What Is Personal Is Political... Right From Day One: Unveiling Gender Inequalities in Group Work

Abstract

Teaching Sociology and Political Science enables us to address gender inequalities as part of the curriculum in disciplines that analyze inequalities and power relations and as a transverse competence to be used in the classroom, turning students into protagonists in the recognition and management of discrimination. In this article, we show how the first day of class can be an ideal moment, within the framework of a subject based on the methodology of project-based learning (PBL), to make the theoretical foundations of the gender perspective visible to students through their own experience. Here we present some techniques that reveal how gender norms are the cause of the unequal distribution of roles which assigns women to the private and reproductive space in the classroom. Based on the hypothesis that group work can prove to be a blind spot from the gender perspective, we take advantage of the potential of the cooperative learning methodology to stimulate critical thinking in students, by providing them with new tools to identify the public nature of gender inequalities.