The programme focuses on students who wish to develop expertise in women’s and gender history as well as in European history and who are interested in intercultural exchange and competences. Local and transnational education will be combined with student and faculty mobility. Intensive Programmes should strengthen the cooperation between the participating students and teachers. Transparency and comparability of acquired qualifications will be assured by using the European Credit Transfer System and Diploma Supplement. Supranational qualification assurance mechanisms will assure a European dimension to the project.
Learning outcomes:
- Cognition of the historicity of gender norms, roles and relations;
- Capacities for analysing past and ongoing socio-cultural processes in local and supranational contexts;
- The mastering of adequate methodological skills; awareness of the variety of the historic tools, critical approaches towards documents and an awareness how historical interests, categories and problems change over time and in diverse political, social, and geographical contexts;
- Ability to participate in international scientific discussions, in mainstream history, in the fields of women’s and gender history and of equal opportunity policies;
- Awareness for the European dimension of history, awareness for a concept of history beyond the local, regional, and the national dimension;
- Critical reflection of the predispositions of the discipline.
Competences to be acquired:
- Understanding of cultural differences and similarities and their historical and social preconditions and contexts (comparative perspective);
- Practice in comparative production of historical knowledge;
- The recognition of the importance of cooperation and communication in learning, teaching, and research within transnational networks.
Added value:
The Joint Degree MATILDA: Women’s and Gender History will add to academic qualification in the international field of women’s and gender history. Especially the following competences will be promoted:
- Understanding of the historicity of gender norms, roles and relations;
- Discussion of cultural differences and similarities and their historical and social preconditions and contexts (comparative perspective);
- Practice in comparative production and analysis of historical knowledge;
- Ability to participate in international academic debates, in mainstream history, in the fields of women’s and gender history and of equal opportunity policies;
- Ability to work in museums, memory sites, archives and exhibitions and to broker issues of women’s and gender history into these fields;
- Practice in critical reflection of the predispositions of the own discipline.
Professional perspectives (besides those in academia):
The joint MA-programme will prepare participants for mediating discussions and findings of women’s and gender history in various fields like school, adult education, university; PR, policy advice; journalism; museums, memory sites, archives and exhibitions, in compliance with a professional preparation of students:
- Project oriented teamwork;
- Capacity for analysis and synthesis;
- Information management skills; students learn to handle sources of information and access and evaluate information in a varied form (libraries, archives, teachers, internet, etc.);
- Capacity to learn; capacity to adapt to new situations;
- Foster and manage diversity;
- Sensitivity to cultural and social differences/similarities and to the questions of gender relations is an essential basis for social and communicative competences – e.g. by raising the sensitivity for historical processes, for the long lasting effects of gendered rights and norms, by drawing attention to gender difference as pattern for other differences;
- In the field of socio-political work students are especially prepared for tasks in gender mainstreaming, the
- management of equal opportunities, and the presentation of social and communicative processes.
- Qualification in critical and self-critical reflection.
Need in society:
The Joint Programme clearly responds to several needs in society:
- The teaching of history has general overarching objectives such as: acquiring a rational, critical view and insight into the past in order to have a basis for understanding the present and for informed citizenship.- Recognition of the inequalities caused by politics of gender differences.
- Competences should be considered as well as knowledge.
- The “society of knowledge” is also a “society of learning”. Therefore education has to be understood in a wider context: individuals need to be able to handle knowledge, to update it, to select what is appropriate for a particular situation and context, to learn permanently, to understand what is learned in such a way that it can be adapted to new and always changing situations