The Erasmus+ educational innovation project “Women’s Legacy: Our Cultural Heritage for Equity” starts the 2022/2023 school year with a presentation in the city of Seville. Specifically, the event has been organised in collaboration with the association El Legado de las Mujeres and the support of Seville’s city council. Entitled “Educating for a Universal Culture with Women’s Legacy”, it will take place on Wednesday 21st September, starting at 9 a.m., in Hogar Virgen de los Reyes.
Many education professionals will meet there, both from Andalucia and other parts of Spain, with a double objective. On the one hand, to analyse the presence of female cultural heritage in present day education. On the other, to become familiar with the five educational resources of free open access that this project has created so that contributions to universal knowledge made by women become part of the educational curriculum.
In order to meet these objectives, the event will include presentations and round tables with the participation of the researcher Ana López-Navajas, Women’s Legacy’s precursor and project manager; some teachers that have worked in the development of these intellectual products; Clara Macías Morilla, Councillor for Equality and Human Resources of Seville’s City Council; or Eva Díaz Pérez, writer and director of the Centro Andaluz de las Letras; among other professionals in the field of education.
WOMEN’S LEGACY: AN UNSTOPPABLE MOVEMENT FOR COEDUCATION
The Erasmus+ KA201 educational innovation project Women’s Legacy started in 2020 with a duration of three years, which means that it is now halfway through its completion. The aim is that contributions made by women in history, culture and science become part of the educational contents. For this, it has the support of nine partner organisations from Spain, Italy, Lithuania and Scotland. In total, 24 teams have been organised, with over 200 people involved.
Some of the partners of Women’s Legacy, coordinated by Conselleria d’Educació of the Valencian Government, are: Glasgow City Council’s education services, the City Council of Scotland’s biggest city; Universitat de València and Vilniaus Universitetas (Lithuania’s capital); and IAL Nazionale (Innovazione Apprendimento Lavoro), the biggest Italian network of social companies working in professional and ongoing training.
The other five partners of this Erasmus+ project are El Legado de las Mujeres, a Spanish association of teachers that intends to increase the visibility of women in secondary education content; Escola Sindical de Formació Melchor Botella de Intersindical Valenciana; and two secondary education centres, IES Benicalap in Valencia and IIS Luidi Einaudi in Italy.
FIVE OPEN INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTS
The five intellectual products which have been developed as part of the European Erasmus+ project, Women’s Legacy, are: a teacher training course entitled “A Science with Women Scientists for the Classroom”; a resource bank with activities, indications and information on women and their contributions; and three catalogues of works and fragments of female authorship in the fields of music, literature and art.
The course “A Science with Women Scientists for the Classroom”, which has been completed online by around a hundred secondary teachers in the Valencian Community in its pilot edition, is a 30-hour long specific course that will be publicly available for any educational institution to offer it to its teachers. The team of the project Women’s Legacy is already working on its adaptation to more educational stages, as well as on its incorporation for Master’s Degrees in Secondary Education. In addition, the objective is to offer it in other countries too.
The resource bank contains activities, indications and information on women and their works and contributions, classified by subject and level of ESO. In total, 17 subject groups have worked to produce a model for the inclusion of women’s legacy and female role models that can be exported to any education system in the world. It will soon be available openly on the website www.womenslegacyproject.eu.
The three catalogues of works by women and female figures address three areas: music, literature and art. Three transnational groups have worked and selected works and female icons. They have also developed a methodology of documentation and review, providing files with the key information about each of the relevant works or figures. These catalogues can now be consulted for free at www.womenslegacyproject.eu.
These five intellectual products of the Women’s Legacy project are instruments of didactic intervention which aim to correct the androcentric vision that has traditionally been transmitted from school and to recover the heritage that women have generated throughout history in all academic fields.
THE NEXT STEPS FOR WOMEN’S LEGACY
One of the most important characteristics of all the lines of work in the project Women’s Legacy is its transferability. Thus, for example, the resource bank has been created to be easily adaptable to other languages and educational systems; the catalogues are also developed to be exportable to the field of cultural public policies; and, similarly, the training course has been designed to be replicated in other subjects.
Nevertheless, the Women’s Legacy team continues to work to coordinate the maintenance and expansion of the resource bank and catalogues, as well as to continue providing training for STEM teachers. The project is also open to the incorporation of more people and institutions that want to collaborate in the study and development of the materials that will be made available to the general public, as well as in the dissemination of these materials so that they can be applied to enable the transformation towards real equality in the classroom.
