MRD's approach: Ideally suited to support Future Earth research agenda in mountains

Both Future Earth and Mountain Research and Development (MRD) aim to support production and dissemination of knowledge for sustainable development. As shown in Future Earth’s Strategic Research Agenda 2014, the global research community has begun to acknowledge its societal role and the need for a new type of research in which scientists link disciplines and coproduce transformation knowledge with stakeholders. Future Earth has defined three research themes that conceptualize the issues to be dealt with at the same time as the way in which this should be done. In many ways, MRD’s policy has made the journal a forerunner of Future Earth’s stipulated “step-change in research”. Indeed, MRD’s section policies aim to support similar contents and ways of producing these forms of knowledge. MRD publishes “systems knowledge” in its MountainResearch section, “target knowledge” in its MountainAgenda section, and “transformation knowledge” in its MountainDevelopment section. Each of these sections has dedicated review criteria to assess and enhance the quality of the knowledge presented in the papers. In this poster, we provide examples from each of the three sections of what the knowledge types look like, how they are assessed, and how they contribute to the three Future Earth themes.

How gender fair are German schoolbooks in the twenty-first century? An analysis of language and illustrations in schoolbooks for mathematics and German

Schoolbooks convey not only school-relevant knowledge; they also influence the development of stereotypes about different social groups. Particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, many studies analysed schoolbooks and criticised the overall predominance of male persons and of traditional role allocations. Since that time, women’s and men’s occupations and social functions have changed considerably. The present research investigated gender portrayals in schoolbooks for German and mathematics that were recently published in Germany. We examined the proportions of female and male persons in pictures and texts and categorized their activities, occupational and parental roles. Going beyond previous studies, we added two criteria: the use of gender-fair language and the spatial arrangements of persons in pictures. Our results show that schoolbooks for German contained almost balanced depictions of girls and boys, whereas women were less frequently shown than men. In mathematics books, males outnumbered females in general. Across both types of books, female and male persons were engaged in many different activities, not only gendertyped ones; however, male persons were more often described via their profession than females. Use of gender-fair language has found its way into schoolbooks but is not used consistently. Books for German were more gender fair in terms of linguistic forms than books for mathematics. For spatial arrangements, we found no indication for gender biases. The results are discussed with a focus on how schoolbooks can be optimized to contribute to gender equality.