Field Officers take on the Geoscience Education world

<p>Responding to a widely perceived need for enhancing geoscience education (King, 2013), in 2018 the EGU Committee on Education launched the EGU and IUGS-IGEO Geoscience Field Officer (FO), project. FO Educators are specifically trained and appointed to run professional development activities: teacher workshops based the hands-on activities developed by ESEU Earth Science Education Unit (originally at Keele University) and published in the Earthlearningidea on-line repository. These activities, based on the CASE (Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education) methodology and successfully tested on nearly 40,000 teachers in the UK (King & Thomas, 2012), are aimed at geoscience teachers without an academic background in this field, or needing training courses in practical geology. The objective is to improve teachers’ knowledge and skills by means of a friendly approach and to raise their self-confidence in addressing geoscience topics in their classes. Six EGU and IUGS-IGEO FOs (the first six authors of this article) translated the activities into their respective national languages, prepared the workshops using commonly available equipment and low-cost materials and begun running workshops in May 2019. Meanwhile, the FOs coordinated their work and exchanged information through e-mail and Skype meetings. By January 2020, the FOs’ activity has included: 16 workshops given in Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Morocco, and India for 286 attending teachers from primary and secondary schools. The workshops were evaluated through a questionnaire shared by all the FOs. The feedback showed that all the participants found the approaches very interesting and expressed interest in updating themselves and attending future workshops. The full evaluation data will be presented at a later date. Information about the FO workshops was disseminated through 4 teachers’ conferences, aimed at informing potential participants of the opportunity offered by EGU in the first pilot countries. Following the pleasing results of the first months of the FO project, EGU made a second call for more FOs in EU and non-EU countries. The new FOs will be trained during the EGU General Assembly 2020 in Vienna with the assistance of the existing FOs. Geoscience plays an important role in the operation of society and in protecting the future for all humans. Geoscience underpins key areas of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by all United Nations Member States in the 2030 Agenda (United Nations 2015). The FOs’ dissemination activities will help the geoscience community to include students and teachers from the school level upwards and will result in the forging of interdisciplinary links with other disciplines and in promoting the adoption of sustainable development models in a growing number of countries.</p><p> </p><p>References</p><p>Earthlearningidea website: http//:www.earthlearningidea.com</p><p>King C. (2013). Geoscience education across the globe - results of the IUGS-COGE/IGEO survey. Episodes, 36.1, 19-30.</p><p>King. C. and Thomas, A. (2012). Earth Science Education Unit workshops – an evaluation of their impact. School Science Review. 94(347) 25-35. ISSN 0036-6811.</p><p>United Nations (2015) Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/ documents/21252030%20Agenda%20for%20Sustainable%20 Development%20web.pdf</p>