Collaboration among researchers and practitioners for the development of more gender sensitive interventions in educational and social services

The research presented in this paper has been designed in order to explore gender in educational services. The aim is not only to identify and focus on stereotypes, naturalization and culturalisation processes and their permanence but also to investigate gender matrix, implicit in the educational interventions as well as in the way practitioners are used to work for and with the users. The purpose is to understand whether and how gender culture influences the definition of educational needs and the structuring, the managing, the evaluation of the educational and social services and the dissemination of their work. At the same time, the goal is to explore the possible resistance and impediments that the proposal to use a critical gender approach could meet in these educational contexts. In the thirty qualitative interviews conducted, participants were invited to explore both gender and educational problems (such as social exclusion, mental disease, disability etc., their educational services are designed for), trying to link them together and to reflect on intersectional understanding of gender and other axes of oppression; where gender is something that is done and not just a neutral biological dimension nor a simple variable. The not taken for granted acquisition of this lens in social and educational services can support practitioners at different levels: to implement educational tools and strategies to analyze and meet the users’ needs and to enhance their capacity to take into account the lived experience of each person and the related different forms of oppression across a particular social context; not to confirm or reproduce mechanisms that create gender disadvantages through their interventions; and to use this knowledge in the interest of social change in developing more gender sensitive educational services and projects. The research and the results presented in this paper are part of a research grant assigned from the Department of Educational Humane Sciences of the University of Milano-Bicocca, under the Prof. Sergio Tramma scientific supervision.