Our Blue experiment - World Ocean Day for Schools 2024
This year we collaborated with Dr Pamela Buchan, Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, to run a global experiment to capture data around marine identity, marine citizenship & connection to the ocean.
We’re exploring what it means to be a Good Blue Human - focusing on three main themes - Being, doing & connecting.
Informed by our reflections from last year we recognised the importance of leaning into the tools & frameworks that we’ve dedicated so much time and energy to create. The ‘Our Blue’ platform, launched in 2022 has supported meaningful engagement and local impact for our global community of educators.
Over the last two years, we’ve built an incredible network of schools and helped connect them to their local blue spaces. At times it’s felt as if we were sitting on a metaphorical goldmine of local ecological knowledge and nature connection seen through the lens of primary school children. But until this year. we’ve not found a way to harness these incredible stories.
Our aim for 2024 was to begin that journey. World Ocean Day for Schools was founded by the We are Ocean Collective and so we looked back into the collective to see who could help us. We’ve been inspired by Dr Pamela Buchan’s work on Marine Citizenship for quite some time, and when we combined it with Nicola Bridge’s work on Ocean Literacy and Challenge 10 of the UN Ocean Decade we recognised an opportunity.
The mission was to design a way to actively support young people in becoming marine citizens whilst extracting baseline data so we can continue to learn how best to increase global ocean literacy. Despite this being our seventh year, this feels like it might just be the beginning.
“World Ocean Day for Schools is a fantastic opportunity not only to explore the relationships people have with the sea, but also to understand how these relationships are formed in childhood. This is the first time that marine citizenship and what motivates it will be investigated in young people on a global scale. The data collected through this project will help researchers to better understand how marine citizenship can be promoted in all people.”
Dr Pamela Buchan, Research Fellow, University of Exeter
