Technology education for all genders

Technology education for all genders

On November 5th 2019 CHANGE coordinator Anita Thaler (IFZ Graz), has been invited to a panel discussion to Technisches Museum (technology museum) in Vienna.
The technology museum actively deals with the subject of technology, education and gender. In the museum a "women's gallery", breaks up the male dominant tale of technology history und the newest publication of the series "Blätter für Technikgeschichte" about gender and technology are main activities. In the mentioned publication, Anita Thaler and her colleague Birgit Hofstätter wrote a chapter ("Gelebte Utopie — Mit Transdisziplinarität zu einer Technikbildung für alle?" — "Living utopia — technology education for everybody with a transdisciplinary approach"), looking back to over a decade of transdisciplinary technology education research at IFZ using Thaler's vehicle theory. In the last 10 years, Thaler and her colleagues could prove that using youth's interest topics (like music, fashion or TV series) can serve as a vehicle to introduce science and technology. To constantly reflect on gender relations, while de-dramatizing gender within class rooms, is an inherent characteristic of this vehicle-approach, which has proven to be successful to include all genders (see also "To Boldly go, where no one has gone before — A transdisciplinary journey to technology-education for everybody").