Sara Ricciardi

Co-authors: Stefano Sandrelli, Stefania Varano, Silvia Casu, Giuliana Giobbi, Riccardo Leoni, Claudia Mignone, Gloria Tirabassi, Rosa Valiante, Alessandra Zanazzi, and Anita Zanella
From our experience with schools and educational communities, we have realized that the weak link in developing scientific citizenship starting from primary school is not the contents but the difficulties in building valuable educational practices that are rich and feasible for teachers and students. Those practices engaging pupils should also allow students to "look inside" scientific research and understand how it works. Our focus, therefore, as IAU Office of Astronomy for Education Center Italy, was aimed to stimulate and co-design educational practices interesting for schools in the Mediterranean countries. However, first of all, we had to glue together a community of astronomers, educators, and practitioners in the Mediterranean Area who could work together, reflecting on the educational value of astronomy at school commonly but also thinking about strategies for working with the various environments within our collaboration. Our choice led us to a co-design process; talking about educational resources, together we grew a community of practice among IAU National Astronomy for Education Coordinators (NAECs), encompassing various countries from southern Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East. One of the Office's priorities is to exchange ideas about Astronomy Education and stimulate a conversation about fully engaging the various National communities of teachers and students. We strived to create an equitable partnership among all teams involved. After defining together a common theme for this educational project (light in its multiple facets), we worked on individual resources already developed in the various countries, analyzing them and understanding how to make them usable in other partner countries. We aimed to produce universal resources centered on students' needs, emphasizing hands-on methods. We embarked on a co-creation project where each NAEC presented its educational resource. Then through peer-to-peer discussion facilitated by Office members, we tailored those resources for a broader audience and different educational contexts. After a long online process (October 2021 to June 2022), we finally met for our first in-person meeting on the island of Lampedusa, a highly symbolic location in the middle of the Mediterranean. Here, each participant showcased their revised activity, and we collectively created a structure for those resources. We are now documenting the process and finalizing a multilingual, multicultural educational resources booklet. Over two years, 23 National representatives joined the project as advisors for other NAECs or in the tailoring and translation process, while about 11 Mediterranean countries are proposing a resource. This presentation will describe the two-year process that led to these outcomes, highlighting the growth and development of the NAEC Mediterranean community.