The Education Section Informal Education and Outreach Working Group represents Earth and space science educators, education-attentive scientists, and others who work with informal (a.k.a., “out of school time”) audiences in a variety of settings, such as museums, planetariums, universities, and more. Informal learning is a lifelong learning process––especially important because 95% of our lives is spent outside of formal classroom settings.
This working group was initiated in 2022. Our goal for the coming year is to engage our members in establishing priorities that meet community needs, as well as test a new pilot initiative which may become a staple program offering at future Fall Meeting sites. Read on for more information!
Recent projects:
As its first initiative, the AGU Education Section Informal Education Working Group worked on the development and facilitation of a pilot public-facing event to be held during the week of AGU Fall Meeting. We invited Earth and space science educators, teams of educators, education-attentive scientists, and others who were in Chicago for the 2022 AGU Fall Meeting to come to Chicago’s Adler Planetarium on Wednesday evening December 14, 2022 to do activities with and/or interact one on one with the public on various Earth & space science topics. The event was highly successful with over 2000 attendees just from AGU, and 800 from the general public!
This program idea was a follow-on to Exploration Station, a program that was held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco until 2015, which was developed and led first by the AGU Space Physics and Aeronomy section Education and Public Outreach committee and, later, by AGU staff. While this current iteration of the program will not be as extensive in scope & scale as Exploration Station was, at least not at first, we are trying this version as a trial run to see if we might use what we learn to present a public-facing education program in future AGU Fall Meeting cities.
Recommended resources:
For more resources and information about informal education, please visit the website of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE).
This is a new working group and we welcome your ideas, questions, and broader participation! Contact: Sanlyn Buxner (buxner@psi.edu) or Michelle Nichols (mnichols@adlerplanetarium.org).