A Philippine Science High School (PSHS) physics teacher has been chosen to participate in the International High School Teacher Programme 2022 organized by the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) or the European Council for Nuclear Research
Joseph Hortezuela, from PSHS Central Visayas Campus (PSHS-CVisC) took part in the event to sharpen his skills from July 3 to July 16.
Hortezuela joined 42 other participants for a 2-week international teacher program composed of lectures, on-site visits, exhibitions, and hands-on workshops that introduce its participants into cutting-edge particle physics.
CERN is one of the world's largest and most respected centers for scientific research located in Geneva, Switzerland.
“The programme aims to bring modern science into the classroom and raise scientific awareness among students. I will conduct an echo seminar or a webinar of the two-week training programme,” Hortezuela said in a statement.
Participants will go back to their countries as ambassadors, who pass on the subject to our next generation of physicists, engineers, and information technology specialists.
“We have a lot of things we don’t know yet in science, and we just need models and measurements to make sense of the existence of the particles in the universe. This is the role of CERN in developing particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that leads to the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle in 2012 confirming the existence of this mass-giving field,” said Hortuzuela when asked about his take away from his experience.
Besides helping CERN establish closer links with schools all around the world, the programme targets to support teachers’ professional development in the field of particle physics, to promote the teaching of particle physics in high schools, to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and experience among teachers of different nationalities, and to stimulate activities related to the popularization of physics within and beyond the classroom.
“Collaboration is the key to discovery in science to explain our existence as exemplified by the scientists and engineers from the different parts of the world working at CERN,” he added.
For this year, participants came from United States, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, France, Kyrgyzstan, Cameroon, India, Finland, Israel, Slovakia, New Zealand, Turkey, Denmark, Romania, Croatia, Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Malaysia, Ukraine, Iran, Sweden, Montenegro, Thailand, Nepal, Poland, and Qatar.