Water education, ocean literacy and arts integration

Abstract

Life below water, as well as at waters, is threatened due to human activity that has caused global warming. As UNESCO stresses, “the time to learn and act for our planet is now”. This article reports on a literature review of existing action research on water education, ocean literacy and arts integration carried out by an emerging interdisciplinary research group stretching across the fields of marine science, arts and science education. Joined by a concern for water education and ocean literacy, the interdisciplinary teams screened 368 research articles with the assistance of the program Covidence which helps with streamlining the literature review processes in a team. Ending up with 14 relevant articles that were analysed in-depth, the authors argue that arts-integrated water education projects take place locally across higher education, formal education and informal education in collaborative teams. The action research projects screened promote and develop open-ended, inquiry-based and creative pedagogies, seeking to foster the capacity to act for sustainable living in a more-than-human world. However, all research projects screened in the review seemed to develop water education more generally. There is a lack of literature researching how the connection to ocean literacy including life below water specifically, can be nurtured.