The 3rd Shaw–IAU Workshop on Astronomy for Education will take place on 12–15 October 2021. Owing to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the workshop will be fully virtual. 

This year’s topic is What everybody should know about Astronomy Education. What are the things that, in an ideal world, all of us who are active in astronomy education should know — about teaching methods, about ways to make our events and resources equitable, about evaluation techniques, about astronomy education research?

For participants who are new(-ish) to astronomy education, the workshop will provide a unique opportunity to familiarise themselves with many different aspects of the field in one go — and for the rest of us, it’s an opportunity to both revisit the basics and learn new things. 

The target audience for this workshop includes astronomers, teachers, educators, education researchers active in astronomy education, and anybody else who is active in astronomy education, or is planning to be. 

The call for abstracts and speaker suggestions for this workshop is now open. As the goal is to give a broad overview of all important aspects of astronomy education, all talks and posters should be focused on specific aspects of what everyone in astronomy education should know: What key concept related to your work (or the work of your colleagues) should everyone attending the Shaw–IAU workshop know, after the meeting has finished? 

The deadline for talk abstracts and speaker suggestions is 30 June 2021 and the deadline for poster abstracts is 15 August. 

The event is being organised by the IAU Office of Astronomy for Education (OAE), with generous funding from the Shaw Prize Foundation.

More information

The IAU is the international astronomical organisation that brings together more than 12 000 active professional astronomers from more than 100 countries worldwide. Its mission is to promote and safeguard astronomy in all its aspects, including research, communication, education and development, through international cooperation. The IAU also serves as the internationally recognised authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies and the surface features on them. Founded in 1919, the IAU is the world's largest professional body for astronomers.

The IAU Office of Astronomy for Education is hosted at Haus der Astronomie (HdA), managed by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. The OAE’s mission is to support and coordinate astronomy education by astronomy researchers and educators, aimed at primary or secondary schools worldwide. HdA’s hosting the OAE was made possible through the support of the German foundations the Klaus Tschira Foundation and the Carl Zeiss Foundation.

Links

• 3rd Shaw–IAU Workshop on Astronomy for Education

Contacts

Niall Deacon
OAE Coordinator
Email: deacon@astro4edu.org 

Lars Lindberg Christensen
IAU Press Officer
Cell: +49 173 38 72 621
Email: lars@eso.org