The European experience of educational seismology

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of last two decades, European experiences in educational seismology and describes the different contexts in which they have been developed. The basic idea of these educational projects is that Seismology may represent an efficient communication vehicle for teaching a wide range of basic Earth sci-ence topics through laboratory practices and educational activities. Moreover it is also an effective tool to raise in the young citizens the awareness on the earthquake risk and possible mitigation actions. In this frame several seismic stations with different technologies were installed in schools across Europe. The scientific support of re-searchers and the need to establish strong links between teachers and researchers attribute to the school an active role in the knowledge process using the scientific laboratory practice by adopting the “learning by doing” modern approach of science communication (R. Schank and C. Cleary, 1995, Engines for Education, Ed. Routledge, 248 pp). Some educational activities correlated with seismological projects are presented, following different strategies depending on the country, but all aimed at building a new way to communicate science in the schools. The new vogue is the opening toward social networks and blogs. This generalizes the concept of an educational Geoscience website making it an e-platform for science communication and multimedia data sharing, where researchers, teachers, students and education op-erators can interact and constantly be kept informed of ongoing activities and relevant events. All of these 'seismology at school' initiatives rely on the concept of school networking and will merge in the European project NERA (Network of European Research Infrastructures for Earthquake Risk Assessment and Mitigation, http://www.nera-eu.org/) where a spe-cific workpackage is dedicated to networking school seismology programs.