EGU Geosciences Education Field Officers: the assessment of the programme

With the main goal of supporting geosciences education in Europe and beyond, the European Geosciences Union (EGU) Education Committee (EC) launched and support the Geoscience Education Field Officers (GEFO) programme. A GEFO is a teacher trainer that promotes hands-on workshops to geoscience teachers and pre-service teachers, from primary to secondary school, in his own country. Since 2019, a network of 11 EGU GEFO are working, initially with members from France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, later reinforced, in May 2022, with GEFO from Albania, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Romania, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Beyond Europe GEFO programme is established in eight countries (Burkina Faso, Chile, Colombia India, Malaysia, Morocco, Togo) and is supported by the International Union of Geological Sciences Commission on Geoscience Education (IUGS-COGE). Indicators as: a) number of workshops held, attending participants, and locations; b) workshop contents; c) teachers’ conferences attended and abstracts/papers published by GEFO about their activity; d) and an evaluation form provided to attending participants that allows to make a sample characterisation (teacher education establishments involved, gender, role, teaching years, professional position, school level, taught subjects) and appreciation of the interest of the workshops, have been used to assess the progress of the programme. The evaluation form was adapted from one used by the Earth Science Education Unit (University of Keele, UK). The assessment has brought some challenges particularly related to the application of the same evaluation form in different national educational systems/curricula, and with the encouragement of attends to fill in the form.