The issue of gender bias in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects and careers is a transnational problem recognised by business leaders, higher education and by the European Commission. The issue originates in schools when many girls make critical subject choices that will effectively lock them out from STEM in higher education and employment. This is coupled with the pervasive cultural stereotype of the male scientist or engineer and entrenched parochial attitudes. The gender in-balance in STEM subjects and in employment statistics are transnational concerns which extend to most EU countries, yet these themes do not feature prominently in teacher training while initiatives and resources launched by subject associations, education providers and others often tend to feature a ‘top-down’ approach.This project aims to increase the employment potential of all young Europeans, but especially girls, by improving their interest and engagement in STEM subjects through linking these to a wider awareness of global issues. Our partnership organisations have evidence through their existing work that bringing together STEM and global education often with an additional local dimension results in added motivation for girls and a sustained interest in these key subjects. By working initially with carefully selected pilot schools we will avoid the shortcomings of the ‘top-down’ approach. In addition, practical solutions to some of global challenges and problems on which the target groups will work are best developed internationally if they are to have wider credibility. The project will facilitate much of this work through the development of digital skills and especially through the collaborative authoring of eBooks. This aspect capitalises on existing partner expertise. It enables dissemination to new and developing networks exploring this pedagogy, but most importantly brings with it an inclusive element as young people incorporate their virtually ubiquitous access to mobile technologies into their learning. Our partnership of nine institutions brings together NGOs, universities and secondary schools. Each will contribute their experience of international partnerships, global education, previous STEM activities and cutting edge research into mobile learning to the project, but they also have in common their capacity to innovate and to work collaboratively. Although the partnership has been specially created for this project all the partners have previously worked with at least one other member of the team. The planned activities will initially focus on the work of the universities, NGOs and pilot schools to develop and test a series of bespoke Global STEM Challenges aimed at engaging all pupils, but especially girls, in creating practical solutions to real world global issues. With support from their national partner organisation schools will collect, adapt and produce materials which they feel will support other pupils to take part in a focused STEM challenge. They will trial these with younger (or other) pupils in their own school and in their partner school. A further part of the brief will be for pupils to interview female researchers working on global issues in different countries and to incorporate these video clips in their materials. These outputs will form the nucleus of an online Teacher Toolkit. The pilot schools will also start the process of constructing and testing in-service and pre-service training materials that would help to convince teachers and teacher trainers to adopt these methodologies. The training activities will populate an online Teacher Education Programme to be demonstrated to early adopters through a series of local dissemination sessions and Multiplier Events. All of these activities will be rigorously benchmarked, monitored and evaluated, including pupil evaluations, so providing the partnership with credible data and enabling them to work together on a series of academic papers and presentations, an essential part of the dissemination process. Throughout these activities we will employ a ‘bottom up’ approach with carefully planned involvement of the pilot schools and their staff and pupils. For this reason pupils play a key role at the end of Year 1 in a Joint Pupil Mobility and staff at the end of Year 2 in a Learning Teaching and Training Activity.We envisage significant impact at local, regional, national and international levels. Our project partners, including pilot schools, have committed to incorporating project methodologies and outputs into their existing networks. These not only reach teachers and global educators but also influence policy makers and groups set up specifically to combat gender inequality in STEM. By the end of the project we would also expect each partner to be part of a new network which would be established partly as a result of national dissemination sessions funded through the project and though other dissemination activities.
‘Girls into Global STEM’ (GIGS, www.gigsproject.eu 2016–19) is a response to well documented reluctance of girls to take up STEM subjects in upper secondary education and the consequent impact this has on the gender balance in universities and in STEM-based careers (Milgram, 2011; Dasgupta & Stout, 2014). GIGS draws on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a focus for its activities at school level. It is therefore very much a product of a growing awareness around global issues, especially among young people, made possible by online newsfeeds and social media. The objectives adopted by our project were focused on a bottom-up approach that began with providing our target groups with high quality stimulus materials that could foster problem solving and challenge based methodologies, develop digital skills and combine these with increasing global understanding and positive engagement in science: 1. To increase the employment potential of young Europeans, especially girls, by improving their interest and engagement in STEM linked with wider awareness of global issues and facilitated through digital skills. 2. To support teachers in the embedding of digital skills and global learning methodologies into their STEM teaching. 3. To integrate digital literacy set within a global context into STEM education policy and practice. The GIGS project was coordinated by the University of Hull, each country was represented by either a university or NGO working with a partner secondary school. An additional UK partner was Practical Action. This organisation offers local support for development projects in some of the world’s poorest countries while their education programme helps to bring the challenges these communities face to a school audience in the UK. Practical Action led on the development of key resources - the 'Global STEM Challenges'. Each secondary school was well known to its national partner and brought something different to the partnership. In the UK De Ferrers Academy is a leader in the use of eBooks and mobile technologies in the classroom, important features of the GIGS project. Gimnazjum w Zespole Szkół w Siennicy in Poland has a laboratory and teaching room dedicated to the technologies for generating renewable energy and a good relationship with our other Polish partner, the Centre for Citizenship Education. The Grammar School, Nicosia is a leader in STEM education and robotics, they are also proven partners of CARDET our other Cypriot partner. In Sweden Sandgärdskolan is closely linked to the University of Boras which sends many students there for their teaching practice. In the first year of our project we developed the 'Global STEM Challenges'. These fit into curriculum areas across Europe not only in science but also in geography and citizenship, each one is drawn from one of the Sustainable Development Goals. We demonstrated through our surveys and interviews that these activities have the capacity to inspire all school students and especially girls to find out more about how science and technology can provide practical, often low-cost answers to important global issues. We devised and analysed online surveys for our school students both before and after the practical work. Throughout the challenges the older students, working with younger cohorts, collected video clips, still images and other assets for inclusion in pupil generated eBooks that record their work and contributed to our Teacher Toolkit. We brought together all 32 of the challenge creators for a 5 day workshop in Poland in June 2017 specifically with the aim of finalising their eBooks. We then moved into a phase which saw the development and testing of a number of in-service and pre-service training programmes that can be adapted by schools, training providers or as part of a pre-service course. Each training course draws on the Global STEM Challenges and other resources assembled in an online project toolkit (www.gigstoolkit.com). A Learning, Teaching and Training event in 2018 helped to prepared partners to develop these training outputs, Multiplier Sessions, academic outputs and local training and dissemination events. These training outputs support transformational learning in our immediate target groups and are easily transferred to other sectors. Our overall aim is that teachers should find out how to run their own Global STEM Challenges and potentially be in a position to train others and so disseminate the work of the project. The impact of the project was demonstrated by the responses and attitudinal changes by all school students, especially girls, to the STEM focused activities developed by the project and the theme of gender equality is prominent in dissemination invitations. However the work has also generated interest in terms of its potential for global education more generally and we see these two themes sustaining interest and awareness of the project beyond the contractual period.