New trends in physics teaching, v.4; The ... - unesdoc - Unesco

New Trends in Physics Teaching IV
to a national project, it was clearly important for us to have communication channels to educators
in various parts of the country. We needed to find out what was going on in energy education
there and to let them know about and assist in their use of our materials.
Early in 1978 we established a twenty-four-person Regional Energy Education Network.
Twelve of the representatives were NSTA district directors, and twelve of them were social
studies people in the same regions. REEN members have been, on the whole, quite active in their
home regions. They have established workshops, they provided a distribution point for the PEEC
materials and other materials, and they feed back to us their guidance for what is needed to make
energy education work.
Practitioners conferences
Growth and the recognition of our national responsibilities caused us to branch out in one other
direction. While Energy & Education serves as a satisfactory mass communication mechanism,
we began to feel the need for meetings with the practitioners in the field who were teaching
energy and, therefore, meeting the problems of implementing energy education materials head-on.
With DOE funding, we held what we called the ‘First Annual Practitioners Conference on
Energy Education’ at the University of Maryland in December of 1978. This first conference
established the format that we’ve followed ever since. We divided the sixty to seventy participants
into small working groups and asked them to summarize the state of the art in energy education
for us and to make recommendations about its needs.
The first conference was one in which internal communication and mutual support were
extremely important. It was the first time that many people who had been involved in energy
education in isolation in various parts of the country were able to come together, to share their
concerns and to receive the support of others with similar enthusiasm. The first conference was
reported in the January 1979 issue of Energy & Education. It seemed to have filled a need and
early in 1979 we began to receive inquiries about holding the second conference and, with funding
from a variety of sources, we held it at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, in late 1979.
The effects of a year’s success were noticeable. The participants were more outwardly directed
and their recommendations (which are available in a report from NSTA [ 201 ) essentially said to
the school districts and state and federal agencies that ‘energy education is important and here’s
what we need if we are going to continue it’.
The upsurge of that confidence and growth were also evident at the Third Practitioners Conference
held in November 1980 at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s ‘Land Between the Lakes’
conference centre. But members of this conference was not overconfident; they began to look
very realistically at the future. The working group reports from that session (also available in
a report from NSTA [30]) concern themselves with private and public co-operation, with guidelines
for the search for funding, etc. It was already clear to us in November 1980 that the funding
picture, which until that time had been largely federally based, was about to change.
ENERGY EDUCATION - 198 1
Energy education in 198 1 seems to have accomplished the difficult feat of reaching its apex and
nadir essentially simultaneously. According to its sponsors, National Energy Education Day
(NEED) was celebrated on 20 March in some 10,000 schools; proclamations were signed by
forty-seven governors and several million students were made aware, at least for one day, of our
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