Author: Siwei Zou
Affiliation: Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking Univesrsity
Country: China
Co-Author(s): Thijs Kouwenhoven
Affiliation: Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Country: China
Title: Astronomy for Development from school to university in South-western China
Our main goal of this project is to improve the life, education and mental health condition for left-behind children and help university students to break the language barrier in research in the less-developed region of China. Our project includes two parts: i). To initiate the training for teachers and volunteers in Pingtang Town in astronomy education and mental health aid for the ‘left-behind’ children. ii). To test our designed research English course for science students at Yunnan University, to help them to break the language barrier in research. Then we aim to enlarge the audience to the left-behind children and students in a larger area of south-eastern China. We are going to connect the Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), a local non-profit organization in Pingtang, Guizhou, Yunnan University, Yunnan Observatory and IAU OAD office in East-Asia region. 1. The ‘left behind’ children problem is a long-lasting problem especially in the countryside of China. It means children whose parent or parents work in big cities for a living and leave their children in the countryside. Based on the white book “The spiritual status of Chinese left-behind children 2018 ”, there are nearly 10 million left-behind children in the countryside of China. The left-behind children and adolescents are far not adequately cared for. Due to the poor education condition and lacking of caress from their parents, these children not only behave unsatisfied in the compulsory education courses but also suffering multiple psychological problems. We will start with the ‘left behind’ students in PingTang — a small town in GuiZhou province. This small town is near the FAST telescope, we will take advantage of the location and organize 1. a one-week workshop to train teachers and volunteers of basic astronomy teaching skill and psychology guide courses in left-behind caring center and primary school in Pingtang 2. a two day trip to FAST telescope and introduce children basic science especially astronomy knowledge. 2. The second part of this project is called ‘Do Not Let Language Become Barrier in Science’. Based on our experience of ‘Sino-French Summer Observing School’ held at Yunnan University in 2018, we found the course and observation experience are proved to be very useful. However, we realized that the average awkward research English level of students have limited their communication with international researchers. Out of this motivation, we are collaborating with one English training center “Likeshuo” to design a research English course and will test it on the University students who study in astronomy. This training center contains more than 200 staff and obtained in both adults and children English teaching. However, professional research English course is still lacking in their designed courses. Therefore we will design this course together and then applied it firstly onto Yunnan University postgraduate students in Astronomy. We are aiming at reaching education equality especially science education equality between developing and less-developed area.