The Women’s Legacy methodology has arrived in Catalonia for the first time, thanks to the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV). This European project, which is currently being developed at the state level thanks to the support of the Asociación El Legado de Las Mujeres and co-financing from the Instituto de las Mujeres (Women’s Institute) of the Spanish Government, has planned two training programs to incorporate female role models into education.
This training initiative has had the collaboration of the Equality Unit, the Institut de Ciències de l’Educació (ICE) (Institute of Educational Sciences), and the Department of Romance Philology at the URV, as well as the Veus de Dona working group in Tarragona and the APELLC (Associació de Professionals i Estudiosos en Llengua i Literatura Catalanes) (Association of Professionals and Scholars in Catalan Language and Literature).
Firstly, the course Formación de Formadoras Women’s Legacy: Integración de Referentes Femeninos y Perspectiva de género en la Docencia (Women’s Legacy Trainer Training: Integration of Female Role Models and Gender Perspective in Teaching) was organized, which was inaugurated at the end of March in the Boardroom of the URV’s Catalunya Campus. The event was attended by Sandra Ramos, Councilor for Culture, Festivities, and Universities of the Tarragona City Council, an institution that has officially joined Women’s Legacy. Consequently, new lines of work between the Public Administration and the project will soon be defined.
With 23 university lecturers enrolled, the aim of this course is to train faculty to incorporate a gender perspective into their teaching and to highlight women’s contributions in their academic disciplines. Furthermore, this is the first time that Women’s Legacy has provided ‘trainer training’ for university faculty.
Secondly, another course was organized for primary and secondary school teachers in the Tarragona area: Women’s Legacy: Una ciencia con científicas para el aula (Women’s Legacy: A Science with Female Scientists for the Classroom), for which over 150 applications were received.
This training is currently being delivered in a first edition across Catalonia with 25 teachers from more than 15 centers in Tarragona. The objective is to provide teachers with didactic resources to update the content of STEM subjects through the introduction of female role models in the field of science and technology and a broader perspective on science.
The URV’s ICE has adapted the contents of the original project to the Catalan language and integrated them into an open platform that facilitates their direct use in the classroom, aligning them with the curricular contents of the educational system in Catalonia. The training has been managed by the URV’s ICE and financed by the Department of Education and Vocational Training of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
About Women’s Legacy
Women’s Legacy’s main goal is to complete the biased and impoverished cultural vision transmitted in classrooms—which is heavily focused on male achievements and contributions—by incorporating female genealogy into educational content, thus recognizing and highlighting the contributions of women and their leading role in all fields of knowledge. The project was born in 2020 through the efforts of researcher Ana López-Navajas. It currently has more than 30 working groups and a network of nearly 250 collaborators.
In this time, the project has consolidated a digital resource bank, which currently includes over a thousand entries. This bank is the practical realization of an inclusion system for educational content that will be transferred to other educational systems, featuring female role models, their works, and activities ready to be used in the classroom, categorized by subjects and levels. Additionally, it offers three digital catalogues with works authored by women in art, music, and literature. All of this is accessible from its official website: www.womenslegacyproject.eu.