Since 2007, PCP has focused on encouraging and pursuing innovative approaches to education. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the program organized weeklong gender training for teachers, academics and specialists, and workshops on designing of education materials. The program focused on resilience-building for teachers through workshops on creative writing, art, staged readings of plays (theater), movie screenings and discussions, gender and memory walks in various neighborhoods in Istanbul, museum tours in various cities in Turkey, physical activities, and co-creation of new education materials. After COVID-19 pandemic, digital creativity and innovation became crucial for the program. During the pandemic, the PCP conducted three online trainings and an awareness raising workshop that reached out to more than 200 teachers.
Online trainings, workshops and webinars were designed with the objective of accessibility to all. In this respect, the participation of disadvantaged groups (disabled people, single parents, care-givers of elders and toddlers) was encouraged. The participants, especially women from villages and countryside, started to participate in the trainings and webinars. Through digitalization, we started enabling many new groups (particularly women and girls) to access our education programs since the hardships of traveling (for groups from villages, participants with disabilities, health problems, and caregiving responsibilities) and getting permission from their family members were no more impediments to their participation. Further, through funding from Sabancı Holding, we were able to donate laptops and fund internet access to our programs to all participants in need. This was the method of overcoming financial and technological barriers in accessing online education. This also enabled women teachers to overcome the bias at home that rare computer technologies should be at the service of men. If one computer existed in each household, women and girls did not have equal access to it. Hence, the donation of computers to all participants underlined a gender-related inequality in access to computer technologies at home.