WeSTEAM – Empowering women in STEM through Art Thinking
Despite the great efforts made in EU policies and projects and in policies and projects at national and local level, the participation of women in STEM is still unsatisfactory. Gender inequality is particularly evident in the IT sector, where only 20% of graduates and 18% of IT specialists are women.
The WeSTEAM (Science, Technology, Arts, Engineering, Math) approach promotes transversal and transversal skills, collaboration with non-academic partners and responds to economic, environmental, political and social challenges.
It can complement the technical and scientific curricula with key competencies that can improve leadership and promote the development of future female leaders also in the IT sector.
WeSTEAM aims at developing, testing and disseminating a methodology based on the STEAM approach to enhance the Art Thinking skills of female students engaged in STEM careers in order to:
Empower women STEM students for increasing their chances of employment in high-Level positions in the ICT labour market once they graduate.
Increase the attractiveness of STEM courses for women.
The specific objectives of the WeSTEAM project are:
Design and disseminate a reference framework for assessing women STEM students’ Art Thinking capacity. This will allow students to gain awareness of the skills they need to enhance in order to complement their curricula according to a STEAM approach.
Design and disseminate a training methodology to be used by STEM teachers in their teaching activities or by students themselves to enhance, through a set of training tools, their Art Thinking capacity.
Design and disseminate a VR -based educational game for enhancing art thinking capacity in women STEM students in an interactive and attractive way.
Create a certification system, in line with national and EU qualification frameworks, for recognition and certification of Art Thinking skills. This will allow women STEM students to prove their skills and communicate them when applying for further learning or jobs across Europe.
Partners:
Coordinator: Luleå University of Technology (Sweden)
Project partners:
Ars Electronica (Austria)
Changemaker Educations (Sweden)
Espronceda (Spain)
Sineglossa (Italy)
Details
WeSTEAM is an Erasmus+ project co-financed by the EU and Swedish Council for Higher Education.
Project Period: January 2022 – January 2024
Project number: 2021-1-SE01-KA220-HED-000032118
Funding: EUR 229,831
Programme: Erasmus+
Key Action: Partnership for collaboration within Colleges and Universities
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