From the early 1980's on, there has been a constant flow of gender equity projects in schools and teacher education in Finland, as well as in other European countries. Projects generally have aroused enthusiasm and feeling of solidarity among participants, but the common finding is that the results tend not to be sustainable (Brunila et al. 2005). Teachers see boys and girls through lenses of gender stereotypes; the measures of achievements, both in national and international level (e.g. in PISA), show differences between boys and girls, and the publishing of the results always leads to discussions of schools as designed for girls; the cultural ideas of masculine and feminine restrain the possibilities of individual students to find out their own individual educational and professional paths. In order to change everyday life and attitudes of teachers and students in schools, curricula, pedagogies and practices of teacher training needs to be developed towards sensitivity for social dimensions of differences such as gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality and locality and their interactions. Even if Finnish gender research in education is highly evaluated and is networking in all universities, empirical studies that are informed by feminist theoretizations reach teacher education very slowly and meet resistance. Research on teachers and schools constantly suggest lack of gender awareness among teaching staff (e.g. Lahelma & al. 2000, Soro 2002, Juutilainen 2007). In curricula of units of teacher education, it is not easy to find concrete items, courses or text books that suggest that problematizing gender or results of women’s studies will be presented to forthcoming teachers. Whilst understanding about the impact of gendered processes in schools is weak, the travelling discourse of boys’ problems (Arnesen et al. 2008) easily reaches teachers and teacher educators.

Based on sustainable networking among gender researchers in education, and funded by the Ministry of Education (2008-2010), a national research and development project is founded. The director of the project is professor Elina Lahelma. The aim of the project Gender awareness in teacher education is to help teacher educators, teachers and educational administrators in implementing the Act of on Equality between Women and Men (Finnish Law 609/1986, 5§), which states special responsibilities for schools. The project has a wide network of experts, teacher educators and researchers of education in all universities in Finland. The aims of the project are to promote multidisciplinary research with multimethodological orientation and to increase research co-operation between researchers as well as to offer help for gender equality planning in the units, departments and the faculties involved in teacher training and education.

The project is currently working towards a research program with a meta analysis of Finnish research on gender and education and a plan for research to be conducted in the network. In the poster session we are going to present the project, focussing on the research program.