Teachers’ professional development in Italy: assessment of EGU Geoscience Education Field Officer (GEFO) programme after five years of activity

In this age of rapid environmental changes, geoscience education becomes even more necessary to achieve sustainability across the ecological transition. In front of this need, in Italy, as well as in many other countries, the teaching of geosciences – even if it is prescribed in all grades of compulsory education – is often neglected, mainly for lack of specific teachers’ training.

To overcome this criticality, in 2019 EGU appointed, trained, and funded four Geoscience Education Field Officers (GEFOs) to run practical workshops on curricular geoscience topics for teachers in four European countries (France, Italy, Portugal and Spain), followed by more GEFOs enrolled in the successive years. One of authors (G. Realdon) was appointed as GEFO for Italy.

Italian GEFO’s activity, started in July 2019, then interrupted by COVID-19 pandemic in the period from early 2020 to fall 2021, resumed at full swing in fall 2022 and has been continuing steadily to present.

Since the beginning, the outcomes of the workshops have been monitored through an evaluation questionnaire, agreed and applied by all GEFOs in their respective countries.

The number of workshops carried out in Italy between 2019 and 2024 amounts to 37, with 562 participants in 12 regions spanning the whole country.

Most of the teachers (88.2%) were women, 78.3% consisted of confirmed teachers and 54% had been teaching for 7-25 years. Lower secondary school teachers accounted for 36 % of the sample, followed by primary school teachers (27.2%) and upper secondary school teachers (23.7%).

Teachers’ appreciation of the workshop was assessed through three 5-point Likert scale questions.  A question about teachers’ interest in the workshops obtained a mean score of 4.82, another about their professional interest received a mean score of 4.72 and a third one about their interest in attending other workshops obtained a 4.75 mean score.

Finally, teachers were asked for comments about the workshops and suggestions for future workshops. These open answers were analysed through deductive content analysis, by applying the coding categories already used in previous studies on GEFO workshops’ participants.

The collected comments were 396, 31.6% of which expressing general appreciation for the workshop and the trainer, 26% praising the practical aspects, and 20.7% the theoretical/pedagogical knowledge provided by the workshop. The suggestions provided by the teachers were 95, 36.8% of which proposing to address other topics or subjects, and 26.3% providing methodological/organizational recommendations.  Finally, requests for more or longer workshops or expressions of general approval (e.g., “go on this way”) together accounted for 38.4% of the answers.

These results encourage the continuation and - if possible - the expansion of the project to reach more teachers. There remains the critical issue represented by the fact that still a large proportion of Italian natural sciences teachers do not receive adequate academic or in-service training in the geosciences: only a national initiative by the Ministry of Education could reach all teachers who need it and - through them - future Italian citizens.