Project Mission

The project will engage the girls’ teams in 3 major challenges:

HOW WE FEEL SCIENCE
– create a more authentic understanding of science and gender in early schooling through engaging teenage girls as co-creators of this understanding, through telling the personal and collective and gender-sensitive stories about science education and about the image of science in society

SCIENCE IN REAL-LIFE
– engage the participating girls and their support teachers in real-life and real-time science and research experience in collaboration with the local community, including interacting with female role-models in science and research

VISIONS OF EARLY SCIENCE ENGAGEMENT
– invite the girls to co-create scenarios of new ways of science learning in school that will appear attractive and relevant to teenage girls and their emerging gender identities

The project’s work programme is based on and follows these 3 challenges.

The authenticity and relevance of the results of these efforts is depending on the direct and uncompromised involvement of the girls’ teams along the entire project duration. The teenage girls will be co-drivers of new visions for what science learning could be in early schooling.

Girls are more sensitive to poor teaching than boys. They require teaching of excellence, otherwise they quickly lose interest. The girls feel the need to address the topics contextualized. Girls often derive more benefit from “the whole picture” than from isolated facts.

Often, teachers inadvertently embody negative attitudes towards girls. When a girl gets good results, it is said that she works hard. When a boy gets good results, it is said that he is intelligent. This needs to be changed. Teachers at the school need to be involved in the project to create joint initiatives with girls, which also take teachers’ opinions into consideration.