Duration: 2026 – 2028
Principal Researcher
Cláudia Faria
CI&DEI´s Principal Researcher
Bianor Valente
Team Members
Paulo Maurício
Funding
FCT
Research line
Educational Policies, Didactics and Training
The central problem of this project is to understand how to bring the ocean into school to promote meaningful Ocean Literacy (OL). In concrete, the project aims to get a general picture of the level of OL of the Portuguese students, at the end of the main school cycles, and to identify and deeply understand how schools explore ocean issues with their students, using a holistic approach to understand the process of teachers’ appropriation of ocean issues, their practices and perspectives. Through this, we expect to understand the direction we are adopting concerning the promotion of ocean literacy in our schools.
The ocean is intrinsically connected to our lives, holding innumerous possibilities for different dimensions of our modern life. In 2017, the UN General Assembly declared the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030), the ‘Ocean Decade’, which highlights the importance of the ocean for achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in order to support a sustainable, equitable and healthy future for all. Moreover, in a coastal country like Portugal, with 97% of its territory made by sea, and where the sea is immersed in all cultural, historical, and daily life dimensions, present and future generations have an increased responsibility to sustainably manage the ocean. However, individually and collectively, Portuguese people have little awareness of their impact on the ocean. To reverse this reality, OL, a holistic and multidimensional framework, which essence is the understanding the ocean’s influence on us and our influence on the ocean, is crucial. An ocean-literate person understands the fundamental concepts about the ocean; can communicate about the ocean in a meaningful way; and is able to make informed and responsible decisions regarding the ocean and its resources, being capable of transforming knowledge into actions. In order to meet an ocean literacy society, numerous international trends in formal education are guiding the design and update of curricula, in order to make it “more blue”. The inclusion of OL in the curriculum will help learners to understand the importance of ocean life and features and ocean–human interactions, underscoring that the ocean is part of the planet, therefore supporting better decision-making by society as a whole.
Therefore, the ultimate goal of this project is to make school curriculum more blue. The objective of our initiative extends beyond increasing knowledge; it aims to foster a comprehensive understanding of the ocean. OL, in our vision, involves not only the acquisition of knowledge but also the transformation of this knowledge into practical applications, driving changes in attitudes and behaviors towards a sustainable and informed relationship with the ocean, in order to enable and empower students to take sustainable action for collective well-being and sustainable development. At the end, it is expected that the project will contribute to a greater understanding on how to respond to the need to achieve an Ocean Literate society, in general, and in the Portuguese reality, in particular, a current and urgent need, not only producing recommendations for teachers, but also for curriculum reformulation and for pre-service and in-service teacher education. Additionally, we expect that these recommendations could also contribute to guide other countries interested in evaluate these same issues, which is an objective of the Ocean decade.