The educational innovation project Women’s Legacy, promoted by Valencian researchers Ana López-Navajas and Paula Jardón, which has the support of the University of Valencia, has been one of the nominees for the 2024 UNESCO Prize for Girls’ and Women’s Education.

The Women’s Legacy candidacy for the 2024 UNESCO Prize for Girls’ and Women’s Education had been presented by the Ministry of Equality together with the Ministry of Education of Spain thanks to a proposal from the Women’s Institute. The award, announced this Wednesday, has been given to two initiatives for Africa. The first promotes equality in Ugandan schools, while the second is a campaign for the education of women in Zambia.

This educational innovation initiative has been generating its own methodology for four years to promote the inclusion of women in educational content and thus end an androcentric vision in cultural transmission.

The University of Valencia has participated in the creation of this project through the development of an Erasmus + KA2 EU project, with the contributions and involvement of 16 researchers from the areas of Didactics of Social Sciences, Arts, Music, Experimental Sciences, Art History, Philology, Research Methods and Diagnosis in Education and Physics, including UCIE researcher Paula Jardón.

Women’s Legacy was born in 2020. Ana López-Navajas had been studying for years the absence of women’s contributions to the scientific, cultural and historical fields in textbooks, in which she identified that the presence of female references did not reach 8% in 2019. For this reason, she decided to launch a project that would offer resources to solve this inequality. Entities and universities from Lithuania, Scotland, Italy, France and Jordan have collaborated on it.

Thus, for four years, Women's Legacy has created more than 30 working groups on different areas of knowledge and has had nearly 300 collaborators from different countries thanks to the support of international institutions. The result is a series of educational intervention instruments that serve to correct the androcentric vision of the culture transmitted in education and to recover the European cultural heritage of female authorship.

During this time, the project has consolidated a digital resource bank, which currently has more than a thousand entries and is the concretization of a system of inclusion in educational content that will be transferred to other educational systems, with female referents, their works and activities ready to be used in the classroom, by subject and level; and three digital catalogues with works of female authorship in art, music and literature. All of this is accessible from its official website:

www.womenslegacyproject.eu

In addition, there is a training course for teachers on female scientists in STEM. Currently, Women’s Legacy is still being implemented in educational centres in Andalusia, Madrid, Castilla y León, Asturias, the Basque Country and Catalonia. In addition, a broad training programme is being developed for teachers of different courses thanks to the Ministry of Education of Castilla La Mancha.