Colourful Children 
This page contains documentation and reflections from the Portuguese teachers at school 2 about activity 1.
Ikon för Verifierad av gruppen

Answers to the questions about Gender Equality

1)Work to promote in children capacities and competencies that will prevent choices based on gender stereotypes?

Issues related to gender equality enter the life of the preschool brought by children and are a part of their daily lives.

It isn’t easy to approach these issues due to its complexity and other factors such as lack of training for Preschool teachers in this area, lack of resources and bibliography. Besides, according to the curriculum orientations for Preschool education in Portugal (ME, 2016), these contents are integrated in the fundamental area of personal and social education. The fact that this area is transversal to all areas doesn’t favour the educational intentionality, which is important to all levels of education and even more in the education of young children. To begin with, the Preschool teacher has to pay attention to what children say and suggest and simultaneously question what might condition their choices and behaviours. This is the starting point for the organization of an integrating educational environment. The discussion of different ideas is a fundamental strategy and the preschool teacher has a nuclear role, moderating, stimulating, orienting, supporting the presentation of different points of view and giving every child space to participate.

Work to promote in children capacities and competencies that will prevent choices based on gender stereotypes should then focus on every aspect of life in the Preschool:

Educational Environment:

  • Which areas of activities exist in the room? Why? With which purpose?
  • What are they called, how are they organized, and which materials/equipment do they integrate?

The majority of rooms in preschool is organized in different areas of activity. The observation of how it works and how the preschool teacher intervenes are aspects that the teacher should reflect about to avoid the existence of areas that are more destined to girls or to boys and to avoid limiting areas of activity according to his/her own stereotypes.

Choice of materials:

  • Considering there are lots of materials that are left over from previous years or that children bring from home, and consequently cannot be selected carefully by the teacher, these material can be a starting point to an interesting reflection and the search for alternative solutions
  • Books and films can also be the starting point to reflect on the roles attributed to men and women; Create and use grids of analyses to evaluate pictures and texts of books in order to understand which roles are attributed to each gender. The preschool teacher should do this analysis with the children, and this can be the basis for project work such as deconstruction and reconstruction of stories and organization of new books.

Introducing different ways of working in what concerns roles attributed to both genders:

  • Presenting situations that are more equalitarian and which allow children to work different situations related to their everyday life.
  • Using stereotyped situations presented by children as a starting point to work with the children.
  • Allowing the opportunity of reconstructing and recreating, making new rules or even starting the construction of new and more equalitarian games, books and materials;
  • Involving families in the different activities and projects
  • Questions that the teacher can work on with father and mother
    • Discussing the high rate of traffic accidents, mainly involving boys, and a higher tendency of boys leaving school earlier
    • Discussing the triple workday of women (mothers, professional workers and household managers) and the damages it can bring to their mental and physical health (sleeping less hours, for example)
    • Discussing gender inequality
    • Discussing gender violence. We can discuss domestic violence, which in Portugal is the first cause of death of young adult women or even violence in relationships due to its importance (power inequality in intimate relationships)

The pertinence of discussing these issues in groups of fathers and mothers should emphasize the negative impact of gender stereotypes, not only in children’s development but also in the life of adults, men and women, who tend to contest gender stereotypes but have never really been helped to deal critically with them, looking for alternatives of behaviour more suitable with values like equality, sharing and mutual respect.

In conclusion, the project to develop gender equality in preschool integrates necessarily three levels of action

    • Pedagogical area, which includes work practice developed by preschool teachers with children
    • School area, which includes work with families and community
    • Professional area, which includes continuous professional training/ self-training, both for teachers and auxiliary staff who collaborates with teachers.
X