Purple Folders are designed by university professors, high school teachers, senior students in the FoE to serve as classroom materials, and to help teachers integrate gender and human rights into their curriculum. The proposed project itself aims to promote quality education in human rights and gender studies, whose impact also has the potential to reach beyond academia, through civil society. Apart from contributing to academic literature, it also aims to create a network for teachers and educators to share and enrich gender-inclusive materials and education methods.
In addition to online trainings, PCP will continue and expand on designing “Purple Folders,” a set of gender-inclusive materials for high schools created by a group of teachers, faculty of education students and specialists. After the COVID-19 pandemic, accessing the hard copy materials was not practical for teachers. Hence, the PCP team started the digitization process of the folders. During the current year, PCP plans to publish digital Purple Folders. Further, the PCP will continue developing gender inclusive materials in different disciplines, targeting various high school levels which can be reused and recreated by teachers. Also, first and second-generation Purple Folder documents will be revised by teachers during the 2021-2022 project year, to create an up-to-date version. Under the revision project, 30 focus group teachers will apply the folders in their classroom.
In addition to the innovations of the training, PCP started digitalizing the printed materials, i.e. the “Purple Folders,” produced by the teachers and specialists. During the process of digitizing the Purple Folders, the PCP Team also revised the instructions of the Purple Folders’ contents as compatible with digital use for teachers, with the aim of instructing teachers on how to make better use of digital material in online teaching. The Purple Folders cover a wide range of areas, including English, Turkish Literature, STEAM, Social Sciences, Physical Education and Psychological Counselling and Guidance. A visual output of the PCP program was “Animation Films'' that the PCP team co-created with animation film students from Bahçeşehir University. Within the scope of 3-4 minutes, these animation films narrate the lives of significant women artists, writers, mathematicians, and scientists using feminist methodologies. Such visual examples were shared with the PCP teachers in order to enable them to make their teaching experience more lively, using aesthetic resources that could open up vibrant discussions in class.