Grant Recipients
Dr. Sandra Scott, Professor of Teaching (EDCP)
Yvonne Dawydiak, Learning Design Manager, Teacher Education
As educators living and working in a coastal community, we must play a key role in building ocean literacy with in-service and pre-service teachers and the wider education community. To that end, we will launch a web series and accompanying open educational resources centered on the Salish Sea. This initiative will build upon and enrich content already shared via a reimagined project website: Intergenerational Landed Learning. This website will be redesigned into a learning hub.
Connecting with our oceans is more crucial today than at any time in our history. Renowned marine scientist Sylvia Earle describes the Ocean as the Blue Heart of the planet. Today, due to environmental devaluing and destruction resulting in climate crisis, the world’s oceans are experiencing ecosystem collapse, biodiversity loss, and mass extinctions. Following the lead of environmental heroes such as Greta Thunberg and Autumn Pelletier, students are calling for action. As botanist and Indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it”. One way to begin the process of healing is through an education which shares stories of both the human and non-human world’s lived experience with the Ocean.
Project Outcomes:
This project has concluded with the successful reimagining of the Intergenerational Landed Learning Project website. This website includes meaningful stories surrounding relationships with the ocean, as well as recordings from a hybrid Ocean Sustainability workshop series which took place in 2022, amongst many other resources. The team at Edith Lando VLC has been proud to support the creation of this much needed educational resource, as well as the content development for the Ocean Sustainability portion of the site.
This resource has now been shared globally at two events: The April 2024 UBC Sustainability Education Fellows Information Session, and the August 2024 Northwest Aquatic and Marine Educators Ripple Effects Conference. Featured in these conference presentations was the 2022 Ocean Sustainability workshop series, including the special session led by Professor David Boyd, The Rights of Humans, Whales and Oceans: Accelerating Action on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The workshop series is also available through the Edith Lando VLC Database and the newly restructured Sustainability Hub website. These workshops offer an array of perspectives and discussions around relationships with the Ocean and Climate Change.
