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Gender and Philosophy: Developing learning and teaching practices to include underrepresented groups
Start date: Dec 31, 2015, End date: Dec 30, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Gender and Philosophy: Developing learning and teaching practices to include underrepresented groups (GaP) The underrepresentation of women and ethnic minorities in academic philosophy is a widely recognized fact in the Western world. The discipline has low rates of female students and especially low rates of female high level professionals (mostly less than 20%) even in the Nordic countries, known for a high level of gender equality. The current situation compromises the equal availability and accessibility of higher education, hinders the development of potential intellectual resources, and weakens the quality of higher education and its outcomes. The lack of women and minorities hampers the discipline of philosophy, which is distorted when the cultural and social experiences of the underrepresented groups are excluded. The underrepresentation of women and other minority groups has many reasons. Social and historical factors interact with methodological reasons, which are internal to the discipline of philosophy. The strategic partnership network “Gender and Philosophy” will approach the challenge of underrepresentation by focusing on methodological, pedagogical and didactic strategies in philosophy. By combining insights provided by problem based learning (PBL) and feminist philosophy and pedagogics, the network will develop teaching and learning practices that are able to address a growingly diversified student body. The project has the goal of enriching and transforming the teaching and learning of philosophy in general. In addition, the approaches taught aim at offering students of philosophy tools that strengthen their critical and creative thinking. The participants include four Northern European universities with strong research records in high quality feminist philosophy as well as a strong tradition of equality in higher education: University of Iceland, University of Jyväskylä, University of Aalborg and University of Oslo. The consortium creates synergies in innovative teaching and curricula development of feminist philosophy and enhances and deepens the potential of philosophy to tackle current problems and issues. The network will develop, implement and evaluate pedagogical methods by organizing four five-day summers schools with pilot character, one at each participant university. The emphasis is on new philosophical pedagogics, didactics and methodologies through which topical issues are addressed, thus enhancing the analytical and practical potential of philosophy. The schools are targeted for philosophy graduate students. The outcome of the summer schools development work and the insights of the network will be developed into a Teacher’s Manual “Strategies of Inclusion in Philosophy Teaching". The handbook will be published electronically, the access to it will be open and free of charge and it will be distributed widely through the publishing events, professional networks of the participants and social media. Ultimately, the innovative practices developed by the network will be implemented in the Joint Nordic Master´s Program in Feminist Philosophy that is now being prepared by the strategic network. In addition to European academic philosophy and its gender and minority imbalance, the new methodologies and awareness of the connections between gender inclusion and methodological issues will have an effect on pre-university philosophy teaching by being included in high school teacher education. The results of the project will also be of use for didactics within other disciplines that deal with gender and minority imbalance.
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