Meet ProBleu – a Mission Ocean and Waters project providing tools to schools and educators and bringing ocean literacy to classrooms across Europe.
As children return to school, it is important to consider how educators can make the younger generation more ocean literate and how the love and care for our ocean and waters can be instilled from an early age. Ocean literacy is an important pillar of sustainable ocean management. An ocean literate person understands how the ocean affects individuals and how individuals affect the ocean.
ProBleu, a Mission Ocean project, is working to raise awareness and interest in children to protect our natural environment. Launched in 2023, the project aims to encourage citizen science and foster a global culture of sustainability.
Providing support for educators
To support the development of ocean literacy, ProBleu provides teachers and schools with educational materials and a repository of innovative marine and freshwater resources. One of these is the MINKA platform – a citizen science observatory that empowers students to monitor marine biodiversity. The platform allows users to collect and store data and makes it accessible to researchers and policy makers, creating an environment of knowledge sharing. These resources offer different approaches to education and introduce contemporary learning methods, such as combining online and offline learning, and hands-on learning to make it more engaging for students.
A key objective of ProBleu is also to expand the Network of European Blue Schools – the European Ocean Coalition (EU4Ocean) initiative awarding the Blue School label to education centres which integrate ocean and water literacy into the classroom curriculum.
Contributing to the objectives of Mission Ocean and Waters
ProBleu project contributes to two Mission Ocean objectives:
1. Protecting marine and freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity.
2. Preventing and eliminating pollution.
Funding calls
Over three years, ProBleu will provide funding to at least 100 schools to promote the integration of ocean literacy in classrooms. A total of 46 projects have already been selected through the first two funding calls. The third funding call has just been launched! Primary and secondary schools from EU Member States and Associated Countries are invited to submit their educational and citizen science projects.