HR: 10:20h
AN: ED42A-01    [Abstracts]
TI: International Workshops for Teachers at the European Geosciences Union
AU: * Laj, C
EM: laj@lsce.cnrs-gif.fr
AF: LSCE, Ave. de la terrasse, Gif-sur-Yvette, 91198 France
AB: The 2005 edition of the EGU Geophysical Information for Teachers (GIFT) workshoptook place in April 2005 during the General Assembly of the European Gesciences Union. It reunited 70 teachers from 16 European Countries and 3 teachers from the USA. The general theme of this 2-days workshop was 'The history of the Earth' and it focussed on important, but somewhat ill-known aspects of the evolution of our planet. GIFT-2005 was preceeded by a one-day workshop on Natural Risk Assessment (NaRAs) which included aspects of seismology in the schools and two talks on the 2004 Sumatra tsunami. Both were organized by the Committee on Education of EGU. Both workshops comprised seminal talks by leading scientists in the field, but also presentations by science educators and presentations by the teachers themselved of some off-track activities in their schools. This combitation stimulated discussions between the teachers, scientists and science educators and among the teachers where the different languages did not appear to create major difficulties (the official language of the workshops was English). Some of the contacts between teachers are already evolving in long term collaborations between them and their respective schools. It clearly appears that reuniting teachers formed and teaching within different educational systems, leads to stimulating creative discussions and collaborations, each teacher benefitting from the different background of his/her colleagues. The great output of this kind of international workshop is to show that while there is no educational system 'better than all others', the interactions between teachers, scientists and sciences educators during a major scientific conference, create new stimulus and enthousiasm among the teachers and this will invariably lead to up-to-date and alive teaching of geo-sciences (and scicnes in general) in primary and secondary schools, i.e. where future geoscientist are formed.
DE: 0805 Elementary and secondary education
DE: 0830 Teacher training
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005