Speaker
Description
In the context of Romania joining the OCDE is of outmost importance to consider aligning the educational knowledge content with the literacy standards worldwide in all disciplines including astronomy. At the international level the astronomy literacy standards have been defined by Russo et. al. 2019 and within the IAU Astronomy Education Office assessment instruments of astronomy concept inventories are being developed. In Romania, the status of astronomy as a science suffers from a duality beyond compare, while it is a subject of research it is not a subject of study in the national curricula. As a consequence, the access to astronomy education is inadequate and creates severe inequalities among students. We propose to overcome the disadvantages of our Romanian reality with a strategy that transforms isolated astronomy outreach events in bricks that build a complete and structured knowledge in astronomy ensuring astronomy literacy at all levels of our society. Our research looks at astronomy education over time in Romania since the beginning of the nineteenth century making comparison with the themes of astronomy literacy today. Apart form the formal astronomy education we also look into the non-formal approaches to astronomy education publicly available and assess how well the astronomy literacy standard is being covered and propose a strategy to maximise the impact of all astronomy education resources available for Romania in order to achieve high quality and equitable astronomy education for Romanians.