Published: 22nd April 2025 08:00 (UTC)

A new collaboration has just started between the Inclusive Astronomy Communication group (IAC) of IAU Office of Astronomy for Outreach (OAO) and AstroEDU, the OAE platform for peer reviewed activities.

The mission of the IAC is gathering and sharing tools and resources to facilitate the adoption of inclusive practices and to spread the existing knowledge. There is a collection of resources available on the IAC's webpage. Anyhow this collection is a simple list of pages or links that cannot support future growth and the advanced search features that may be needed and, moreover, there is no certification process of the published activities.

The Office of Astronomy for Education has already been down this path. The AstroEDU website and the peer reviewed process of publication behind it has been providing educational resources in English and other languages (including Italian and Spanish) for many years. The idea came up immediately in a conversation between us on this topic: "let’s see if we can collaborate!" After all education and outreach activities do have some differences but have also a lot in common. We decided on a pilot, and Raffaele Belligoli, author of some of the published IAC resources, volunteered to work with us and the AstroEDU editorial board.

The task turned out to be not too complex: with the help of the editorial board and external reviewers, Raffaele had to add information and modify his work to make it useful in an educational context and to teachers and outreach officers from all around the world. But it did not take too long: the resource was published and used with very positive feedback, also helping us trace some simple guidelines to help future migration.

This collaboration will continue. The next steps are on one side for the AstroEDU platform to enhance resources based on inclusion attributes, also with the help of the WG of OAE called JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion). On the other side the IAC members will keep up with this effort, working on the migration of their existing resources.

Livia Giacomini, editor in chief of AstroEDU says “This is a great chance for a collaborative effort where everybody gains: IAC doesn't have to build a repository, and AstroEDU is getting more resources and professional help in the publication process. Moreover, thanks to this collaboration we will reach a very important goal: we will drive more and more effort in publishing inclusive activities and making the existing ones as accessible and usable as possible for our audience of teachers, researchers, outreach officers and students. Who could ask for more?”

         

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