3) It is important in every situation to work with educational intention in what concerns gender equality so that every child can develop more equalitarian practices.

To develop systematic work, it is important to:

a)Establish a plan-which involves a sequence of steps that will enable questioning and achieve the pre-established goals;

b)Flexiblemoments of discussion-those moments cannot be planned rigorously because many times they start from situations from the school’s daily life. Teachers should take advantage of every opportunity to address these topics (behaviour, situation, book, pictures can be the starting point for a dialogue/ debate). According to the socio-constructive perspective, the strategy of discussion should involve the promotion of the group’s interaction in order to keep the children mentally active in the learning process.

c)Acquire didactic ability -there is the need to know how to mediate a discussion, ask questions, evaluate, overcome resistance in order to manage a more organized and formal discussion in strategic terms or even a spontaneous dialogue on the topic (less formal as it is a dialogue on the spur of the moment);

d)Create a group of discussion-it allows us to work with the children the questions, problems, controversies related to gender, which will be discussed by everyone during a certain period of time, or until a solution or answer is found. A basic principle of this strategy is to promote the participation of all children, listening to their opinions or suggestions. There is no imperative necessity of consensus which implies an effort not to have leadership that controls or imposes a certain point of view. Nevertheless, it is important that children realize that the equal participation of every child is promoted: for example, in the planning of group work, in terms of decision making or to overcome problems the group faces. In the development of strategies of clarification of values and changing attitudes, we assume that people can be induced to change their attitude towards a certain reality through the presentation of new information about certain characteristics or qualities that help in their understanding.

e)Brainstorming or creative discussion-it is a way of stimulating and generating new ideas (based on the commitment of teacher and children working as a team.) We establish a rule that anyone can produce ideas about the initial topic, being also essential the listing of those ideas. These ideas will be evaluated and redirected (through the participation of everyone) to gender equality and democratic citizenship with the possibility of using these ideas as the basis of projects on these topics.

f)Evaluation/ educational reflection-that will evaluate the children’s behaviour. There are no right answers: its (in)adequacy depends on the context and the specificity of each reality. Nevertheless, it is essential that the teacher intervenes when necessary and is attentive. Listening to children, questioning them and inducing them to question their reasons, confronting them with different points of view are ways of acting in face of situations that every preschool professional applies.

Objectives/ aims in the Portuguese Curriculum Orientations

The objectives for gender equality are defined in the Curriculum Orientations for Preschool education (Ministério da Educação, 2016), integrated in the area of personal and social formation.

Objectives for the Preschool teacher:

• Enlighten discriminatory stereotypes, questioning situations that occur in the life of the group;
• Reflect about their attitudes, materials, resources, strategies and activities
• Support the construction of each child’s identity and self-esteem
• Recognize each child’s singular characteristics
• Respect and values each child’s and his/ her family’ culture (page 34)
• Promote a democratic living context in which children have a right to participate and in which gender, social, physical, cognitive, religious and ethnic differences are accepted in an equity perspective in an educational process that will contribute to increase equal opportunities for women and men, for people with different social backgrounds with different abilities and from different ethnic groups
• Promote gender equality to educate towards citizenship and build a real democracy
• Deal with the differences without transforming them in inequalities
• Develop an intentional action that will lead to effective equal opportunities for boys and girls in the socialization process experienced in the preschool (page 39).

Objectives for the children

• Contribute to the design of the rules for the group, recognize the reason why they have and need rules, and try to follow those rules
• Be able to progressively solve conflicts in an autonomous way, through dialogue
• Listen, question, discuss different opinions and perspectives trying to negotiate solutions or conclusions
• Demonstratesupportive behaviour and helping others (self-initiative or when asked to do so)
• Recognize the diversity of habits and characteristics of other people and groups, showing respect towards children and adults, independently of physical, gender, ethnic, cultural, religious or other differences
• Recognize that the differences contribute to enrich life in society, identifying those contributions in daily situations
• Accept that boys and girls and boys, men and women can do the same things in the household and in society
• Identify in their social context (group, community) some forms of injustice or discrimination (ethnic, gender, social or other types of discrimination), proposing or recognizing ways of solving or minimizing those situations (page 40)

NORMS AND VALUES

During many years, contrary to what happened to other professions, being a preschool teacher was not accessible to men. Only in the last few years have we seen men entering the profession. The existence of more male teacher in preschools is fundamental to promote gender equality in the work with children.

In this line of thought, it is important to reflect on the contribution each educational agent gives to overcome obstacles we can find in preschools.

How open is the school to the existence of male preschool teachers? How are they integrated? How does the institutional space promote equalitarian practices? How does the school welcome families? What is the attention given to gender equality in the training of auxiliary staff?

The auxiliary staff assumes a fundamental role in preschools when it comes the interaction with children and transmitting and clarifying values. Therefore, their work should be consensual with the work of the teacher, mainly in terms of personal and social formation and education for citizenship, avoiding disparities when it comes to communicative, behavioural and attitudinal contents.

In terms of educational organization, sometimes preschools organize work in smaller groups in a way it reinforces differencing between boys and girls and we all need to rethink this way of working. In order to do so, it is important to reflect about expectations of both genders, namely understand which characteristics the teacher associates to the good student, girl and boy, and verify if they are coincident. The idea of a good student, male, is frequently different in terms of discipline and social performance from the female. This excessive differentiation in schools induces differentiated patterns of behaviour that end up affecting performance at school.

If on the one hand there is more tolerance to indiscipline when it comes to boys, on the other hand this excessive tolerance ends up damaging their school integration and not preparing them adequately to be more perseverant and attentive to their school performance. It can also make them less sensitive and less attentive to the established rules, thus impacting negatively in learning to respect authority. In some cases, girls are given the task of helping to maintain discipline in the group, being the teacher more demanding in terms of their behaviour.

It is important an attentive attitude of the teacher to how girls and boys organize themselves in the classroom or in the playground and to how they solve conflicts and assume leadership. The intervention of the teacher is essential to reflect with the children on the reasons for the observed differences and to determine to what extent they are reinforced or induce excessively differentiated educational practices.

Listening and intervening accordingly is essential to promote questioning of the different situations/ opinions that occur.

To support a more intervening attitude and the construction of values, we can consider the contribution of Children’s Philosophy. The questions that connect citizenship and gender correlate easily with philosophic subjects, such as politic philosophy, action philosophy, axiology, ethics and aesthetics.

The pedagogical reflection around these questions must be addressed in a wider context of a philosophical reflection which, in its purest and original sense, should start at an early age. When we speak about complying with rules and building values, it’s necessary to implement an evaluation process. We can talk about two different levels of evaluation that complete each other: (self)evaluation of the teacher and (self)evaluation of the children. How the teacher works and processes evaluation is a fundamental strategy to the evolution of his/her own work and can promote reflection, also by the children, on attitudes, behaviour and learning experiences.

Most contexts give pretexts to evaluate children’s representations of gender roles: plots, characterization and description of relationships between the characters of children’s books, films or TV programmes, drawings and narratives of the children, advertisements, toys, etc. Besides the situations that occur naturally, the works done by the children can also be a pretext for the teacher’s intervention on the way children represent differences and roles attributed to men or women.

These works allow for better knowledge of the group and can also be used to understand better children’s gender representations or even to question those representations.