Conversion of ocean research papers into art and communication by high school students
Project 19 is an activity that combines ocean literacy, marine science education and communication. Portuguese high school students (15-18 years old) were invited to analyse scientific papers about concrete ocean problems and present what they found most relevant through artistic performances, visual arts and communication materials that they found appealing to their generation. Some outcomes included conventional formats. Others were very creative. All were truly inspiring.
National
Portugal
All Portuguese coastal districts (Funchal, Ponta Delgada, Faro, Beja, Setúbal, Lisboa, Leiria, Coimbra, Aveiro, Porto and Viana do Castelo). At leats, one school per district.
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): +ATLANTIC CoLAB Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Tiago Last name of representative: Garcia Gender: Male Nationality: Portugal Function: Communication Officer Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Edifício Diogo Cão, Doca de Alcântara Norte Town: Lisbon Postal code: 1350-352 Country: Portugal Direct Tel:+351 927094525 E-mail:tiago.garcia@colabatlantic.com Website:https://colabatlantic.com/
Project 19 is a +ATLANTIC CoLAB activity that combines ocean literacy, marine science education and communication. Portuguese high school students (15-18 years old) converted research papers about the biggest marine issues into artistic performances, visual arts and communication materials. Some outcomes included conventional formats such as news stories, social media campaigns, or videos. Some students chose to explore more artistic and creative formats, such as theatre plays, songs, dance, short films, street art, stop-motions and many more.
Projeto 19 aims to contribute to a greater and better understanding of how the ocean plays a fundamental role in the planet, in the climate, in biodiversity, and in human life. And vice versa. Through its innovative education method, students raised awareness and promoted behavioural changes in their social circles, helping to protect the ocean and coastal areas.
On the other hand, Project 19 aims to foster the consumption of science and its products by the younger generations, as opposed to the (mis)information that abounds in social media. In this way, Projeto 19 aspired to contribute to a more informed society, in which opinions and actions are based on scientific information that is verified and approved by science experts. Thus, Project 19, in addition to promoting ocean literacy and contributing to the SDGs, the UN Ocean Decade and the EU4Ocean goals, also seeks to contribute to the fight of fake news, propaganda, and populism.
In the first edition of Projeto 19 during the 2021/22 school year, +ATLANTIC was supported by the Portuguese Blue School programme of the Ministry of Economy and Sea, taking advantage of the large network of Portuguese schools involved in this inspiring initiative.
Ocean literacy
Science education
Science communication
Art
Nature protection
Projeto 19 was based in the assumption that only a well-informed society will be able to tackle the biggest challenges and threats that our planet faces. Aiming at building a more sustainable world, the project served to teach youngsters about the science behind issues like climate change, marine litter, plastics, sea level rise, coastal hazards, ocean pollution, biodiversity loss, unsustainable seafood and many other hot topics.
Projeto 19 was an investment on the leaders of tomorrow. It contributes to make them look for science first, and not social media, when they need to formulate an opinion about an important matter, decide what to buy or who they vote for, etc.
The inspiring results — available at projeto19.colabatlantic.com — show how engaged the students were and suggest that this initiative may act as a crucial point in their lives. It apparently served to make more teenagers to pursue university education on the environment, the planet, and sustainability. Perhaps Projeto 19 will also serve to make some of them to become future scientists and innovators, who dedicate their careers to help to build a more sustainable world.
According to the feedback received by the 2021/22 teachers and students, Projeto 19 is a "great, fun, motivating way to learn science", it "empowers the youth and actors of change within their communities", and an "innovative education method that should be adopted by all official science curricular programmes". Representatives of various leading international ocean literacy initiatives, such as the EU4Ocean and UN Ocean Decade, already mentioned Projeto 19 as something that serve to reach their goals. They also mentioned the great potential of Projeto 19 to growth at international level. In fact, the +ATLANTIC CoLAB is currently evaluating how this scale-up could take place and what resources would be needed to expand the success in Portugal around Europe.
Projeto 19 allowed teenagers to decide what content is relevant in a given research paper. It also allowed them to pick the best formats, channels, concepts and means to covey those key messages to their generation and social structures. There was no influence of adults in those two essential steps of the methodology. This way, Projeto 19 managed to 1) empower youth and give them a voice without any sort of limitation by those who normally decide everything, and 2) became an opportunity for adults to learn what matters for the younger generations and how do they want us to communicate with them.
There are currently numerous initiatives that proclaim that they aim at empowering youth, but not so many actually give youth the freedom to express themselves without any sort of control besides deadlines. The results of Projeto 19 are amazing because the students took that chance to tell adults their vision and what they believe is important for their future.
One of the biggest achievements of Projeto 19 was to make hundreds of teenagers aware of what is a researc paper, where to find them, and how to analyse them to get information and knowledge from it. This inspired them and inspired the adults involved (teachers, parents, friends, etc). In this sense, Projeto 19 can be a new way to foster co-design of initiatives that aim at driving societal change based on the emotional connection of the actors with the subject. It also serves to make the leaders of tomorrow aware of the social and cultural aspects of ocean issues, such as in the case of marine litter and overfishing, for example.
The project included 472 students in all coastal districts of Portugal including the Azores and Madeira archipelagos. Based on a balanced gender distribution, the project went beyond the existing school classes and united students of various ages and degrees. In many cases, the students decided to look for the local communities perspectives on the ocean issue address in their paper. For that, they have interviewed a wide range of stakeholders including fishermen, politicians, scientists, marine protected areas managers, among others. By organising public artistic performance in their hometowns, they contributed to communicate and outreach ocean science to many people who had never had contact with a research paper. Should this initiative be continued and scaled-up as +ALANTIC is evaluating, the impact on society of teaching science following the Projeto 19 approach can be large.
Projeto 19 is about a future in which youth learns about the problems that affect people's lives through an inclusive, creative, fun, artistic, collaborative and practical way. A future in which something similar to Projeto 19 is in practice in all school programmes will surely be a future where more citizens produce, consume and utiise science and innovation to know better the environment. We cannot think of Projeto 19 without considering that these same citizens will not be conscious about what they buy, what they do, how they live, etc. The tiny yet important impact that Projeto 19 already had inspired us to believe that is one efficient to way to promote the change we look for. Through Projeto 19 we demonstrated that even the most dense science can be understood and disseminated by all. A society that consumes more science is, without a doubt in our eyes, a better society, both on the individual, collective, personal, professional and commercial levels.
After properly understanding the research paper they were working on, many students teams felt they wanted to learn more with the authors and with the communities affected by the problem described in the publication. They then organised webinars, talks, field trips, podcast, and social media campaigns to reach out to those stakeholders. In some cases, their effort escalated and ended up involving local, regional and national organisations involved in the management of the ocean issues described in the research papers. In those cases, the final results of Projeto 19 — as evident in projeto19.colabatlantic.com — included the stakeholders' feedback and their visions on the problems.
Almost all disciplines of marine sciences were covered in Projeto 19. Only a few very specific ocean topics were intentionally left out in order to make all students feel engaged and happy with the research paper they had to work. In distributing the research papers among the schools, we were sensible to the fact that the students would naturally feel closer to the ocean issues they previously heard about and those that are affecting their regions in a more evident way. Nevertheless, in a couple of cases, the students embraced with open arms the mission of working on a topic that they had never heard about and whose impacts do not directly affect their region nor their country nor their hemisphere.
The author of Projeto 19, Tiago Garcia, is not aware of any similar initiative in which the students can choose what is relevant in a research paper and what are the best ways to pass those messages to their generation. Projeto 19 is innovative in the level of freedom it gives to students. Other initiatives that may have a couple of points in common tend to set strict rules about what students can and cannot do. In other words, Projeto 19 was not about adults telling youngsters what to do. We simply launch the challenge, explain what is a research paper, put them in contact with the authors, ask them to tell us what they think is important and to use the formats that they see as more appealing.
The teachers involved told us that they had never felt so much enthusiasm about science education. They also mentioned that the Projeto 19 methodology served to bring together the education of science, visual arts and English. In the end, the teachers asked us if they could aplly our methodology in future school years, should we for some reason decide not to run Projeto 19 again. The conclusion is simple: the Projeto 19 methodoly in a novel way to teach science which proven to be very exciting to teachers and students.
On another hand, many communicators, and science communicators, like to defend that communication must follow some rules to reach some objectives. It sometimes feels that communication is perceived as an exact science, when it is clearly not. The same communication strategy implement in two different contexts may easily generate very different results. There are various unpredictable and uncontrollable events that can take place and will immensely affect the end result of a communication action. Projeto 19 was also innovative in that matter, as it demonstrated that science communication does not really follows dogmatic approaches.
Projeto 19 can be easily replicated in any country and continent, as well as on a global scale.
Since research papers tend to be mostly published in English, it is important to ensure that the students have a good understanding of that language. This is not a problem for a high school students in many countries. Alternatives are to work on research papers published in their native language or to translate them.
Besides that, it is essential to ensure that all authors agree with this sort of exploitation of their results and that, if needed, students can use the information and visuals in the publication.
Finally, it is highly beneficial to partner with already well establish school networks, such as the case of the Portuguese Blue School. Such partnership allowed, in the case of Projeto 19 to be able to engage with the teachers in little time and to be sure that the ones selected were already committed to ocean literacy.
The Projeto 19 methodology, created by Tiago Garcia at +ATLANTIC CoLAB, consists in the following steps:
1 - Select the shools. We did this in partnership with the Portuguese Blue School programme which already had a network of 500 schools in operation in the country.
2 - Select the research papers. Main criteria were how appealing is the scientific topic or ocean issue covered and relevant it is for the region of a given school.
3 - Organise a meeting with one or two teachers per selected school to explain the objectives and methodology
4 - Give enough time for teachers to set up teams without affecting the studying of the students. Make sure they do not influence the key decisions of the students in terms of what and how they want to communicate.
5 - Organise webinars with students to explain to them what is a research paper and how are they structured. Take the opportunity to spike their creativity and encourage them to be as bold as they want in terms of how will they tell the stories hidden in the research papers.
6 - Introduce the authors to the students working on their research paper and encourage both to interact as much as needed
7 - If needed, suggest key stakeholders that students may reach out to in order to get other perspectives on the topic
8 - Run periodical project management meetings with professors to check on progress, difficulties, delays, etc.
9 - Organise a public event (online or physical) for students to present their results to their school communities, families, friends, and stakeholders. We intentionally did it on the 1st of April 2022, April Fool's Day, to highlight the need to fight fake news.
10 - Show all the results and event recording in a website or landing page and run a communication campaign to disseminate them.
Projeto 19 can easily address all the challenges affecting the ocean, as long as there are research papers about it.
In terms of local solutions, it fosters a more efficient, more appealing and more engaging way to learn about those challenges. This will result in a better informed society. Simultaneously, the project fosters the idea of having science as a go-to source of information, which can be key to diminish fake news, misinformation, propaganda and negationism.
Projeto 19's inaugural edition took place in the 2021/22 school year in Portugal.
The concept (including why it is called Projeto 19), schools involved and students' results are available at projeto19.colabatlantic.com.
Results show the conversion of research papers into various types of artistic performances, visuals, and communication actions.
The results were presented in a live online event on the 1st of April 2022 (April Fool's Day) in which many of the research papers authors were present to provide feedback to the students.
In a near future edition, +ATLANTIC envisions a Projeto 19 with high schools from various European countries.
On the longer term, the goal would be to inspire governments and Ministers of Education to consider adopting Projeto 19 as an official way to teach science.
The +ATLANTIC CoLAB is a not-for-profit R&D+I Portuguese Collaborative Laboratory that conceives and provides knowledge-based products and services related to various fields of the blue economy, ocean sustainability, marine science, marine ecosystem's health, climate change, ocean literacy, and science communication. Our multidisciplinary team applies numerical modelling, remote sensing, data science, artificial intelligence, and space and ocean technologies to develop such products and services and to partner in national and international projects.
Learn more at https://colabatlantic.com/
