Ocean Literacy, formal education, and governance: A diagnosis of Brazilian school curricula as a strategy to guide actions during the Ocean Decade and beyond

Abstract

Ocean Literacy (OL) was proposed by UNESCO as a goal for the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (Ocean Decade) aiming to (1) increase understanding of the importance of the ocean, (2) significantly influence communication on related subjects, and (3) facilitate informed and responsible decision-making about the ocean and its resources. Formal education is essential to expand the reach of OL, providing people with tools to engage in coastal and marine issues consciously and knowingly. To this end, content analysis of school curricula can help planning strategies, especially to empower citizens to implement public policies. This study assessed the extent to which OL-related terms and words are present in Brazilian curricular documents at federal (National Curriculum Parameters-PCNs and Common National Curriculum Base-BNCC) and regional (Federative Units curricular guidelines-RCs) levels. Qualitative (content analysis) and quantitative analyses (descriptive and non-parametric statistics, and multivariate analysis) were performed. The number of occurrences of OL-related words and terms were registered and counted. Nineteen words were found, totaling 797 citations (a frequency of 0.0001 in the total number of words referring to content). The number of citations were higher in BNCC-based RCs than in PCN-based RCs (Kruskal-Wallis test, p = 0.0009). Principal component analysis separated the documents into two groups, one related to BNCC-based RCs of Northeast, North and Midwest regions, with a higher number of OL related terms, and the other group with the PCN based RCs of these same regions plus those documents of Southeast and South regions (principal component 1 explaining 97.90% of the total variation and having 0.93 correlation with the total frequency of citations). General results indicated that Brazilian production on fields and themes related to OL is still concentrated in national journals, books, and booklets, thus with a limited impact. In same way although school curricula in Brazil have a larger number of topics on marine environments than do other countries, they showed heterogeneity among Federative Units, but generally with the topics still representing a very small fraction of Brazilian curricula. Thus, it is necessary to expand the contents related to the ocean and marine environments in curricula to provide students with basic knowledge about the importance and functions of these environments, as well as their conservation. Therefore, results here emphasize the need to implement OL to highlight the importance of knowledge of the oceans and enable citizens to discuss marine conservation policies and promote ocean sustainability. This study provided some strategies to increase OL in formal education and, hence, reach various stakeholders, which is fundamental to implement the United Nations Ocean Decade in Brazil and the Global South.

Ocean literacy in Brazilian formal education: A tool for participative coastal management

“…The significance of incorporating OL principles and concepts into the school curriculum to enhance societal understanding and consciousness of marine environmental issues has been widely acknowledged (Guest et al, 2015; Payne & Zimmerman, 2010; Santoro, Santin, Scowcroft, Fauville & Tuddenham, 2017; United Nations, 2018). Thus, the analysis of school curricula is the first initiative so that the potential and challenges of including these contents are achieved (Pazoto et al, 2021). Despite the acknowledged importance of OL, there has been a paucity of research examining its presence in formal education curricula.…”

“…Despite the acknowledged importance of OL, there has been a paucity of research examining its presence in formal education curricula. Two prior studies conducted in Brazil analysed national and regional curriculum documents at the elementary school level, with one study identifying only a small fraction of content related to ocean and marine themes (Pazoto et al, 2021), and the other concluding that only five of the seven OL principles and 14 concepts were represented in the analysed documents (Pazoto et al, 2022). In contrast, our study found that the Brazilian secondary education curriculum incorporates the vast majority of OL principles and concepts.…”

Playing Citizens: A Ludic Approach to Ocean Literacy and Heritage Education in Niteroi

“…Ocean Literacy, which also guided our activities, already existed in the United States as a movement to incorporate Ocean Sciences-related topics into formal education in the early 2000s [Pazoto et al 2022]. However, Ocean Literacy was only adopted in Brazil in 2019, following the Portuguese release of the book Ocean Literacy for All: A toolkit by UNESCO [Pazoto et al 2021], which discusses the 7 principles that govern the movement. Today, Ocean Literacy is promoted as a goal for achieving the behavioral change expected for the Ocean Decade [Unesco 2021].…”

How is the ocean represented in school textbooks in Chile? An analysis of curricular content and images of marine fauna

“…Topics of ocean literacy and marine science issues are underrepresented areas in the school curriculum and textbooks worldwide (Mokos et al, 2020;Mogias et al, 2021;Mogias et al, 2022). In Latin America, Brazil is taking the first steps to analyze and integrate marine content into the school curriculum, given the international context of the Decade of Oceanic Sciences (Pazoto et al, 2021). In Chile, the only review of marine content in the school curriculum is that of Fanta ( 2021), which analyzed the curriculum bases from preschool to high school, finding the words "sea" and "ocean" only 16 times in the primary and secondary educational cycle, highlighting the weakness of school marine education in Chile.…”