It’s summer and that means it’s time to travel.

Well, actually, we travel year round, but…

July is a particularly mobile month with Nicole (@NoisyAstronomer) going to CONvergence and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific meeting (the latter with @GeorgiaBracey), several team members going on vacation (I’d forgotten those existed!), and then there is my travel. For the next 35 days I’m going to be in Europe, working to come up to speed with the Galileo Teacher Training Program (GTTP) and the Global Hands-On Universe program (GHOU). I’ll be traveling with a force of nature named Rosa Doran, and across 5 weeks we’re going first to Turku, Finland for the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS), then to Lisbon, Portugal to collaborate at NUCLIO, and finally, we’ll be attending the GHOU workshop in Velos, Greece.*

For me, this trip is really a chance to learn about how astronomy is taught in other nations. Here, in the US, we’re bound by our national and state standards, an we are sometimes trapped by a culture that avoids topics like evolution and cosmology so as to avoid culture wars. While Europe has many over their own rules and cultural biases, these aren’t their issues. During the first week, I’ll be helping with a GTTP that will be teaching content and concepts in teaching to educators. (You can see what we’re doing here.) This meeting within the greater EWASS allows us to take advantage of their marketing and infrastructure to run a program for educators that also allows us to take folks to hear amazing speakers.

This year I’m going to learn. Next year, if all goes well, I’ll be returning to be part of the program, as we weave CosmoQuest related educational materials into GTTP and GHOU.

Want to follow along on my adventures? Circle me on G+ or follow me on twitter (@StarStryder). There will be images, stories, and the occasional video documenting my journey.

*This is being paid for via my normal salary, and a European program is paying my airfare and some hotel. Mostly, I’ll be crashing on sofas/spare beds. No NASA funding , donations, or institutional funding is being used to support this trip.