INCLUDING GENDER PERSPECTIVE IN CLASS

Last school year I planned to cover the contents about history with 10-12-year-old kids. Despite I find it rather fascinating as I studied humanities in my pre-college studies, I am aware the topic might not seem so captivating for students unless I made them feel involved in it. 

As teachers, we are also responsible for ensuring our students will contribute to making a fairer world in many aspects. When regarding the History topic I thought about including the GENDER PERSPECTIVE and GENDER EQUALITY as part of the project considering the following definitions in order to avoid gender stereotypes and break the classical gender barriers:

·          Gender equality implies to correct gender discrimination and value the rich differences             between genders.

·         Gender perspective refers to the analysis of the feminine presence in certain spaces              in order to identify discrimination, work for gender equality and promote 

          educational equity. 

The idea of the project was to introduce the topic to the students as a challenge as they were asked to rewrite History from women’s perspective. They felt extremely motivated as they felt they were contributing make the world a fairer place by including feminine point of view. Moreover, this motivation also allowed them to increase the sense of responsibility towards society. 

We started the project taking a look at one of the most read books the lasts couple of years “Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls”, discovering Boudicca, one of my favourite warriors who was not considered able to lead her tribe after her husband died and, however, she brought great victories to the Celts tribes against the Roman Empire. 

We discussed how most women end up in History books as “The wife of…” and that we wanted to discover what was behind that tag. 

The following part of the project aimed to discover women from every historical period and discover the characteristics of the society, politics, and economy so that we could create a digital publication with the eTwinning partners. 

Unluckily, we modified the project because of the pandemic, and what should have been a cooperative project became a more individual task. However, despite not finishing the whole scheme, we did contribute to EDUCATIONAL EQUITY from gender equality, and gender perspective point of view. 

Núria Parareda