Newswise — Jackie Spears made two particular observations while teaching an education course on nonsexist teaching.
Spears, an associate professor of secondary education at Kansas State University, noticed that although the course drew in-service teachers at all levels, from preschool to community college, there were hardly any math or science teachers. She also noticed that many of her students reacted defensively during discussions of research demonstrating that many teachers treat boys and girls differently.
"The way the faculty talk about these issues created a lot of anxiety in teachers to the point that they'd shut down and quit talking about the issues," Spears said. "Teachers intend to teach all children equally, so to see research that says they don't is really frightening to them. I became interested in finding ways to talk about the issue so that the teachers would open up instead of shut down."
When she directed K-State's women's studies program, Spears and colleagues from the College of Engineering and the Division of Biology developed a workshop to support sixth- and seventh-grade girls interested in science. Spears, who now heads K-State's Center for Science Education, has bachelor's and master's degrees in physics. She began her study in the 1960s, a time, she said, when women's roles in the sciences were undervalued.
"I ended up experiencing a huge amount of discrimination and bias," she said. "But when you're living it, you try to ignore it. It was a common way of coping in those days."
Realizing that women still are underrepresented in the sciences, Spears said her colleagues in engineering and the sciences urged her to offer a course on gender bias specific to teachers in the STEM disciplines -- science, technology, engineering and mathematics. With support from a National Science Foundation grant, Spears taught such a course to science and math teachers in groups of 10 to 15.
"The more I did, the more I realized that teaching 10 or 15 teachers at a time, we weren't going to make much of a difference," Spears said.
So Spears created an interactive program, "Seeing Gender," available on CD. The program lets teachers move through various modules, including video clips and articles, at their own pace. The program can be downloaded free at http://www.eac.org
"Seeing Gender" builds on research that shows that many teachers treat male and female students differently. Spears said that when she was a high school physics teacher she probably did, too, without realizing it.
"Most of what we do is the result of gender schema created when we were very young -- patterns of behavior and expectations that operate out of our unconscious," Spears said. "But if we look at it, we can make the unconscious conscious."
One way that teachers treat boys and girls differently, she said, is through short-circuiting. When a student asks for help, a teacher may be more likely to talk a male student through a problem but take over a task for a female student. Spears said that an observation by one of her education students pointed out that in a computer class, for instance, girls were more likely to take their hands away from the mouse and keyboard in anticipation of a teacher's help whereas boys keep their hands on the equipment.
"The girls are helping to create an opportunity for that short circuit to happen," Spears said.
Gender differences can become even more pronounced in a laboratory setting, she said. Research suggests that girls prefer to observe longer before beginning an experiment, but boys often are quick to get their hands on the equipment, not only setting the pace for the class but also getting more hands-on time in the laboratory. Such differences may seem slight, but they do make a difference, Spears said.
"What's a small difference one year can mean a big difference when the patterns are repeated year after year," she said.
Spears said that it's important for teachers to recognize gender differences so that they can employ teaching methods that create equal opportunities for boys and girls to succeed in the classroom. That could mean assigning specific tasks to each member of a laboratory team or creating all-girl lab teams.
Spears said she'd hoped to come up with many more discipline-specific strategies, but because math, technology, science and engineering are so different, there's no simple answer.
"It's hard to get down to specialized classroom changes. It's hard to give a boilerplate solution," she said. "I think the real value of the CD is its capacity to help people open up to the issue. My hope is that if I tell enough stories, teachers will change."
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