Sea literacy program starts this year for the 1st cycle

The Oceano Azul Foundation, the Oceanário de Lisboa and the Directorate-General for Education today launched a pioneering sea literacy program in Mafra, which will reach first-year students this year.

The program will begin to be developed in schools in the municipalities of Mafra, Cascais (district of Lisbon), Peniche, Nazaré (district of Leiria) and Portalegre, where teachers are already receiving training, informed the Blue Ocean Foundation.

The pilot program ‘Educating for the Blue Generation’ should extend to the rest of the country, depending on the adhesion of the municipalities, and intends to ‘transform the next generations of Portuguese into citizens more committed to sustainability and conservation of the ocean’. alerting children to the negative impacts of the exploitation of marine resources and climate change on oceans.

In addition to initial teacher training, a handbook on the ocean is distributed among teachers in the context of the school curriculum of the first cycle, alerting to the strategic importance that the sea has for the coastal countries and for Portugal.

In the manual, eight areas of knowledge about the ocean – literature, ecology, law, strategy, economics, history, physics and chemistry – are addressed in the textbook, which allows the classroom to work in the subjects of Portuguese, Mathematics, associated with the skills of the Profile of Students Exiting Compulsory Schooling in Portugal.

The ocean is explained to the students through practical and playful activities, encouraging fieldwork in the coastal zones and meeting new trends in education, which focus on the teaching of cross-cutting themes through experiences inside and outside the classroom. class.

The program starts in Mafra, involving 3,650 students, two hundred teachers and two dozen schools, but will arrive in this first phase to a total of 15,440 children and almost a thousand teachers to be extended to the counties that have already joined.