Abstract:

There is an urgency to ensuring that primary school teachers on entering service have an adequate level of ocean / marine literacy. There is the age-old dichotomy of the 'land-lubber' versus the 'sea-dog' and increasingly young people are not only becoming detached from their landward surroundings - characterised as 'nature deficit disorder' - but the marine environment also which we characterise as 'marine deficit disorder'. In fact, young people have probably become detached from the sea much earlier in historical terms, and the situation regarding the marine is thus all the more perilous. As these young people become teachers, they lack the connection with the sea in order to effectively teach about the marine in their classes. Marine literacy is critical for teachers to allow children to consider the marine as a source of employment in a wide range of industries which otherwise they remain unaware of. Therefore we consider marine literacy to go beyond 'knowledge': it is something that comes about through interpersonal exchange of experience, which in the past relied on (grand)parent-to-child transmission. As this transmission has been interrupted, marine literacy must now be 'taught' or learned in new ways. An intervention involved a pilot marine literacy programme - ‘Environmental Systems: The Marine Environment’ was delivered by Dublin City University - St. Patrick's Campus in order to re-connect students to the marine environment and provide stimuli for cognitive conflict: animals unknown / unheard of, visually inert habitats full of biodiversity, pollution as invisible and the teacher as scientist. The student teachers were taught two modules in three small high intensity cohorts (n=8, n=7, n=8), average age 19.8 years, on a range of topics concerning basic and advanced classification tasks, data-logging/collection and analysis, site-exploration, use of historic mapping, local knowledge and history, visual and literary arts, geology. The research tool is a questionnaire which elicits perceptions of how marine literacy fits into the primary school curriculum, perceived importance of content areas, and perceived barriers to implementing marine education in primary school. The students were probed for their 'pre-conceptions', or lack of knowledge, and their 'learnings' during their engagement with the modules and facilitator The resulting data was analysed using repertory grid analysis which derived a personal 'map' of the students perceptions and enabled a comparison with their peers and a hypothetical ideal dataset. Socio-networks were established which demonstrated the inter-connectivity between the students and importantly how their perceptions evolved given different time-captures. From this work, it is proposed that, not only is the method a means to monitor or assess students but also a framework to enhance marine literacy.

Keywords:

Sustainability, evidentiary, nature blindness, ocean literacy, marine literacy, case-study, repertory-grid technique, rep-grid.