First day of class: starting to walk from cooperation, politicization and visibility of gender inequalities

Abstract

This text aims to address two challenges of higher education: to focus the learning framework on students and to do so with a gender perspective. Situated at the intersection of both aspirations, it is key to provide tools that make visible to students the logics that support a cooperative learning that takes into account the importance of gender inequalities in the classroom. For this, the first contact with the students in the presentation of a course seems a key moment: studies show how the first hours in the teaching influence the motivation to learn throughout the course. From these premises, and after delimiting the core elements of student-centered learning and the gender perspective applied to higher education, this text describes an experience implemented in the first two hours of presentation of a first year course of Sociology and Political Science based on a battery of active techniques in which emotion, symbolism and trust are key. This makes it possible, from the first hours, (i) to show the inequalities in the classroom, (ii) to frame the methodology and some of the central contents of the subject, and (iii) to experience from practice the meaning of politics. Understanding learning as a political process in which cooperation is essential, this text presents a model in which the focus is on students that we aspire to motivate to be the protagonist of their learning, in equality.