As part of the Transforming Women's Legal Status Project, the
Washington College of Law awarded three Teaching, Research and Advocacy
Fellowships to Latin American women's rights advocates and legal
scholars who were dedicated to teaching and writing from a gender
perspective. The Fellowships provided each Fellow with the opportunity
to obtain an advanced legal degree at the Washington College of Law with
a Specialization in Gender and the Law, to write legal scholarship
from a gender perspective, to develop curriculum and expertise in law
teaching, and to study multiple forms of advocacy.
The Fellows participated in the WCL masters program, which includes a
set of courses incorporating international, comparative and domestic
approaches to legal issues of importance to womens lives. In addition
to taking doctrinal courses, the Fellows conducted
supervised fieldwork and participated in seminars examining how
different teaching methodologies, including clinical legal education,
could be effective in different legal and cultural contexts. The goal of
these fellowships was to provide womens rights advocates with a solid
foundation in gender theory, women's human rights and educational
theory, enabling them to return to the target countries as faculty
members well positioned to integrate gender into legal theory and legal
education.
While at the Washington College of Law, the Fellows worked closely
with faculty members to develop curriculum, teaching materials and
pedagogical methods for different courses that they then taught at law
schools in Latin America. They also authored chapters of Genero y Derecho, the first Latin American legal
textbook on gender and the law in Latin America.
