Building International Capacity In Earth Sciences Education Through GIFT Workshops

For over 20 years, the Geoscience Information For Teachers (GIFT) workshops as a teacher enhancement program, have been financially supported by the EGU and were organized by the EGU Committee on Education (CoE). These workshops have been held in conjunction with the EGU annual General Assembly in Vienna, Austria. Each year the workshop has focused on a different general theme. Past themes have included, for example, “Energy and Sustainable Development”, “The Carbon Cycle”, “Mineral Resources”, “The Solar System And Beyond” and “The Mediterranean”. These workshops combined scientific presentations, by prominent scientists, coupled with hands-on, inquiry-based activities that are used by the teachers in their classrooms to explain related scientific principles or topics. The main objective of these workshops was to communicate first-hand scientific information to teachers, significantly shortening the time between discovery and textbook. Since inception, the EGU GIFT workshops have brought together nearly 1000 teachers from over 25 nations. The EGU CoE further expanded efforts to teachers outside of Europe by organizing Vienna-style GIFT workshops outside of Europe in Malaysia, Mexico, Ethiopia and South Africa.

            With a broad vision to further increase the impact of “out-of-Vienna” activities, a new type of EGU GIFT workshop has now been achieved for teachers in South Africa, on a “capacity-building” basis. Funding from the EGU was awarded to a local, South African Program Committee for a workshop in Cape Town, South Africa. In consultation with representatives from the EGU CoE, the South African Program Committee, together with presenters from South Africa successfully accomplished the first of these “capacity-building” GIFT workshops in August, 2022. The aim of these novel workshops is to transfer and grow, as much as possible, the achievements obtained at EGU in Vienna to different countries globally, while observing and learning the using successful educational approaches developed in these countries.

Programs and presentations of past GIFT workshops, with Web streaming, are available at: https://www.egu.eu/education/gift/workshops/