Aims and Objectives
The Aware II –project "Increasing Teacher Trainees' Awareness of Sexualised and Gendered Violence" is a continuation of the first Aware -project “Increasing Awareness in Educational Organisations of Sexualised and Gendered Violence ” - publication and web project 2001 – 2003. The publication “Gendered and Sexualised Violence in Educational Environments”, produced within the first Aware –project, is used as one of the educational materials for the studies.
The purpose of the Aware II –project is to raise awareness of sexualised and gendered violence, to change attitudes and to look for ways to prevent violence at schools and in other educational environments. In Europe there is not a great deal of training courses on gendered and sexualised violence based on scientific research and suitable for higher education. The project will produce and implement such course. This teaching material will raise the public and scientific awareness of gendered and sexualised violence among the educational organisations' personnel.
The project's main context is the change in sexual culture. Gendered and sexualised violence is approached from the educational organisations' perspective. With the help of the educational material, people working in the field of education, teacher training and pedagogy, are trained to be aware of gendered and sexualised violence and can develop ways of preventing it.
The aim of the project is to change attitudes and prevent gendered and sexualised violence in the entire society. Furthermore, the project will bring forward research that has already been conducted, and employ young female researchers. The project is mainly based on previous and present researches on gendered and sexualised violence toward women and children. The main project partners come from Northern and Central Europe: the Nordic countries' long developed political gender equality makes the area exceptional on the European level.
The primary beneficiaries are children, young adults and women subjected to gendered and sexualised violence, and the secondary beneficiary is the society as a whole. Other beneficiaries are also young female researchers taking part in the project. Also, the use of the Internet and IT-technology benefits the information society development in every country participating in the project. The training material produced in the project can be used in the European countries as educational material on gendered and sexualised violence.
The aims of this project are
- to increase teacher trainees' and teachers' awareness of gendered and sexualised violence,
- to develop non-violence pedagogy at schools and
- to produce and organise a web-based course developed in an international framework.
Awareness of gendered and sexualised violence as a cultural phenomenon increases through the web-based training course. The aim is to produce learning material for reducing and eliminating gendered violence from learning environments and to create a gender-sensitive, life respecting models for teaching and learning. The aim is also to improve the course participants' abilities to build non-violent school culture and to motivate them to do so. The educational material built in an international cooperation and the international students' discussions in the web environment give wider perspective on the topics than would a course on a national level do.
Updated 6.9.2004 AK