20–27 Mar 2026
Wild View Resorts
Africa/Gaborone timezone

BLUEshift Africa: Accelerating Towards the Future of Undergraduate Astronomy Education in Africa

26 Mar 2026, 15:00
15m
Wild View Resorts

Wild View Resorts

Plot 80 President Avenue, Kasane, Botswana
In-person - Talk 7 Astronomy Education Education, Development & Outreach

Speaker

Linda Strubbe (Strubbe Educational Consulting)

Description

In the vision to increase the number of African astronomers and related STEM professionals, strengthening undergraduate astronomy education is a crucial (and often overlooked) piece. BLUEshift Africa is a project designed to address this need. BLUEshift’s cornerstone is two-day workshops on undergraduate astronomy teaching for early-career scientists, held at AfAS 2025 and 2026. The main workshop goals are to help participants learn to teach astronomy in more interactive and inclusive ways and to build community around university-level astronomy teaching in Africa. Workshop topics include research-based principles of teaching and learning, teaching to promote equity and inclusion, and active learning techniques such as Think-Pair-Share. We are delighted to share the results from our two years of workshops, the second of which just concluded. We will also share results from our online “Communities of Teaching” sessions with workshop alumni, and from our pilot study of undergraduate astronomy teaching around the continent.

Stream Education, Development and Outreach

Primary authors

Linda Strubbe (Strubbe Educational Consulting) Tabitha Alango (Elimisha Msichana Elimisha Jamii) Dr Tom Rice (American Astronomical Society)

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.