Our project : Tackling stereotypes at school
The main goals of the European Erasmus + programme are to improve the youth's training and make easier the entry in labour market. The challenge is to reduce the early leaving from vocational and
educational training to less than 10% in 2020 in Europe.
The school partnerships funded by the European Union should enable to create inovative teaching practice by helping teachers from different countries to exchange about their experiences and work
together.
Our project is called " Gender Stereotypes and career choices " and brings together three schools from Montaigu (France), Piazzola sul Brenta (Italy) and Koszalin (Poland). Its main goal is to
fight against stereotypes about jobs and gender. Indeed, most of the young people consider that there are jobs for men and jobs for women. Therefore, when they have to choose their vocationnal
specialities, they are guided by these mass clichés, and they don't wonder if the job they have chosen is interesting for themselves, well-paid and guarantees a social advancement. Finally, men
reach high positions and women get part-time, low-paid and poor quality jobs.
Our project should also fight against bad school results, especially for male pupils who often think that they must be rebels and use strength or violence to prove their value. This behaviour is
another effect of gender stereotypes and leads many boys to a difficult scholarship.
During our three-year project, about 40 teachers from the three countries will work together and share their professional practices to create a toolbox of inovative teaching methods to help
pupils to realize and identify the stereotypes which guide their way of thinking. It should lead them to make informed choices of their future job and to give up risk behaviour which might harm
their school performance.
The toolbox that we will build will be tested with the pupils of our schools involved in our project. It will be online on a dedicated website for all the teachers. In a medium term we hope to
observe a better balance between girls' and boys' choices in our schools' different educational paths.
24 pupils from each school will also make a journey for a week in a partner's town : Koszalin in april 2016, Piazzola sul Brenta in 2017 and Montaigu in 2018. Indeed the Erasmus+ programme aims to develop taste of mobility, the feeling of European citizenship, the knowledge of foreign languages and cultures.