Geoscience Education Field Officers programme

EGU Geosciences Education Field Officers (GEFO) is a team of geosciences teachers and researchers who provide professional development to school, in-service and pre-service, teachers. So far eleven GEFO from European countries are promoting workshops at a regional and national level on primary and secondary teachers who have elements of geoscience in their teaching curriculum. The workshops are based on practical, hands-on, interactive teaching materials and use approaches designed to develop critical thinking skills, knowledge and understanding. The apparatus and materials used are not expensive and are readily available in normal school classrooms and science labs. The activities promoted are simple, overall time, speedy, and based on the online and free Earthlearningidea repository of teaching resources support. The topics include all the geosciences curricular contents such as: Plate tectonics, Rock cycle, Seismology, Time scale and history of Earth and Volcanology, but GEFO are also able to promote GeoPark training courses.

In future EGU is seeking to build on this success by expanding the initiative, so if you are interested in being a GEFO, please stay tuned. For more information about this programme, please contact the Chair of the EGU Education Committee, Jean-Luc Berenguer, at education@egu.eu.

Each Field Officer works closely in their respective country with national institutions for Teachers. All these national associations are building a network with the Education Committee to promote Geoscience Education at school and at the University.

All the partners are noting the alarming decrease in the uptake of geoscience options at all levels of education in most countries … they have agreed to write and publish the following document entitled Manifesto for the teaching of Geoscience (PDF document, 70.1 KB).