The Ocean for All Alliance: Bringing Ocean educators from around the world together to collaborate, learn, and improve

Solving the grand challenges described in The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development requires transformative approaches to bolster ocean education and promote more positive outcomes. We will describe one such novel effort currently underway, called the Ocean for All Alliance, which brings together ocean educators from different parts of the world alongside evaluation researchers to form an evidence-based learning network, a type of community of practice, designed for collaboration, learning, and improvement. This Alliance currently includes 15 organizations conducting diverse field-based ocean education programs for underserved youth in South Africa, Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, and Argentina alongside evaluation researchers from the University of North Carolina Wilmington in the United States.

What is unique about our approach is that it combines the concept of a community of practice with that of adaptive management by gathering evaluation data from all ocean education programs in the Alliance to reflect, learn, adapt, and improve (i.e., evidence-based learning). These ocean education programs occur in different cultures and contexts, but they all have common themes of immersive experiences like snorkeling, explorations of local ecosystems to learn about unique species, challenges, and solutions, a service-learning project (E.g., beach cleanup), and mindfulness practices like yoga and stretching to deepen connections and facilitate positive attitudes. All programs in this Alliance are focused on reaching underserved adolescent youth living in communities near the ocean.

Our community of practice describes these diverse ocean educators and evaluation researchers coming together and sharing their unique knowledge and expertise about effective pedagogy, evaluation, and more through ongoing in-person and virtual interactions. The comparative evaluation, led by the evaluation researchers, uses a set of agreed upon outcomes to determine the performance of all ocean programs in the Alliance, and the Alliance as a whole. These outcomes include ocean learning, ocean resiliency, attitudes towards the ocean, water safety, social-emotional learning, and ocean stewardship. Data will be collected by the ocean educators using a retrospective survey and the results will be analyzed by the evaluation researchers to provide evidence of successes and areas for improvement. Taken together, these efforts to build community between organizations and researchers results in the rapid sharing of ideas and innovation, increased capacity for organizations to collect evaluation data, faster dissemination of evaluation results, and even provides some empirical data on what works in ocean education programming.

In this presentation, we will describe the origins and development of this Ocean for All Alliance from its start at the I AM WATER: Ocean Conservation organization in Cape Town, South Africa to where it is today. We will share specific details on how we are facilitating collaboration, learning, and building evaluation capacity across diverse continents and cultures. We look forward to engaging the audience in discussions around this project, challenges we have faced, and lessons learned. We believe this is a new frontier in ocean education research and we are excited to share this work.