Portuguese-language high school teacher programme extends its reach to South America and Africa

From 5 to 10 September, a record 75 teachers from Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, São Tomé and Cape Verde will take part in the Portuguese-language high school teacher programme at CERN.

 

CERN usually focuses on the Member States when organizing its national teacher programmes, providing them with additional return on their investment in the Laboratory by helping to train and inspire the next generation of scientists. However, Portugal’s Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas (LIP), through the Agency Ciência Viva, has taken the initiative to go beyond the borders of Portugal and include other countries that speak Portuguese. Last year there were 60 participants in the programme, including 11 teachers from Brazil and 5 from Mozambique. This year brings even more teachers from more African countries, with 45 from Portugal, 20 from Brazil, 5 from Mozambique, 3 from Angola, 1 from Cape Verde and 1 from São Tomé. “This is the first time CERN has made a connection with Angola, Cape Verde and São Tomé,” said Mick Storr, head of the Teachers and Visits section in CERN's PH Department. This programme is sponsored jointly by CERN, LIP and the Brazilian Federal Government through Sociedade Brasileira de Física and Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (CBPF). Travel for the Angolan teachers is funded by the Angolan Government.

Pedro Abreu, one of the main local organizers for this programme and a physicist at LIP, says he has received a tremendous amount of feedback from last year’s first Portuguese-language programme. “Teachers send us updates about Big Bang projects they are working on and there has been an increase in the number of teachers from Portugal taking their classes to visit CERN, as well as in in the number of seminars held by Portuguese physicists at schools in Portugal (which is done prior to any visit to CERN),” said Abreu. “The Portuguese community at CERN is very committed, and most of the researchers are connected to LIP. The teachers like to feel that these physicists could have come from their school and that their current students could one day hold such positions.”

Participants will attend lectures in the mornings on topics such as particle physics, detectors, accelerators, computing and physics applications in medicine. Afternoons will include hands-on activities, such as building working cloud chambers, as well as visiting various locations around the CERN site including the LHC experiment’s control rooms, the CERN Control Centre, and the LHC Superconducting Magnet Test Facility.

“Courses such as this one cover two strategic missions of CERN – training the scientists of tomorrow through contact with teachers and promoting international collaboration,” said Storr. “By inspiring one teacher, we are potentially reaching 100 students, and if we have 1000 teachers participating each year, then in 10 years we’ve theoretically reached a million young people.” Currently, 850 teachers take part in these teacher programmes each year, and about 3500 teachers have attended since the current series started in 1998.
CERN has been hosting national programmes for teachers in their native tongues, since 2006. “We started with Hungarian, which was a bit of a challenge, but if we can do it in Hungarian we can probably do it in any language,” said Storr. To date, these programmes have been held in 15 different languages. Portugal’s decision to invite other countries to take part opens up all sorts of possibilities for networking with other Non-Member States.

“The success of CERN’s Teacher Programmes is due to a big collaborative effort between CERN physicists and engineers, users and national scientists” said Storr. “They have really taken to heart the value of educating the scientists of tomorrow and I would like to say a huge thank you to them. Without their efforts it would not be possible to run these programmes.”

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(translated into French by Rania Python)

by Carolyn Lee