2019-2022 - EGU Geoscience Education Field Officer Programme across the COVID-19 pandemic

In 2018 the European Geoscience Union Committee on Education launched the Geoscience Education Field Officer (GEFO) programme to establish a network of teacher trainers to improve the teaching of Geoscience in European countries and beyond by means of hands-on workshops, based on the experience and resources developed by the Earth Science Education Unit at Keele University (UK).

The first GEFOs (from France, India, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, and Spain) were selected, trained in April 2019 in Vienna and, after setting up the equipment for running practical labs and translating the related worksheets from the Earthlearningidea repository (www.earthlearningidea.com), began to run workshops for teachers in their respective countries.

 Between May 2019-May 2022, GEFOs ran 29 face-to-face workshops in five countries, with 503 attending teachers from primary to higher secondary school, and six presentations at teachers’ conferences.

More workshops were planned when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, leading the governments to close the schools and suspend all activities in attendance.

GEFOs had to stop running face-to-face workshops, but continued to meet online, exploiting the forced interruption for reflecting on past activities, and switched to online teaching, giving 27 webinars attended by 609 teachers, including one for the National Organization of Science Teachers and Educators (Philippines), one for the International Earth Science Olympiad 2021, one for the Experiment Share - Earth Day Eve and two for the virtual EGU GIFT (Geosciences Information For Teachers) 2021 and 2022.

Meanwhile, GEFOs published two papers on the assessment of the first year of the GEFO programme (Correia et al., 2020; Realdon et al., 2020), one regarding the activity in Portugal (Correia, et al., 2021), an educational article in a teachers’ journal (Realdon et al., 2021), and four abstracts in national and international teacher’s conferences.

All the workshops in attendance were assessed by means of the same evaluation questionnaire, administered in each country’s language. Despite the difficulties and constraints met since 2019, the results offered an encouraging picture of the workshops’ outcomes in all the involved countries, with very high appreciation from the teachers and useful suggestions for the future development of the GEFO programme.

 

References:

Correia G.P., Pereira, H. & King, C. (2021). O Geoscience Education Field Officer, Revista Ciência Elementar, V9(3): 056. DOI http://doi.org/10.24927/rce2021.056

Correia G., Realdon G., Coupechoux G., Juan X., Baskar R., Burgeoini Y. & King C. (2020) - Geoscience Education Field Officer international programme: The first year of activity (May 2019 – April 2020). ASE International, 10, 11-21. ISSN: 2515-110X

Realdon G., Coupechoux G., Correia G.P., Juan X., Baskar R., Bourgeoini Y. & King C. (2020) - EGU (European Geosciences Union) Education Field Officer programme: teachers’ appreciation, perceptions and needs. European Geologist Journal, 50, 10-14. ISSN: 1028 - 267X. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4311369 

Realdon G., Correia G.P., Juan X., Coupechoux G., Baskar R., Bourgeoini Y. & King, C. (2021) - Watery world – hands- on experiments from Earthlearningidea. Science in School, 54. ISSN 1818-0361 https://www.scienceinschool.org/article/2021/watery-world-hands-on-experiments/