Niels Brouwers is normaal gesproken docent biologie op The International School The Hague maar is op dit moment een jaar met sabbatical. Samen met zijn vrouw reist hij een jaar lang door Europa en bezoekt GLOBE scholen. Benieuwd hoe het gaat> Wij houden je op de hoogte!
Op dit moment is Niels in Vilnius, Litouwen en heeft hij GLOBE school ‘Vilniaus Fabijoniškių gimnazija’ bezocht.
Tuesday 4 October 2022
A brief introduction: I am Niels Brouwers, biology teacher and GLOBE coordinator at the International School of The Hague. I am currently on a year-long sabbatical trip through Europe with my partner, Wieneke Maris (geography teacher). We are not just traveling, but we want to draw inspiration for our future teaching and build an international network by visiting organisations/schools that (a) work towards best practice in teaching for sustainability and (b) organise the implementation of the GLOBE programme.
We are currently in Vilnius, Lithuania, where I visited Rūta Alkimavičienė (biology teacher and GLOBE coordinator since 2010) at her school, the ‘Vilniaus Fabijoniškių gimnazija’. Her school has been actively contributing to the GLOBE programme since 2005, first with monitoring temperature and rainfall through a small weather station, and since 2018 primarily with monitoring tree greening up and greening down.
Rūta runs the program with the help of a colleague (an English teacher). She receives one task hour per week for running GLOBE in her school and about 15 students across all year levels are involved in the programme. Currently they are monitoring 5 different tree species that are located on the school grounds. The students monitor these trees 2x a week, sharing the load as the monitoring has to take place outside the official meeting hour. The meeting hour is mainly used to upload the pictures and data on the GLOBE website, as well as for working on analysing these data and producing a conference poster. Last year, the students produced a nice poster of their findings and presented this at the national GLOBE conference.
I am really keen to see how other teachers run the GLOBE programme in their schools. Rūta has everything nicely organised and I will take this information with me to set-up the tree programme in my school next year.
The next stop will be Riga, where I hope to meet with the country coordinators as well as visit another GLOBE school in the region. To be continued.
