Abstract:

Equal opportunities must be understood, not as an ethical imperative, but as a necessity, as a facing tool increasing competitiveness. Gender equality promotes academic quality and universities should promote it through their policies. It is important that the university promotes institutional, curricular and educational changes; we mean significant and comprehensive changes that create an academic culture of equality and inclusion (Carrell, Page, & West, 2009). In this vein, we believe that the most important challenge is the change in mindset of both the faculty and the students. However, there are other critical challenges such as those related to education and curriculum content.

The Law 3/2007 of 22 March for effective equality between women and men, establishes the need for education in Higher contained on equal opportunities (Article 25) and also relates to teacher training therefore ordered the integration of the principles of equality in courses and programs for initial and continuing teacher education. The National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA) contains, objectives, in its guidance to support the development of the memory of the new curricula and postgraduate these measures when it states that the general competencies should be defined taking into account the fundamental rights of equal opportunities between men and women, the principles of equal opportunities and universal accessibility for people with disabilities and finally our culture values of peace and democracy. However, these assumptions are raised without further explanation and without any specificity, because what happens in reality is that the curricula are constructed so that only in some cases a generic reference that does not translate into blocks nothing concrete.

We think that the approach to equality should necessarily be considered in the design of the curriculum and should be implemented, subjects that should be studied, without exception, by students of different degrees and especially those of the degree of teacher. If we want schools to be agents of socialization where non-sexist and democratic values are transmitted, and be the fundamental education for gender equality space is vital to work from initial teacher training.

In order to contribute to the advancement of equality and equity, the objective of this experiment was to include equal opportunities mainstreaming in the teaching of Theory and History of Education course at the Faculty of Education University of Alicante.

The methodology used in this research is qualitative. A seven cuestions survey open to 115 students at the beginning of the academic year 2013-2014 was applied. Their own narratives allowed us to know their perceptions of equal opportunities from the perspective of gender and whether they had addressed these skills in a subject.

The results show that students generally have a coherent view on the implications of equality. Thus, from the information collected in the survey and based on the analysis of the various categories, we can say that there is an awareness on part of students and teachers towards equal opportunities from the perspective of gender and the subject has been addressed, surface and timely manner, in different subjects of the race.

Keywords:

Values, equality, equity, gender, initial teacher training.