Astronomy has been one of the area of interests among Nepali students and enthusiasts, thus, sometimes ‘A’ in STEAM is confused as Astronomy instead of Arts. Therefore, we opt to use the power of Astronomy to foster STEAM education in Nepal to contribute to sustainable development goal 4 i.e. quality education. The idea of this project is to create astronomy club at selected school, train students and help them communicate with their own communities to explore collaborative opportunity sharing their knowledge.
Nepal has a huge gap between community (public) and institutional (private) schools in terms of their teaching-learning approaches. Children from marginalized, underprivileged and underrepresented communities are mostly going to community schools. This gap is creating gender as well as educational disparities in the country. We plan to use astronomy as a tool and astronomy clubs a resource centers for creating conducive environment for communication and collaboration among students at community school, institutional school and their community where both of them exist. We believe that it will help them be more critical towards these disparities and creative to be a part of equitable society. We are targeting community schools as they have less access to the resources compared to institutional schools.
This project helps student develop leadership skills through ‘mentee turns into mentor’ at workshop/training, establish astronomy club at their schools with the Telescope kit to conduct outreach activities in their locality/community. This project will help students at community school build confidence to communicate and collaborate with others students. The project will establish astronomy clubs at two schools in each province. It will be implemented in three provinces, Bagmati Province, Province-2 and Gandaki Province respectively. We believe this will help students and community to learn the communication and collaborative approaches for the better society.
Contact:
Manisha Dwa, manisha@nepalastronomicalsociety.org