Voicing children’s understanding of the human-ocean connection

Children are often regarded as the saviours of the future, the source of hope to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. For this, education reform is lobbied for, and agendas are drafted and enacted so that children can be provided with the knowledge, tools and agency to fulfil this greatest of roles. This is because education is the tool through which citizens become equiped with the knowledge and skills to participate in society and that societal norms and values are enshirend. So therefore, education remains pivotal for addressing one of the great challenges identified as part of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, that is to restore society’s relationship with the ocean.

This paper voices children’s stories-with the ocean and how these are informed by their formal ocean learning. Children are lacking opportunities to learn about the human-ocean relationship since ocean topics are absent from education curricula worldwide. However, considering the ocean’s dominance as a feature on the Earth’s surface, its current precarious condition, and education’s formative role, there are growing calls to address the lack of ocean topics in formal education. Many accounts in the literature, however, have narrowly focused on the evaluation of levels of knowledge, despite widespread agreement that knowledge does not strictly translate to pro-environmental behaviour. The human-ocean relationship is complex and understanding how children make sense of this complexity is important to inform current and future ocean education policy. Stories are a sense making tool which humans have drawn on for millennia to make sense of their experiences and confer meaning to their lives. Additionally, through stories, animate and inanimate entities such as the ocean can come alive, enacting their potential for in-relation-with-agency. Drawing on Posthuman and New Materialist theory, this research explores how children understand the child-ocean relationship, with children invited to share their stories-with the ocean following learning in a formal education setting. These stories reveal how formal learning is integrated into children’s everyday lives and how they perceive their place in-relation-with, instead of separate from, the ocean. Only by understanding how children come to understand their ocean learning can we know if education is fulfilling its role of equipping young learners with the tools they need to become the change makers the world needs them to be.