Geoscience Literacy Program
an outreach activity with the Geological Society of Madagascar
an outreach activity with the Geological Society of Madagascar
The Geoscience Literacy Program is an upgraded outreach activity organized by the Geological Society of Madagascar. An earlier version of it was launched in 2020. This program’s goal is to inspire high school students to pursue a geoscience or a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) degree after graduation. During this Geoscience Literacy Program, students are expected to get acquainted to four topics 1) Paleontology, 2) Mines, 3) Hydrogeology, and 4) Environmental Mining, reflecting the specialization of our volunteers. A significant milestone of this program would be to produce a Geoscience Literacy Book, in which the above topics be included. In addition to this, students will be exposed to more hands-on experience, including a scavenger hunt at local stone market and a day field trip at a nearby educational site. This activity satisfies all three missions of GSM, which is “Exchange”, “Empower” and “Excel”. GSM members share their knowledge to high school students to encourage them. Their mentoring and teaching skills improve significantly, preparing them to be a leader and a role model.
|
The program began early this year (specifically in February–March, 2021) with a training of the outreach team leaders and preparing for materials needed for the out-of-class activities. Much of these activities were done virtually and via online communication. When necessary and when COVID-19 measures eased, local volunteers meet at a dedicated place to brainstorm ideas. To enhance the impact of this program, GSM recruited more volunteers to join the outreach efforts and to offer opportunities to university students to be involved in educating high school students.
The general plan of this outreach activity is to perform in-class activity (such as what was done in 2020) and then emphasizing the knowledge gained from it with two outdoor activities: (1) scavenger hunt at local stone market, and (2) field expedition at a nearby site (about 1.5 hr drive from the capital city).
The general plan of this outreach activity is to perform in-class activity (such as what was done in 2020) and then emphasizing the knowledge gained from it with two outdoor activities: (1) scavenger hunt at local stone market, and (2) field expedition at a nearby site (about 1.5 hr drive from the capital city).
The timeline to perform these out-of-class activities was expected to take place in June and July of this year (2021). However, because of the new COVID-19 strike (which is stronger than in 2020), our Geoscience Literacy Program has been put on hold. We must respect the Malagasy government and the school's regulations, and decided to postpone the face-to-face meeting to 2022, as our meeting involves bigger gathering. In the meantime, the Geoscience Literacy Program volunteer team has been working hard at preparing the geoscience literacy book. This is a major part of the Geoscience Literacy Program. Most of the team members has sent me drafts of their assigned Chapter. Those drafts will be given feedback, and we plan to get copyright clearance of some illustrative content prior to finalizing our book efforts. |
Madagascar is in the path of getting people vaccinated, so we hope, this will bring a brighter future. We hope that by the time the hands-on activities resume, the geoscience literacy book that we’ve been working on is ready and it could be distributed to the participating high school students, which would make the GLP activity more meaningful.
To our supporters and followers, we apologize for this year’s inconvenience. Although, in-person hands on activities have been put on hold, GSM-Outreach team were actively involved in other virtual outreach activities, short videos to demonstrate hands on activities, which we contributed to support our sister association, Ikala STEM, a non-profit organization which goal is to empower the next generation of Malagasy women in STEM. Below is the video that GSM outreach volunteers prepared. The languages are in ML and in FR, which are the main language used in Madagascar. For English speaking followers, we hope that some of the visuals are helpful.
As the President and mentor of the Geoscience Literacy Program team, I am always proud to say that the outreach volunteers in Madagascar are very enthusiastic, and despite of the many challenges, they have never let our association down. I love them.
Acknowledgment: We are grateful to the Beta Sigma chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma International for providing funding to this Geoscience Literacy Program.