Despite playing “a crucial role in the functioning of the earth system”, the oceans “are absent from educational curricula”, emphasizes María Lorenzo, a researcher at the Faculty of Education and Sport Sciences. As part of her doctoral thesis, she carried out a “critical analysis” of the primary education curriculum in Galicia, in which neither the oceans “nor the threats that beset them” are present, such as ocean acidification, one of the effects of global environmental change. “The educational system cannot ignore this situation and initial teacher training must develop skills to address it”, argues Lorenzo Rial. As part of her thesis, she designed and carried out a series of activities in the faculty’s classrooms that established “synergies between scientific education, education for sustainability with a gender perspective and marine sciences”, areas that, as she explains, are usually addressed separately in the classrooms. The project was also completed with the development of a series of open educational resources, gathered on the website O mar das mulheres.
Directed by the professor of the Department of Special Didactics María Álvarez Lires and by the professor of Ecology and researcher of the Biological Oceanography group of the CIM Emilio Fernández, the thesis Education, sustainability and gender: a didactic approach to global ocean change through ICTs allowed in this sense “to build a reference framework for the design and experimentation of intervention proposals in the classroom of the Degree in Primary Education”. Through a series of activities, aimed at future teachers developing teaching skills in the field of “ocean literacy” and incorporating the gender perspective, the researcher was able to see how the students “carried out significant learning” which in turn “served to raise their awareness of global environmental change, the need to conserve and protect the oceans and the importance of women’s contributions to ocean sustainability”.
The didactic possibilities of ICT resources
One of the chapters of the thesis presents the results of the “critical analysis” that Lorenzo carried out of the primary school curriculum in Galicia, in which, in addition to noting how “neither the oceans nor the estuaries are present” in the educational content to be addressed, “assessment through standards does not promote the development of skills, the main objective of education”. In this sense, the teacher emphasizes that “scientific education must incorporate resources that integrate ocean literacy”.
Thus, another section of her thesis presents the result of the research work, both at the national and international level, of “ICT resources” on environmental education and global change and, more specifically, on ocean acidification. This research led her to establish a series of “categories of analysis of the most relevant teaching resources” and to design an analysis instrument to determine which of these contents have “possibilities as teaching tools”. Lorenzo actually used this instrument with the Inquiry to Student Environmental Action (I2Sea) project, “which offers classroom activities on ocean acidification and climate change”, finding “limitations” in this resource, such as the lack of a gender perspective. Currently, this analysis tool is being used, she explains, in final degree and master’s theses at the faculty, “for the analysis of other ICT resources such as simulators, websites or interactive stories”.
Open educational resources
Based on this analysis, the research focused on the adaptation and design of teaching materials for use in the Primary Education Degree. Specifically, Lorenzo launched three educational interventions with the students of this degree, with which he sought to promote an approach to environmental change in the oceans, while highlighting how “women’s contributions have been, are and will be essential to achieve real and effective sustainable development”, through cooperative learning processes. Also responding to the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN 2030 Agenda, the first of these experiences introduced students to ocean acidification through online resources and experiments on the effects of decreasing pH in the sea. A second experience, which was part of an innovation project developed at the faculty in the 2017/2018 academic year, led students to determine their individual carbon footprint and define actions to try to reduce it. A third proposal was entitled Marine researchers coming out of the shadows and focused on the preparation of biographies of marine researchers such as Silvia Earle, Ángeles Alvariño, Aida Fernández Ríos, Elisabeth Mann Borguese or Josefina Castellví.
These activities were joined by the design of freely accessible educational resources, available on the website The Women’s Sea. Sustainable and Productive, carried out in 2019 with the support of the Pontevedra Provincial Council. These focus both on the situation and threats to the oceans, and on different female jobs linked to the sea, such as net-sewer workers or salting and canning workers, as well as on the work of marine researchers.
Source: DUVI
