Women’s Legacy, the European Erasmus + KA201 educational innovation project, has presented in Valencia its five intellectual products, which have been developed by more than 200 people distributed in 23 work teams that have been working for a year and a half. It is an initiative led by the Conselleria d’Educació and coordinated by the researcher Ana López-Navajas.
“We present long-lasting products that will go beyond the project, and that are designed to be adapted to the educational system of any country. We are educated in a masculinised discourse that does not correspond to reality. There is a huge distortion of the cultural narrative. This conditions our socialisation, socially discredits women, denies us our referents and weakens our social position. It is a discriminatory situation and Women’s Legacy is a response to correct this”, explained Ana López-Navajas.
The event took place at the Aula Magistral of the Palau de les Arts in Valencia and was followed by more than half a thousand teachers and people linked to the world of education from different countries, 350 of them attended the event in person, and another 200 connected to the live broadcast. It counted with the presence of Ximo Puig, president of the Generalitat Valenciana (Valencian Government), and with the participation of the minister of education of the Generalitat Valenciana, Vicent Marzà, who started the presentation.
The regional minister thanked the work of the people involved in the Women’s Legacy project, “especially its coordinator Ana López-Navajas, whose tenacity is helping to promote the European response to the common need to offer didactic intervention tools that serve to change the androcentric vision of culture, science and history in educational content”.
ABOUT WOMEN’S LEGACY AND ITS COLLABORATIVE NETWORK
The European Erasmus + KA201 educational innovation project, Women’s Legacy, started in 2020 with a duration of three years, so it is now at its halfway point. The aim is to make women’s contributions to history, culture and science part of the educational content. In order to do so, it counts with nine partners in Spain, Italy, Lithuania and Scotland.
Among the partners of Women’s Legacy, which is coordinated by the Conselleria d’Educació, are the education services of Glasgow City Council, the council of Scotland’s largest city; the universities of Valencia and Vilnius; and IAL Nazionale – Innovazione Apprendimento Lavoro, the largest Italian network of social enterprises working in vocational training and lifelong learning.
The other five partners in this Erasmus + project are El Legado de las Mujeres, a Spanish teachers’ association to give visibility to women in secondary education content; the Escola Sindical de Formació Melchor Botella d’Intersindical Valenciana; and two secondary schools, IES Benicalap in Valencia and IIS Luigi Einaudi in Italy.
FIVE INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTS OPEN TO THE WORLD
The five intellectual products that have been developed by the Women’s Legacy project are: a teacher training course entitled ‘A science with women scientists for the classroom’; a resource bank with activities, remarks and information on women and their contributions; together with three catalogues of works and fragments of works of female authorship in music, literature and art.
The course ‘A science with women scientists for the classroom’, which CEFIRE is already teaching online to around a hundred secondary school teachers, is a specific course dedicated to the scientific, technological and mathematical fields, offered by the Conselleria d’Educació, and lasts 30 hours. It will be publicly available so that any educational institution can offer it to its teaching staff and the European Women’s Legacy project team is already working on adapting it to more educational levels, as well as incorporating it into secondary school teachers’ master’s degrees. In addition, the intention is for it to be taught in other autonomous regions and in countries such as Italy, Lithuania and Scotland.
The resource bank contains activities, remarks and information on women and their works and contributions, classified by subject and ESO level. In total, 17 subject groups have worked to produce a model for the inclusion of women’s heritage and references, which will be exportable to any educational system in the world.
The three catalogues of female works and figures are one per field: music, literature and art. Three transnational groups have worked and selected works and women of reference and have generated a methodology of documentation and revision, providing sheets with the keys to each of the relevant works or figures.
These five intellectual products of the project Women’s Legacy will be published in digital format and free of charge on the website www.womenslegacyproject.eu. They are didactic intervention tools 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.
Another important feature of the working methodology is its transferability. Thus, for example, the resource bank has been designed to be easily adaptable to other languages and educational systems; the catalogues are also designed to be exportable to the field of cultural public policies; and, in the same way, the training course has also been designed to be replicated in other subjects. In addition, the maintenance and expansion of the database and catalogues will be coordinated, and training for STEM teachers will continue to be offered.
The aim is to enable an improvement in education policies, which reinforce the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 4, 5 and 10, which refer to equal opportunities and the improvement of education.
INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM ON EQUALITY POLICIES
The morning ended with an international colloquium on equality policies for Europe’s cultural heritage, with the participation of the General Director for Educational Innovation of Conselleria d’Educació, Reis Gallego; the Executive Director of Education of Glasgow City Council, Douglas Hutchison; and Anna Kędziorek, from the Directorate General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture of the European Commission.
Among the international presence at the Women’s Legacy conference in Valencia, in addition to the European partners of the project, the attendance of representatives of the European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education as well as of the Directorate General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture of the European Commission, University Paris 8, the director of the Instituto Cervantes in Amman, the capital of Jordan, and the president of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (RIIFS) of this country, stand out.
