Educational strategies to reduce risk: a choice of social responsibility

This work develops a critical reflection on the activities for information, training and education conducted by a group of researchers of the INGV in recent years.
In particular, our analysis, from an epistemological point of view, is between:
 science outreach, the link between science and the world;
 science teaching and its role of contact between science and school;
 risk education, imaged as a process able to develop a culture of risk in relation to the territory in which we live.
These issues are critically analyzed on the basis of experience gained since 1995.
The educational methodologies tested in "peacetime", out of seismic events, with the EDURISK Project are compared with those experienced during the emergency in Abruzzo.
Increasingly today, we refer to prevention as a primary strategy of defense against risk.
But very often the responsibility of making prevention falls on the others as government, institutions, local authorities and the citizen perceive themselves as powerless against the inevitability of natural events and refer to the rulers for the implementation of effective prevention policies.
As researchers, what are the most effective actions we can take to influence the risk reduction and motivate the choices of people?
The effectiveness of our interventions must be based on scientific information, on a specific training, or must be reached to develop values, actions, awareness?
Our interventions must be oriented and developed to inform, to train or to educate?

Crescimbene, M., F. La Longa, R. Camassi, C. Nostro, F.Bernardini, E. Ercolani and V. Castelli (2010). L’Aquila, earthquake of 6 April 2009: a turning point in the educational strategies for seismic risk reduction, In: ESC 2010 - European Seismological Conference 32nd General
assembly (September 6-10, Montpellier, France);
available at http://hdl.handle.net/2122/6791.
La Longa, F., and M. Crescimbene (2009). La dimensione psicologica del terremoto che ha colpito l’Abruzzo. Relazione sull’attività di supporto svolta in Abruzzo dal 10/04/09 al 19/09/09, 11pp; available at http://hdl.
handle.net/2122/5869.
Peppoloni, S. (2011). Proposals for developing geoethics in Italy, 10.1474/ Epitome, 041032, Geoitalia 2011.
Wallace, D.P. (2007). Knowledge Management: Historical and Cross-Disciplinary Themes, Libraries Unlimited, 2nd edition, ISBN 9781591585022, 244 pp.
Wisner, B. (2006). Let our children teach us! A review of the role of education and knowledge in disaster risk reduction,
UNISDR System Thematic Cluster/Platform on
Knowledge and Education, 135 pp.; available at http://
www.unisdr.org/2005/task-force/working%20groups/knowledge-education/docs/Let-our-Children-Teach-Us.pdf.
Websites
EDURISK Project,
http://edurisk.it/eng.html.
People and Participation,
http://www.peopleandparticipation.net/.