Promoting Entrepreneurship among Secondary School Girls

Through ICT

Contact

Partners

http://ictgogirls.euinfo@ictgogirls.eu

twitter.com/ictgogirlsfacebook.com/ICTGoGirls

The experts behind this project belong to 7 institutions from 5 European Contries: Galicia Supercomputing Centre (CESGA), Spain - www.cesga.es University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Spain - www.usc.es Die Berater, Austria - www.dieberater.com Społeczna Akademia Nauk, Poland - spoleczna.pl CVO Antwerpen, Belgium - www.cvoantwerpen.be Donau-Universität Krems, Austria - www.donau-uni.ac.at Institut für Arbeitswirtschaft und Organisation, Universität Stuttgart, Germany www.iao.fraunhofer.de

Educational Administrations: Galicia Ministry of Education. Spain Galician Gender Equality Office. Spain Dept of Education and Training of Queensland (Australia)2 Public Secondary Schools from each country: Spain, Austria, Poland, Germany and BelgiumCompanies: IBM SpainAssociations: Galicia Computer Engineers Association. Spain

Associated Partners:

ICT-Go-Girls!ICT ENTREPRENEURSHIP GIRLS + + =

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

ICT-Go-Girls!Entrepreneurship is a crucial skill in today's world, but, when facing gender perspective, research reports show that girls tend to have less motivations in becoming future entrepreneurs. Information and Communication Technologies can provide a flexible and potential motivational environment for empowering these girls in their future choices, their studies and jobs

Recommendations:

Objectives:

Enhance entrepreneurship skills among secondary school girls.

Produce a methodology and learning toolkit for secondary schools to promote ICT and entrepreneurship among their female students.

Improve teachers methodologies to promote entrepreneurship and ICT skills among school girls and deliver them support tools.

Increase ICT skills for educational issues among school girls.

Show the empowerment potential of ICTs to girls in order to face their future choices in studies and work.

Improve the following cross-curricular skills: Initiative, Group work, Language learning.

Encourage cooperation between the worlds of education, training and work.

Activities:

ICT-Go-Girls! Methodology will be formed by the following elements: 1. A virtual training and collaborating environment for teachers and students: all participant schools will be able to access a private virtual environment with communication, collaboration and quality digital tools and resources to work in the schools.

2. A set of educational activities with all necessary resources to implement them, including didactical guides, so teaches can integrate them into their daily practice. These activities will require the collaboration among schools and students, and will be aimed at developing specific skills related with entrepreneurship, ICT, critical thinking, leadership, language learning, etc.

The activities will be addressed to students in the first year of their secondary school education (10 to 13 year old students). Girls will be focused as the main target group for our project (although boys can also participate in the activities).

Some activity types: e-portfolios; so each student can analyze her thinking process on the activities proposed, debates on leadership and female empowerment through ICT, interviews, (videoconferencing and video recording) with ICT female model women, work on projects, simulations (i.e. Create and lead their own virtual/real business) etc.

1 Integrating a gender perspective in materials and training design. Teaching or promotional material should use a gender sensitive language and avoid the representation of stereotypes in pictures, story boards etc. used. This is of utmost importance in order to make the variety of choices visible, especially when it comes to gender as well as a professional sector with deeply rooted stereotypes. It is important to support teachers / trainers with trainings and guidelines on gender sensitive didactics. It has been shown that it is not as much the question of coeducation or not which makes the difference in promoting girls, but rather a self-reflexive, gender sensitive coeducation.

2 Include role models. This approach of girls to get in touch with female role models is widely used with different formats (databases, biographies, meetings with girls...) It is highly important to ensure also an insight for the girls into the personal life of these women. Future family life, motherhood and how to combine this with work, in particular when it comes to a male dominated sector, is of high relevance for the girls and their future choice of career. When designing actions with role models, the principle of “the closer, the better” is helpful in terms of meeting in person, but even more in relation to the age difference between the girls and the women.

3 Participatory design approach Include girls in the development process right from the beginning. This includes also the design of games, platforms etc. In practice, materials are often designed without this perspective, thus missing out the viewpoint of the girls and what is appealing and important to them. This becomes even more urgent if recognizing “gender” as something “in motion”, being constantly renegotiated by the individuals depending on the context and situation.

4 Switching from user to designer In order to promote girls in the use of ICT experience shows that it is very effective to give girls the chance to create themselves things, thus switching from a users role towards being that of an active designer. Here, web 2.0 technologies offer a wide range of possibilities, as they are attractive and easy to use.

5 Plan enough resources for supporting teachers It is highly important to support those responsible to realize the actions – for example, teachers: this includes technical support and maintenance as well as trainings on how to use material – being it tool boxes, training kits, platforms, Web 2.0 technologies etc. In this respect, but also to ensure transfer of knowledge among teachers and to gain a multiplying effect, it is helpful to include activities for teachers to reflect on their learning and experiences, for example in building up communities. Supporting teachers touches also the question of taking seriously the time and effort needed to engage in something new. Here, the official recognizing of training activities in the framework of obligatory teacher continuing education is one way to support, another one could be to integrate activities into school activities like project weeks, school clubs or, if possible, into the curriculum.

ICT-Go-Girls is a 2-year Comenius Multilateral Project, co-financed by the European Commission, under LLP program. The project is coordinated by Galicia Supercomputing Centre, in Spain. Its main goal is to:

empower secondary school girls with the knowledge, skills and values to help them be able to create future opportunities for innovation and quality ICT related employment.

We intend to show the attractiveness and potential of ICT as a tool for innovation and development in most productive sectors and reduce the gender gap in ICT related jobs.

Our goal is to develop an innovative methodological proposal that can be transfered to European schools through educational activities in secondary schools, quality educational resources as well as tutoring and counselling to teachers in order to integrate this goal in the curriculum.

Through our partner's network we collected information on over 30 projects in Europe and overseas aiming at the promotion of girls in the field of ICT and entrepreneurship education in secondary education. We reviewed their objectives, design of actions, methodological approaches, materials developed, outcomes achieved and factors leading to or impeding success. Combining this review with outcomes from research in gender studies, we formulated recommendations for the successful design of actions. These are some of them: