Insights from Project SEA: Building Ocean Literacy and Enhancing Marine Science Education Through Teacher Professional Development

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared 2021–2030 as the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, aiming to establish “Transformative Ocean science solutions for sustainable development, connecting people and our Ocean.” A key strategy to achieve this goal is to enhance p-12 instructional strategies related to marine science. Building knowledge and skills in children addresses Ocean Literacy upstream, increasing the likelihood that students exposed to marine science instruction become a well-informed populace committed to protecting the world’s Ocean. We share lessons learned from Project SEA: Science Education and Action, a New Jersey-SeaGrant-funded initiative that prepared 70 teachers in New Jersey to integrate marine science and climate change into NGSS-aligned lessons between 2020–2024. Project SEA represents a partnership between higher education and a nonprofit. Teachers completed surveys to measure their confidence in teaching, and knowledge of marine science and related subjects. Earlier analyses reveal that through our series of workshops, teachers’ content knowledge and confidence in teaching marine science improved, as demonstrated by increased scores on items selected from the Survey of Ocean Literacy, written teaching reflections, and comments from focus group discussions. These teachers described the personal and professional benefits of building a community of like-minded educators committed to bringing Ocean science into preschool–12 learning settings. We will describe our experiences, share selected research findings from across our dataset, and offer recommendations for purposeful p–12 marine science education.