Neither Schoolgirls nor Schoolboys but STEM Learners: Develop and Evaluate Training Course for Hong Kong Secondary School STEM Teachers to Cultivate Gender Equality in the Learning Environment: Case Study

Abstract

This case study developed and evaluated a 3-week training course that comprised 3 weekly modules pedagogically based on Mezirow’s transformative learning theory for Hong Kong secondary school STEM teachers to reshape their gender-related teaching concepts and practices in 4 STEM teaching aspects influencing female and male students’ expectancy and task value of Eccles’s situated expectancy-value theory and hence STEM achievement motivation to cultivate gender equality in STEM learning environment. Gender equality here did not mean exploiting STEM learning opportunities for male students to put female students at an advantage. It aimed at freeing every STEM learner, regardless of gender, from traditionally stereotypical views on male and female STEM performance and ensuring equal multi-aspect learning access with prolonged teachers’ efforts (Else-Quest et al., 2010). The study purposively sampled 6 male and female first-year STEM teachers at different mainstream co-educational secondary schools to participate and qualitatively leveraged 2-stage semi-structured individual interviews: pre-training interviews on prior gender-related teaching concepts and post-training interviews to gather their voices on 1) whether and how this course reshaped their concepts and 2) practical improvements to support them further (i.e., 2 research questions) where thematic analysis ran. Participant teachers hugely reshaped gender-stereotypical concepts and practices through 3 essential transformative learning phases. It constructed 2 improvements: 1) further transformation of teachers’ previous STEM schooling experiences and 2) reachable access to gender-balanced STEM role models (with QR codes).