Hetland to receive EPS-PED Award for Secondary School Teaching
The EPS Physics Education Division selected Karl Torstein Hetland, West Telemark Secondary School, Norway, as this year’s recipient of its Secondary School Teaching Award. K.T. Hetland developed the Energy Network, which aims to make students energy conscious and focus on renewable energy.
The Energy Network, created in 2005, consists of 15 local networks, each involving an upper secondary school and several lower secondary schools, 55 schools in all. Upper secondary school pupils serve as teachers in the associated lower secondary schools. In total, about 2000 pupils are involved. The upper secondary schools also run a network of modern weather stations throughout Norway and observations from this network are widely used in the teaching of various school subjects. Material from the Network is used in physics classes in a large number of schools at national level and plays a major role in recruiting university physics students.
K.T. Hetland led various teaching projects in Norway and was the national co-ordinator of a number of international projects also involving schools in Estonia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic, and of the Eratosthenes Experiment during the World Year of Physics, involving 178 schools from 30 countries. He received a number of national and international awards, including the Teachers’ Prize of the Norwegian Physical Society, which nominated him for the present Award.
K.T. Hetland will receive his award at the International Physics Education Conference, held together with the European Physics Education Conference on August 5-8 in Prague, Czech Republic.
