Gender sensitive teaching and counselling in vocational education

The GERI Project is pleased to have been the UK Partner in the LEONARDO VISIBLE European Project which has produced a Guide Book of Gender Good Practice.  You can download the Guidebook free from this website. 

The Guide book is introduced below by Sirkka Perttu, Project Manager , Helsinki 2008:

This guidebook “Making Visible: Good practice in gender sensitive teaching and counselling in vocational education” is a result of the VISIBLE project, which was a transnational networks project of the Leonardo da Vinci Community Vocational Training Action Programme. It evaluated and summarized all of the relevant national and international projects on gender sensitive teaching and counselling in all of the participating countries, as well as at European level in general, and makes recommendations for future actions.

Within European funded projects in past years, a lot of effort has been put into encouraging women in particular to choose non traditional careers. Still, girls and boys continue to take educational and career paths ‘typical’ for their gender, particularly in countries where the rate of participation of women in the labour market has been traditionally high. The education system plays an important role in fostering ideas about gender that often result from unconscious ways of dealing with female and male students. There is still a need to find innovative methods and practical mechanisms for developing a systematic way to include gender aspects in the everyday work of teachers, as well as a need to raise the awareness of education policy makers in order to include coverage of gender sensitive approaches within the curriculum for teacher/counsellor training.

The aims of the VISIBLE project were to get a general picture of the state of gender sensitive teaching and counselling in vocational education in each participating country, to identify promising practices and pedagogical methods of gender sensitive teaching and counselling, and to make recommendations for future actions such as the development of research and training programmes and materials.

The VISIBLE project was co-ordinated by the University of Helsinki, Palmenia Centre for Continuing Education, Finland and the Project Manager was Sirkka Perttu. The partners were Aristotle University of Thessaloniki School of Psychology, Greece; GERI/Gender Equality Race Inclusion, United Kingdom; Folkuniversitetet, Sweden; BEST - Institut für berufsbezogene Weiterbildung und Personaltraining GmbH, Austria; KTP Association for Qualification at the Labour Market, Czech Republic; University of Latvia Gender Studies Centre, Latvia; Papilot Institution for Enhancing and Developing of Quality of the Life, Slovenia; Vytautas Magnus University Social Research Center, Lithuania; Helsinki City College of Technology, Finland; 3rd Technical & Vocational School of Stavropoulos, Greece and Roskilde Technical College, Denmark.

The guidebook includes a short review of the general gender situation and the gender (specific) situation in vocational education and training and the labour market in the participating partners’ countries, national incentives and regulations, an introduction to the theory of gender sensitive teaching and careers counselling, and good practice case studies from the partner countries. The guidebook is available on the websites of the VISIBLE partners. We hope that this guidebook will provide you with ideas for future actions you can take to promote gender sensitive teaching and counselling in vocational education.

Sirkka Perttu, Project Manager , Helsinki 2008.

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