Vicent Marzà, Conseller of Education, Culture and Sport, has attended the presentation of the KA201 Erasmus+ European project of educational innovation ‘Women’s Legacy: Our Cultural Heritage for Equity’, led by the Conselleria and in which 9 partners are taking part, including those from Spain, Italy, Lithuania and Scotland. This strategic partnership for the development of educational innovation in Europe has a duration of three years and is funded with 361,755 euros by the European Erasmus+ program.
The challenge of the project ‘Women’s Legacy: our cultural heritage for equity’ is to highlight the social and historical prominence of women, restoring their contributions to science, culture and the advancement of knowledge in through the inclusion of female referents and their legacy in the educational curricular contents.
‘Drawing attention to the contribution of women to science and knowledge is key to the co-educational education that we want,’ said Marzà, noting that ‘this project will allow the transmission of a complete and truly universal culture, which will contribute to eradicating gender inequalities from the grassroots, given that women have been left out of much of the educational curriculum, and we want to promote a project like this to rethink not only our educational curriculum, but to share it in the European scope’.
Among the members of ‘Women’s Legacy’, which is being coordinated by the educational sphere for the Valencian government (Generalitat), are included the education services of the Glasgow City Council, Scotland’s largest city council; the Universities of València and Vilnius; and the IAL Nazionale – Innovazione Apprendimento Lavoro, the largest Italian network of social enterprises working in Vocational Training and Continuing Education.
The other five members of this Erasmus+ programme are ‘El legado de las mujeres’, a Spanish teachers’ association willing to give visibility to women in Secondary education content; the Melchor Botella Trade Union Training School of the Valencian Intersindical; and two secondary schools, IES Benicalap, in València, and the IS Luigi Einaudi, in Italy.
The project was born as a European response to the common need to offer instruments of didactic intervention that serve to correct the androcentric vision of the culture transmitted in education and to recover the hidden European cultural heritage of female authorship, thereby introducing a more complete cultural perspective on educational content.
Five axes to be developed
To achieve this goal over the next three years, five intellectual products will be made open to all interested European schools. The first one is an online and open resource bank that provides activities, directions and information for women scientists, artists, writers, musicians, etc., which must be incorporated into each subject of the compulsory secondary education. The resource bank will be in Spanish, Valencian and English.
The teacher training course ‘Women who are missing in STEM’ will also be promoted. This European projection curriculum update tool will have a duration of 20 hours and will be part-time or online. Its aim will be to provide both basic female references and their contributions in science and technology, as well as didactic indications to focus on the different subjects of science and technology at any educational level.
The third axis is the creation of a web repository, in open access, of musical works of female authorship in all current and classical genres, of all history and in all formats (audiovisuals, scores, audios, instrumental arrangements for the classroom), complete or in fragments, which are useful for compulsory education and which must offer a wide musical panorama.
Likewise, a web catalog of literary works written by European writers will be created, in all genres (narrative, poetry, theater, letter, essay and journalistic articles), of all history and of a wide range of subject matters, and that are useful for subjects such as Language and Literature, Philosophy or History. This repository will include works of authorship or female voice in the different minority languages of each of the countries participating in the project, namely: Scottish Gaelic, Sardinian, Latin, Arabic, Polish, Basque, Galician or French.
Finally, there will also be a web repository of works of art of women authorship. All this material will be developed collaboratively between the different project partners, who will form transnational work teams.
In order to publicize this work, four multiplier events will be held among secondary school teachers from the countries of the project partners. The first will be held on February 28th, 2022, in Valencia, and then it will take place in Vilnius (September 27th, 2022), Glasgow (February 28th, 2023), and Rome (May 31st, 2023).
The welcome day that marks the start of the three years of this Erasmus+ took place this morning virtually with an online meeting between all the partners of ‘Women’s Legacy’. The inaugural presentation, entitled ‘Building public policies for co-education’, was given by Dèlia Amorós who, between 2015 and 2019, was part of the Equality Unit of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, and Natividad Fajardo, Director of the Co-education Master Plan.
Thereupon, Ana López-Navajas, the coordinator of the project ‘Women’s Legacy’, and Sònia Pérez Ortuño, the technical manager of the project and head of the Service of Languages and European Programmes of the Conselleria, have addressed the challenge of the inclusion of women in the educational policies, cultures and practices, led by Education of the Valencian government. The meeting was closed by the regional secretary of Education and Vocational Training, Miquel Soler.
The choice to launch the Erasmus+ ‘Women’s Legacy’ project on 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, is not unintentional: ‘To end violence against women we need more measures, more knowledge and brave social and educational policies. Co-education is the tool that we have at our disposal to build an egalitarian society that distorts the patriarchal discourses and practices that underpin gender-based violence’, said Marzà.
