What Teachers Should Know for Effective Marine Litter Education: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Marine litter has had a huge impact on the marine environment and the socio-economic activities that depend on healthy oceans. All members of the community must play their part to address marine litter. Teachers are agents of change that are capable of encouraging pro-environmental practices among the community that will reduce environmental issues, including marine litter. However, teachers were found to have limited knowledge regarding ocean literacy and marine pollution. A scoping review was conducted to identify various aspects of content knowledge related to marine litter education that has been recently conducted for school teachers and students. Web of Science, Scopus and ERIC databases were searched for articles published in English between 2015 and 8 July 2021. Fourteen peer-reviewed articles were selected for this study and were subjected to content analysis. Topics related to marine litter were frequently addressed. Meanwhile, topics related to teaching Environmental Education/Education for Sustainable Development (EE/ESD) were the least addressed. Benthic marine litter, solutions to marine litter and the introduction of new types of marine litter were identified as topics that need to be addressed in future marine litter education. This study lists content knowledge based on previous literature and identified the gaps, which will be useful for teachers to improve their knowledge and implement effective marine litter education in school.

Bibliometric Analysis on Ocean Literacy Studies for Marine Conservation

“…Teachers have the ability to act as change agents and promote practices that address environmental issues, including the advancement of digital literacy, within the educational community [40]. However, some research has found that the knowledge of teachers about ocean literacy and marine pollution is restricted in the given field [40,41]. It is important to carry out educational projects that seek to integrate students, teachers, educational institutions, and the community to generate a virtuous circle around ocean literacy.…”

Biology Teacher Candidates Awareness on Marine Plastic Litter

“…This showed that BTC contribute to overcome marine environmental issues both through environtmental activities and programs even though they are not fully active. Education regarding marine litter is important to raise awareness in protecting the marine environment [64][65][66] which includes participation in overcoming the issues of MPL such as participating in sea and beach clean-up activities [38,40], campaigning for clean seas from plastic litter [41], as well as donations for marine environmental revitalization programs [42,43]. These results are also supported by the percentage of active participation category of BTC in overcoming the issues of MPL where as many as 15.69% of BTC had participation in the very good category, 56.86% of BTC had participation in the good category, 26.…”

Sources, sinks and transformations of plastics in our oceans: Review, management strategies and modelling

“…Marine litter is a result of complicated waste management problems (Ahmad-Kamil et al, 2022) and it affects all the oceans of the Planet, from surface to seafloor, appearing in places as remote as the Artic or the Antarctica (Scotti et al, 2021;Parker, 2018). Parker (2018) used the map of Jason Treat drawing the distribution of marine plastic worldwide, the large accumulations of these materials, and the main rivers and land sources that transport these compounds to the sea.…”

“…Marine litter composition can be made of infinity materials, although plastic is the more visual material due to its floatability (Velis, 2014) and colors. Plastic litter has always been recorded to be the most abundant marine litter compared with other types of marine litter (Galgani et al, 2015;Aytan et al, 2020;Ahmad-Kamil et al, 2022). Plastics are important due to its daily use and functionality because it is the most versatile material of modern times (Plastics Europe, 2022).…”