Ocean literacy in Brazilian school curricula: An opportunity to improve coastal management and address coastal risks?

Abstract

Ocean literacy (OL) is defined as the understanding of the ocean's influence on human beings and vice versa. It aims to improve knowledge on marine environments, enabling citizens to make responsible decisions concerning marine-related issues. To this purpose, formal education mediated by curricula plays an important hole. Therefore, the goal of this study was to investigate both the presence (if the principle or concept were identified) and frequency of occurrence (number of times each principle or concept was found) of OL principles and concepts in Brazilian curricular documents at federal [Common National Curriculum Base (Base Nacional Curricular Comum–BNCC)] and regional [Brazilian Federative Curricular Guidelines (Referenciais Curriculares das Unidades Federativas–RCs)] levels. OL topics were mostly found in RCs than in the BNCC, especially concerning principle 1 (The Earth has one big ocean with many features). However, most of the concepts from principles 2 (The ocean and life in the ocean shape the features of the Earth), 4 (The ocean makes Earth habitable), and 5 (The ocean supports a great diversity of life and ecosystems) were poorly addressed, and there was no mention of principle 7 (The ocean is largely unexplored). Non-parametric statistics was performed and showed significant differences in the frequency of occurrence of OL principles and concepts among the RCs from the five Brazilian geographical regions (Kruskal-Wallis test, p = 0.034), as well as those from coastal and non-coastal areas (U-Mann-Whitney test, p = 0.021). Principal component analysis discriminated the Brazilian curricula from different geographical regions into two different groups. These clusters were formed by South-Southeast-Midwest regions and North-Northeast (Principal component 1 explained 99.33% of the total variation, with a 0.95 correlation with the frequency of OL principles and concepts in the RCs), showing certain heterogeneity among the RCs of the different Brazilian Federative Units. The results indicated that Brazilian curricula address more OL contents than do other countries. However, the representativeness of OL in Brazilian documents is below the recommended for a person to be considered ocean literate, especially for topics dealing with environmental risks in coastal zones. Furthermore, the inclusion of OL in classrooms will depend on the teacher's approach to the curricula, which, therefore, depends on their professional training to deal with the subject. An effort to improve curricula in terms of OL contents can be a helpful strategy to overcome one of the main challenges for social participation in a bottom-up management, the lack of information.