Incorporating the gender perspective in teaching: the case of Barcelona School of Nautical Studies

The maritime sector is strongly legalized owing to a great number of necessary international conventions. MET is also affected by numerous regulations and by a teaching standardization through the STCW and IMO model courses. In addition, MET suffers the extra pressure of different types of international and national audits, which may make the implementation of regulations rather rigid. Traditionally, the implementation of legislation has followed top- down approaches but this paper shows that the combination of both top-down and bottom- up approaches becomes an efficient method to implement objectives and regulations while fostering an increased participation and active involvement of practitioners to better achieve goals. This combination of approaches, with a special emphasis on bottom-up ones, also constitutes a good opportunity for METIs to respond to the need of educating Global Maritime Professionals (GMPs) and to mainstream gender in teaching. This paper illustrates an example of this combined implementation methods through an innovation project to mainstream gender in teaching conducted by Barcelona School of Nautical Studies (FNB-UPC). The initiative described not only empowered MET teachers at FNB-UPC to transform their teaching practices but also served to build a sense of community by allowing them to work jointly to bridge the gender gap in maritime education.