Abstract:

Universities can be understood as actors of change to reach gender equality. This can be reached through the education they provide, by educating students on gender equity, teaching curricula with a gender dimension and providing equal opportunities for men and women. One of the pillars to reach this goal is the awareness and expertise of the teaching staff in including the gender dimension in the curricula. To this aim, the number of seminars and trainings that national universities are offering to their teaching staff regarding gender dimension in teaching has substantially increased in recent years. These courses are often organised according to the activities defined in the Equality Plan of the organising institution.

The aim of such courses is the training of the teaching staff by providing them with:
(1) the fundamentals of a teaching with a gender dimension,
(2) some specific instructions,
(3) examples and
(4) warnings.

However, it is rarely often recognized that such courses also represent an opportunity for the trainers, who can gain know how from sharing activities and experiences with the participants.

The presented work is a compendium of the learnings obtained from the 7 courses provided to 7 different national universities all along 2021. The number of participants is greater than 140 teachers, from different areas from very diverse fields. Almost 100 of them participated in teacher trainings, what means that more than one session was devoted to gender in curricula and, thus, a deeper feedback from the participants could be obtained. Indeed, the analysed instruments include an initial Kahoot concerning their personal experiences in their teaching, a review of gender related activities with students, the identification of gender stereotypes for different degrees/fields and revised teaching guides. These gathered evidences include quantitative and qualitative indicators, that have been analysed segregated by sex and by the field of knowledge. Significant differences are observed among the diverse fields of knowledge, being the teachers within the fields of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) the ones that require more guidance and support along the conceptual change that represents including gender dimension in an apparently gender-blinded field. Once teachers are aware of what implies introducing gender dimension in their teaching, and they become well experienced teachers in it with enriched gender activities within their subjects, the step that represents the greater resistance is to explicitly indicate this gender dimension all along their teaching guide.

All the results presented in this work can be useful for trainers in defining new gender in teaching courses and, also, can be useful to any teacher that has basic knowledge of gender dimension in teaching but still needs some guidance to feel comfortable with it in his or her teaching activities.

Keywords:

Training, Gender, Curricula, Resistances.