Encouraging a Gender Perspective in Science Education: A Learning Experience for Pre-Service Early Childhood Education Teachers

Abstract

Gender bias in science should be made visible to the pre-service teachers and those pre-service teachers should be given tools to implicitly counter that gender bias. One way to do this may be by simply including more female scientists together with male scientists in the teaching approaches, rather than the norm of predominantly including males. This work describes and evaluates a learning experience in which the aim was to encourage pre-service early childhood education teachers to consider aspects of gender in science education and to begin acquiring the skills needed to design teaching strategies that promote these aspects. Participants were 56 pre-service teachers whose task was to design workshops on science topics in which women scientists have made key contributions. At the outset, some of the participants showed little inclination to consider aspects of gender in the science classroom, and others did not contemplate that science and gender could be addressed in an integrated way. It was also apparent that the pre-service teachers lacked the skills needed to design activities that encompassed both scientific content and aspects of gender. Overall, the subsequent learning experience appears to have had a positive impact, although we suggest certain refinements that could lead to more satisfactory outcomes.