This project is about gender stereotypes and their effects on the way males and females live in their town and can manage it. It was inspired one the one hand by the principles of the European Charter for equality of women and men in local life : fighting against stereotypes and discriminations, encouraging a balanced representation and participation of women and men in all spheres of decision-making and Integrating the gender perspective into all activities of local and regional government to advance equality of women and men. On the other hand, it is also inspired by the concept of « invisible walls » created by the social geography, considering that the towns are made by and for males : women are not allowed to live as free as men in the public space and don’t get equal powers in the positions of trust. The questions our project aims to answer are : can we find, identify and explain these gender discriminations all over Europe ? Or are there differences between the countries ? Three schools work together to answer : the college Jules-Ferry in Montaigu (France), the school n° 3 Jan-Twardowski in Koszalin (Poland) and the Istituto Comprensivo n° 3 in Renazzo (Italy). The teachers will create and test common teaching tools to reach three main goals among the pupils : making them aware of the effects of prejudices and gender stereotypes in the daily life and improving equality between men and women in their behaviour ; improving their soft and hard skills (self-confidence, autonomy, digital tools, foreign langages) ; widening their knowlegde about the European artistic and cultural history (architecture, town planning). All the teaching docments and the pupils' outputs will be put online on our website and our etwinning Twinspace, so that other teachers could use them if they are involved in this theme. About 500 13-15 years-old students should be involved, with 20 teachers (native and foreign languages, geography, history, mathematics, technology, art, ethics, civics). The activities are organised in two main steps : first the pupils of each school try to find the « invisible walls » in their town, with surveys and exhibitions, and together they compare the results of their works ; then they try to find means to break these walls and imagine true equal public spaces by creating 3D pictures and models. All these teamworks are made at the same time so that the results can be compared. At the end of the project, we want the students to show respect for gender equality and be more tolerant. Their soft and hard skills are expected to improve. The teachers should give more importance to gender stereotypes in their class and be more attracted and efficient in multidisciplinary teamworks in their own school and with foreign teachers. The schools should consolidate and extend their European partnership policy.
This project is linked to recent questions in social geography : are our towns made by male for male ? Are their public spaces fairly shared between male and female ? Is there a social inequality favouring a gender and discriminating against the other one ? « Invisible walls » would prevent female from living freely in their town : are they real ? Can we find the same walls in different countries in Europe ? The project had several objectives: improving social skills (fight against gender stereotypes and discrimination, male-and-female equality and parity, respect for others, tolerance, team working), digital, scientific, langague (native language and English) and researching skills. French, Italian and Polish schools worked together on these questions by studying the situation in their own towns and regions. Searching activities, surveys and final outputs were drawn up by the partners teachers. Then in each school the 13-15-years old pupils compared how the streets names are shared between male and female in their towns, which jobs and responsabilities male and female are in charge of in city councils. They also made surveys about the way male and female live in their town. They created exhibitions and slideshows to spread what they found and their comments about it.