As a secondary school graduate, choosing the next step in your education may feel like a scary leap. Nothing to worry about: Pulsed Empower is here to support you. This inspiring, challenging program enables secondary school graduates to uncover their uniqueness and put it to satisfying use. Empower focuses on your wants, needs and abilities and helps you find the direction that fits you like a glove.
Empower is all about the strength of creating. The emphasis is on learning through experiencing, doing, sometimes failing, and starting all over to finally succeeding. That is why books are optional, not mandatory. Empower turns every day into an innovative field trip filled with technology, entrepreneurship, and creativity. At the same time, you stay socially connected with other students and lecturers.
The project was born thanks to the Hackathon Hacking Women into Tech, organized by Human Capital Topsectoren, in collaboration with several relevant partners in the Brainport region and beyond. During the hackathon our group became more and more aware of the main issues related to gendered socio-cultural norms in STEM* work contexts, that influence the well-being of people. These socio-cultural norms include, for example, stereotypical comments, gender-identity threats and exclusion. As a consequence, these norms constrain workers’ (mostly women but also men) career perceptions and impose barriers to building their career confidence and engagement in STEM.
Our project aims to create awareness and empathy among co-workers, by creating immersive experiences that highlight these socio-cultural norms, and by facilitating dialogue and reflection with regards to the adoption of such norms.
*Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
Our one-day intervention program can be considered a balanced mix between team-building activities and gender-inclusion trainings. Our intervention, despite the name, aims to prevent the adoption of harmful socio-cultural norms, rather than rehabilitating workers into their working environment, after an unpleasant episode.
Our team strongly believes that the first step for the adoption of positive socio-cultural norms is the ability to understand each-others and the effect that such norms have on confidence and engagement in the workplace. For this reason, the intervention focuses on the creation of empathy among co-workers, using analogue and digital games. In particular, physical games are used to analyse the behaviour of a team in work-like situations such as complex, timed, tasks that require collaborative effort, but also leadership, manual work and technical skills. Digital games use VR and AR experiences to create an immersive environment in which it becomes easier to step in the shoes of your teammates.
Does your company value gender-equality on the working field and you would like to take concrete, immediately-applicable steps towards gender-equality? Are you looking for a new enriching experience to strengthen your team’s wellbeing and abilities? Sign up to have a chat with our team and evaluate the participation to our pilot by sending us a message! Click here to connect.
Read further about how our project was born and our proposition.
Smashing the status quo, breaking the mould, shaping a new one … just to break it again. Our fast-paced, ever-changing world demands equally evolving education. That is why Fontys Pulsed Academy puts its daring spin on it, based on better, broader, exciting design-based learning. Our curriculum is never finished, our thirst for knowledge and skills is never quenched, and our ambition is never fully achieved.
Fontys Pulsed Academy offers student-centred, talented-based teaching approaches captured in five act-provoking programs. These are primarily aimed at a challenging cocktail of technology & craftmanship, entrepreneurship & business, and design & creativity. Additionally, we offer expeditions for educators to take ownership and (re)design the education of their institute.
As a secondary school graduate, choosing the next step in your education may feel like a scary leap. Nothing to worry about: Pulsed Empower is here to support you. This inspiring, challenging program enables secondary school graduates to uncover their uniqueness and put it to satisfying use. Empower focuses on your wants, needs and abilities and helps you find the direction that fits you like a glove.
Empower is all about the strength of creating. The emphasis is on learning through experiencing, doing, sometimes failing, and starting all over to finally succeeding. That is why books are optional, not mandatory. Empower turns every day into an innovative field trip filled with technology, entrepreneurship, and creativity. At the same time, you stay socially connected with other students and lecturers.
Smashing the status quo, breaking the mould, shaping a new one … just to break it again. Our fast-paced, ever-changing world demands equally evolving education. That is why Fontys Pulsed Academy puts its daring spin on it, based on better, broader, exciting design-based learning. Our curriculum is never finished, our thirst for knowledge and skills is never quenched, and our ambition is never fully achieved.
Fontys Pulsed Academy offers student-centred, talented-based teaching approaches captured in five act-provoking programs. These are primarily aimed at a challenging cocktail of technology & craftmanship, entrepreneurship & business, and design & creativity. Additionally, we offer expeditions for educators to take ownership and (re)design the education of their institute.
