplinary groups with effective collaboration, and 2. the establishment of roles and functions within work units, transforming from a sexual division of labor to a distribution based on individual abilities. These experiences progressively shape alternative forms of grouping, work, self-esteem, and the value placed on others, modifying traditional power relations and fostering transformations among both female and male engineering students.

Keywords:

Teamwork pedagogical strategy, Gender in STEM, Gender in teamwork.