On a bus, students leaned back in their seats trying to rest. Some listened to music and looked at the mobile screen, others talked in small groups. He had made a dent in the natural fatigue of any excursion, the fatigue of several days away from home together with the joy of having had a good time.
Lola Alberdi Caussethen professor of Geography and History and director of Public Institute of Compulsory Secondary Education (IESO) Sierra la MestaI was talking with several students of the second year of ESO.
—Well, girls, what are you going to do this weekend?, asks Alberdi.
—Profe, this weekend we have a party at Marisa’s (fictitious name) house. Her parents are not here…, answers a student.
-But how? You still have energy left for parties! I’m exhausted! And who are you going to go? Alberdi is surprised.
—All the friends will go!, answers another student.
—At the last minute, surely Yoli (fictitious name) is missing, her boyfriend has her super controlled…, a third regrets.
“Hey, my boyfriend controls me normally!” Yoli bursts out, visibly angry.
The dialogue set off all the alarms. Astonishment paralyzed the teacher. How could a teenage girl miss a party with her best friends to avoid the anger of her boyfriend? What exactly did she mean by the phrase “my boyfriend controls me normally?”, she questioned herself. Something wasn’t working.
So, she got to work, and decided to design a critical inquiry learning sequence, taking advantage of the participation of her students in a program, recently started at the institute, called challenge 2.0.
Dependent on partner
He Sierra la Mesta institute, which is located in the rural environment of the municipality of Santa Amalia, in Badajoz, educates students with very heterogeneous cultural references and academic aspirations. The educational team had become aware of this singularity and looked for alternatives to the routine of enclosing the curriculum in a textbook. This is what the Desafío 2.0 program, awarded with the Joaquín Sama Award for Educational Innovation in 2017by addressing research topics connected to the interests of students.
One in three young women considers it acceptable for their partner to control them
This curricular enrichment initiative, in which students interested in deepening certain learning took part, was developed in the afternoon and in a on-line. It had the dedication, also voluntary, of a team of teachers that other ways of teaching and learning were proposed, aimed at promoting rigorous and creative study in students and teachers, and that they used the methodology of research projects and problem solving, in cooperative groups.
On this occasion, the thematic core of the challenge was going to be different: they would take advantage of the initial dialogue and ask the students the question “do you think you live in a macho environment?”.
Thus, in the 2015-2016 academic year, Alberdi designed this educational project In collaboration with Luis Antonio Lopez Risco, math teacher. They want students to investigate, inform themselves and become aware of sexist behaviors, barely or not at all reflected on, considered “natural” in their environment. They try to break —from an educational point of view— with the “androcentric representation of social reproduction that, traditionally, has invested authority in the socio-sexual power exercised by the normative model of the human (male) in the family and domestic environment” ( What does the latest Report on fatalities from gender violence say?).
The director of the ANAR Foundation, Diana Díaz, elaborates on the relevance of this task by warning the presence among adolescents of expressions such as “for him, trust is that he shows him the mobile phone; I understand it because he is very afraid of losing me ”. At the same time, the official figures of the moment warned that one in three young women considers it acceptable for a partner to control her.
At first, the project was very simple. A sequence of inquiry, reflection, elaboration and application of a survey on macho manifestations in their environment. The work culminated in a small report, with a summary of data, graphs, interpretations and an evaluative conclusion.
But the project does not end in this first essay. It gives way to another much more relevant educational experience that incorporates the entire institute. Two courses later, in 2017-18, the students of the initial conversation have matured their ideas about relationships, to the point of taking the initiative. They organize themselves, ask their teachers for help and design and deploy a campaign against machismo. “The rest of the students had to open their eyes as they had done before themselves”, says Alberdi.
For him, trust is to show him the mobile. I understand it because he is very afraid of losing me
A teenager, about her boyfriend
The campaign of March 8 of 2018 was a complete success. The girls replicated the activities they had done in the initial project, but went further: they designed their own activities, giving them their personal stamp.
Alberdi was impressed, and decided to give the experience a didactic form and transform it into a open educational resource (OER), accessible to all teachers. Thus, in the 2018-2019 academic year, he published the sequence “My boyfriend controls me normally” in the repository of National Center for Curriculum Development in Non-Proprietary Systems of the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training.
Gender equality
The experience is transferred, then, to a professional resource that alternates investigative practice and collective dialogue on gender equality. The users use a personal diary as a didactic tool where they write down the concerns, interpretations and proposals for progress, not only rational, but also emotional and behavioral ones that arose during the course of the didactic sequence.
In it introductory text formulates this statement: “We will look around us to see how people behave and we will check whether or not there is macho behavior in the people we know. We will analyze the media, some movies, music and other aspects of our daily lives. We will carry out an investigation on the subject to finally conceive an action that contributes to improve the world”.
It is not easy to admit to being macho, but when diving inside they get some surprise
“Before we start, let’s jump!”, the sequence begins, and some topics are raised about the appropriateness of certain tasks and behaviors culturally assigned to men and women, such as: “Women are more capable than men to take care of babies”, “women are very emotional so their emotions always end up controlling their lives”, “men, on the other hand, are more rational than women”, etc. Each student agrees or disagrees, jumping to the left or right. Later, they discuss the various options stated and write down the considerations. At the end, they write their reflections in their learning journal (one individual and one collective).
It is not easy to admit to being macho, but when diving inside, the students get some surprises. This is the starting premise that they submit to individual and collective reflection. They are shown the next dialogue between Yoli and Víctor, her boyfriend (fictitious names), and Yoli with her friends, about a weekend outing.
After answering a questionnaire, which provokes a debate, they reflect on the dominant ideas about love and friendship. “What do you think of Yolanda’s friends? Do they want Yolanda to go out and go back to the way she was before she started dating Víctor? Do Pablo and Rubén want to flirt with Yolanda? Is it normal for Víctor to feel bad and Ask Yolanda to stop dating them? Should Yolanda be more careful and take care of the relationship if she really loves him?” they ask each other.
Then, they analyze some videos to reflect on the validity of behaviors considered normal among adolescents and that generate a high impact. The stereotyped image of women (“do things like a girl”), or micromachismos (which They are there, even if we don’t want to see them.). They are discussed, following a thinking routinewith which to question the mental and discursive schemes of the androcentric model, which result from the uncritical assimilation of asymmetric power relations.
Is it normal for Víctor to feel bad and ask Yolanda to stop going out with them?
So, having established a conceptual framework on machismo, they organize themselves into cooperative teams to investigate their environment. They use the scientific method to develop a justified and rational response. They start from a previous hypothesis (my environment is macho, or it is not) that they must accept or refute, collecting information from other similar experiences. They select the target population, prepare a survey —dichotomous for the youngest and Likert scale for the oldest— in a form on-line, they send it by email and insert it in the class blog; in the end they make a report of results and conclusions.
“Move and change the world!” they say. The world changes by example. It is important to end the project with an action that involves the center and the environment, just as the students did on March 8. They collectively think about how to deploy an awareness campaign in the institute and in the neighbourhood, remembering previous actions.
Diffusion
The educational value of an awareness project increases when it is designed as an open resource, free to use by teaching professionals. For this purpose, it is incorporated into several public repositories: the CEDECthe publications website of the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training and the platform eScholarium of the Junta de Extremadura.
It is difficult to keep track of a resource published in the open and on platforms without a user profile. However, we have evidence of its use in institutes such as Las Lagunas de Mijas (Málaga), Marqués de Santillana de Colmenar Viejo (Madrid), Mercedes Labrador from Fuengirola (Malaga), among others. Also in the Rafelbunyol Town Hall (Valencia), specifically in 12 courses of first and second ESO. It was selected as a reference in the Training Course of open educational resources organized by the Teachers’ Center of Palma de Mallorca.
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