JEDI

The Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Working Group of the Office of Astronomy for Education (OAE)  focuses on establishing standards to support the design and implementation of activities as equitable as possible in learning contexts that make use of astronomy. 

Equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice are very well-known ideals, taken into great account in an ever-increasing number of projects and activities. They keep gaining momentum also in  the educational field, with the intention of creating welcoming and accessible educational groups and contexts.

This international working group has been collaborating with the organizing team of the OAE Teacher Training Programme (TTP), analysing the responses to section “Equity Diversity and Inclusion” of the TTP call and using such results for compiling a set of “guiding questions” to define transparent teacher training standards about Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) topics to be implemented in the TTP call. 

The IAU Office of Astronomy for Education Center Italy has proposed the working group in the first place and its members of the WG have established contacts with Italian primary schools in order to have teachers create and experiment  a practical checklist, based on astronomical resources used in their classrooms, in the framework of Universal Design for Learning. The work with Italian teachers aims at exploiting their expertise and knowledge in order to set new guiding questions and a more detailed and accurate checklist to design and implement welcoming and accessible educational resources, and improve the outcomes of the TTP answers analysis.