Invitation to Contribute to a Special Issue NJG: Earth Sciences Education in the Netherlands 

Education in Earth Sciences has changed a lot over the years. The development of new activities, courses and curricula is now often based on modern didactic principles, and use is made of published evidence-based effectiveness and success of approaches. 

In our view, an improved exchange and debate on these developments in the Netherlands is needed. This will not only be beneficial for educators and potential employers, but also for our students. Hence, we believe that there is scope for putting Earth Sciences education in the Netherlands into the spotlight by means of a special issue of the Netherlands Journal of Geosciences. 

We invite educators and professionals in the discipline to contribute to this special issue on “Recent past, present and future of Earth Sciences Education in the Netherlands”. We welcome the following types of papers:

• Curriculum and instruction original articles: these aim to present effective and innovative classroom, laboratory, field and virtual activities and courses in Earth Sciences in the Netherlands, including science education in schools or science communication with the general public;
• Research articles: these focus on student learning, in particular on new educational theories and educational research questions relevant to the Earth Sciences; 
• Geo(im)pulse: these are short papers on a current issue, for example (political) developments in higher education, internationalization, admission, perception of the Earth Sciences, the (inter)national labour market;
• Literature reviews: these synthesize and evaluate already published literature on a given educational topic, with the aim to come to new insights that are of importance for the Netherlands.

All papers are expected to be founded in relevant (educational) literature, fulfill the quality standard of NJG, and will follow the normal peer review procedure. The papers will be published in Open Access. The usual NJG article processing charges and waiver policy will apply. Papers will be published online immediately after acceptance; there is no minimum number of papers required to define the special issue.

We kindly ask you to submit a letter-of-intent before preparing a manuscript. This will help us to get an idea about the interest in this special issue on Earth Sciences education in the Netherlands and to assess the character of the papers in light of the types mentioned above. 

Deadline for letter-of-intent: October 16th 2023, via email.  

We hope you are as enthusiastic about presenting your work on Earth Sciences education as we are.

Hans de Bresser and Maarten Kleinhans, editors
j.h.p.debresser@uu.nl, m.g.kleinhans@uu.nl