Insigts into the manifestation of creative and digital pedagogies for ocean literacy: comparing analytical approaches

The EU-Erasmus project ‘Ocean Connections’ aims to develop approaches to teaching Ocean Literacy through combining key ideas and practices from research streams in creative pedagogies and in the use of digital technologies, namely Augmented and Virtual Realities (AR and VR). The project identified some core educative principles derived from the research literature which were then explored in practice within 6 pilot projects, 2 each in England, Spain and Denmark. At the heart of the Ocean Connections project is a material-dialogic theoretical perspective that draws on new materialist theory to understand learning about the Ocean as a relational, emergent process. We present this theoretical framework and our rationale for its use, before going on to explain two distinct analytical approaches taken in the analysis of our data. The first of these is a standard thematic analysis of the qualitative data gathered during the project in order to illuminate how the educative principles manifested across the projects. The second uses a diffractive analytical approach (Barad, 2007), to respond and create new insights based on the data, working within a digital, VR space. Findings from our initial analysis of the first three pilot projects shows that some key practices such as modelling, and student-led learning/production of and with technology can aid the enactment of a combination of creative and digital approaches for teaching ocean literacy. It also showed the potentially important role of creative pedagogies in fostering ethical, activist dimensions of ocean literacy. The diffractive analysis opened questions about how learning in these projects occurs across natural-cultural-digital spaces and through time, and how these connect, again, with environmental care, responsibility and activism. As such, this paper offers interesting new insights into how we learn with and through data when it is analysed differently.