Heritage stories in Marine Education with children
Voices of the Sea is highly relevant in the South African context, where the legacy of apartheid continues to shape educational access and opportunities for children. The project investigates how strengthening relationships between schools and marine education organisations, and using story-listening and heritage-based pedagogies, can co-create meaningful, place-based learning experiences nurturing environmental care, justice, and ocean custodianship. Strengthening relationships between schools and marine education organisations like the Save Our Seas Foundation Shark Education Centre by exploring heritage-based pedagogies, the project creates place-based learning experiences that nurture environmental care, justice, and ocean custodianship.
Voices of the Sea follows the questions: How might teachers, children, curricula, and education organisations co-create learning experiences that nurture environmental care, justice, and ocean custodianship among young children? How can strengthening relationships between schools and marine education organisations foster meaningful, place-based learning experiences that deepen young children’s connection and enable custodianship of the ocean? At the heart of the project is how story-listening with communities and heritage-based pedagogies can transform marine education by enabling teachers, children, and organisations to co-create relations through Voicing Stories, Observing Biodiversity, Igniting heritage, Connecting custodianship, Enquiring with children, Sustaining futures
Inspired by ancient ocean kraal systems along our coastline
Inspired by stone ocean kraals along the coasts of South Africa and False Bay in particular, this project understands research as a relational, place-based practice. An ocean kraal is not singular or bounded, but a porous structure shaped with tides, memory, and ecological knowledge. In Voices of the Sea, the ocean kraal as habitat, ecosystem, heritage, knowledge, and care inspires a methodology, gathering without extracting and remaining accountable to place.
