What is The Sea In-depth?
«The Sea In-depth» is a project created in 2010 and developed with the collaboration of the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) (led and coordinated by Josep-Maria Gili, Begoña Vendrell, Laura Peral, Stefano Ambroso, Janire Salazar and Rebeca Zapata) and the “la Caixa” Banking Foundation. The collaboration with “la Caixa” Banking Foundation ended in July 2018.
This project brings knowledge about seas and oceans to the area of education through various teaching proposals.
Schools and individuals can access the educational contents through the virtual platform and participate actively on the project.
The Sea In-depth project is organised in two main blocks:
- Original short videos that talk about the different subject units related to the sea, accompanied by teaching guides (so that the different subjects can be studied more in-depth) and educational activity proposals related to the contents of the videos and guides.
- Research activities that can be carried out at the education centre using simple materials and following sampling and analysis protocols with different levels of complexity. These research activities offer, therefore, the experimental implementation of curriculum contents for both primary and secondary education.
Via the website participants can exchange results, impressions, ideas and materials, creating a dialogue between students, teachers and researchers.
In general terms, the study of natural sciences on the formal education curriculum is designed so that students learn about and understand the natural world. Often it is difficult to grasp the complexity of nature from inside a classroom. One way of doing so is by generating questions that the students can resolve through the results obtained by applying scientific methodology and theories. It is precisely this scientific competence that students need to acquire. The search for simplicity in the approach and its place in a local context can help develop this scientific competence, creating a teaching-learning process that actively involves the students. The sea is the ideal scenario for this type of activity. In addition, direct contact with nature can motivate and encourage a learning spirit among the students.
The aim is to show that coastal areas can allow students to work on research projects appropriate to their educational level, which also allow cross-cutting subjects to be addressed, such as education on health and the environment. Many of the techniques and theoretical approaches presented can also be applied, with certain variations, to the study of continental waters (rivers and lakes).
The project aims to create new educational resources for teachers and educators, making the marine environment a new and at the same time complementary source for covering school curriculum contents and also to fuel, in practice and in theory, the teaching plans of education centres.
Based on the studies proposed, students can develop competences such as:
- build relationship models of how nature works.
- establish connections with socially relevant problems.
- develop team and cooperative work.
- recognise evidence by researching certain questions.
- design alternative work methodologies.
- acquire mathematical competences.
- critically analyse results and compare them to theoretical concepts.
- learn to extract conclusions, validate them and communicate them both orally and in writing.
- intervene in the design or construction of experiments and/or research projects.
These competences can be linked to related concepts and theoretical subjects on natural sciences included in the formal curriculum.
Knowledge acquired from a practical and theoretical learning-teaching process also creates an interest in the conservation of the marine environment among the students.
Beyond this, exploring is one of the activities that most captivates and attracts our species. Surprisingly, it appears that our desire to know and explore is focused almost exclusively to outside spaces. However, over 80% of the oceans are complete unknowns. Creating a passion to explore the most unknown areas of the planet is one of the parallel objectives of this project. The seas, even those closest to us, are the least known natural areas to humankind and could become a fantastic lure for exploring.