A distant goal - reached!

After having arrived in Accra, Ghana last Monday, the team here has been engaged in a whirlwind of instructor workshop activities and cultural acclimatization. There’s been long meetings, there’s been attempts at impersonating our students’ perspectives, there’s been many tea breaks as well as friendships formed. Professional astronomers from Canada, Europe, Nigeria, and Ghana have been preparing to conduct a one week intensive summer school for over 60 West African students. As an international family has been founded around a common vision to promote astronomy, we are very excited to be involved with running this unique program and hope that many of our students leave feeling empowered and with newfound visions of a future in science and technology.

For our students, the West African International Summer School for Young Astronomers (WAISSYA) was opened this past Monday with a very well conducted opening ceremony run by our local organizing team. We were fortunate to have the blessings of high dignitaries from the Ghanaian government as well as local universities and organizations. We even had the opportunity to meet a Mr. Allotey, a Ghanaian famous for his contribution to science. 

This summer school is the biggest WAISSYA yet, with the biggest team, and we hope also the biggest impact on the region. There is a palpable feeling here that we are engaged in training young minds to be leaders in industry, science, and education. Our students are impressive and diverse individuals: a few are teachers, others are students, and others are business men and women. We even have one student representing the Ghanaian government – he is here to make a report that will directly impact the formation of an astronomy curriculum component for science teaching in Ghana. We have also been contacted by local universities hoping to collaborate to establish a more complete astronomy curriculum. This collaboration with the University of Accra will be conducted by our Nigerian colleagues at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.  

WAISSYA is unique for a number of reasons. Compared with many similar programs run in other African locales, WAISSYA’s team is at least half local, being composed of professionals from within West Africa as well as the international community. By having such an international team our hope is that WAISSYA is authentically West African rather than something foreign brought to our students. The West African team members are leading scientists in their fields, running active research projects at their home institutions in Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa, as well as being strong advocates of STEM disciplines in their countries.

The second big way WAISSYA is unique in the world is the teaching program. WAISSYA utilizes a pedagogical style called inquiry. A couple days ago the instructors got a taste of what inquiry is – we need to understand the students’ struggles as well as their triumphs. Inquiry starts with asking questions. Questions are prompted by images of different astronomical subjects: the sun, rockets, stars, galaxies, the moon, exoplanets, and others. Students can decide on a question that most interests them, and then along with other students who are interested in the same thing they will engage with their question for a rather long period of time. Students will learn how to think like a scientist and hopefully come away feeling that any question or difficulty they have in life can be solved by focused hard work.

Before leaving for today, we’d like to take a moment to thank our wonderful sponsors for making this school happen. It is amazing to be seeing this program come together, and it is all thanks to our sponsor organizations as well as many private individuals. You've believed in our vision for creating a sustainable and highly influential program for West African students to explore their interests in astronomy. Thank you!

Our Donors

Many individuals have donated through our crowd funding page

Here are the organizations that have generously contributed partial funding for WAISSYA 2017:

IAU Office of Astronomy for Development, Square Kilometer Array, Abdus-Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, American Association of Physics Teachers, University of British Columbia Dept. of Physics & Astronomy.

Stay tuned for more posts about inquiry, the culture of Ghana, astronomy, and how our program is going throughout the week!