Abstract:

Education for equality is one of the great challenges we face and is framed within the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda (Quality Education and Gender Equality). Most of the initiatives pursued to achieve this goal are aimed at children and adolescents, as part of their education, since it is at this age that the impact is most significant. However, there are not so many projects that develop activities for teachers who, due to their own training, lack the tools to naturally include women in the history of science. Of course, initiatives such as the one of "11 February" in Spain managed to bring this subject to the general public attention, which is a first step. This initiative, among others, gave some resources to high school teachers to start introducing several female names in the syllabus of different subjects, specifically in Science, Technology and Mathematics (STEAM). Now, we need to increase the variety of resources, to introduce the female role in science not as a day of celebration, but as a cornerstone of our heritage.

The European Erasmus+ Women's Legacy (WL) project pursues these objectives through the recovery of the cultural and scientific legacy that women have created throughout history. After centuries of invisibilisation of these women, which has relegated them from scientific texts and books, and from the scientific literature, the project aims to recover the cultural and scientific legacy that women have created throughout history.

In particular, to reclaim the names and works of women in STEAM and include them in secondary education teaching, WL has designed and launched an online course, "Inclusion of female scientists in the curriculum", aimed at teachers who are already working at secondary education levels, but also at university lecturers who train future teachers. In this course, students open their eyes to a new vision of science in which women are not the assistants, wives or sisters of the male scientist stereotype, but reclaim their own name attached to their own work.

The course for secondary school teachers has been held seven times to date, in Spain, Italy and Scotland, with more than 250 students having completed the full course. In the case of the course for university students, the first edition took place in 2023, with more than 30 participants and a high degree of satisfaction on their part. A second edition is planned for 2024.

In this communication we will show the approach of this course to the objectives pursued by WL, which is not restricted to STEAM subjects, as its philosophy and strategies are easily transferable to other fields of knowledge. We will detail its structure and online tools used for training, examples of activities created by the teachers/students, together with the results of the anonymous evaluation of the course. In addition, we will show examples of how the WL project products and resources acquired by teachers are put into practice in their own secondary school classrooms, and their impact on children and adolescents for a better understanding of a more inclusive and equal Science.

Keywords:

Equality education, online course, Women's Legacy Erasmus+ EU project, STEAM education.