A learning framework for young people and local educators to explore, imagine, and mobilize the FAO's Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security & Poverty Eradication in their beautiful, complex, and changing fishing villages as common worlds and aquatic social-ecological systems.
A project for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations by Beyond the Surface International (BTSI) from Coast 2 Coast (C2C) with generous support from the Lighthouse Foundation.
PREFACE
On behalf of the SSF Guidelines Curriculum development team from Coast 2 Coast, we sincerely thank the Fisheries and Aquaculture Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Equitable Livelihoods Team for believing in our small nonprofit to co-develop a curriculum with teachers and students from fishing villages around the world that leverages the SSF Guidelines as a learning framework by which young learners and local educators in and near SSF communities can explore shaping positive changes for sustainable fisheries and optimistic futures. We are incredibly grateful for support from the Lighthouse Foundation that propelled the curriculum's co-creation process through our realization and facilitation of educator and learner focus groups to co-design lesson plans and enrichment activities that enable exploration of the SSF Guidelines as reflected in local realities. Thank you to Dr. John Kurien. The SSF Guidelines Curriculum is a tangile continuation of Dr. Kurien's collective participatory research and resulting publication, Involving the People - Democratizing the implementation and monitoring of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication.
We are emmensely proud of everyone involved in the co-production of this learning framework that honors the SSF Guidelines by placing it in the hands a fishing village's most inquisitive and imaginative community members. Local youth, supported by their teachers, nonprofit program facilitators, and other community-based educators, can explore the unique policy instrument's main themes - from tenure to gender - in their daily lives from a space of creativity and curiosity. Gathering data on the themes embedded within the SSF Guideline's policy recommendations through project-based learning out and about in their SSF community, learners and educators play active roles in raising awareness and democratizing the implementation and monitoring of the SSF Guidelines while having fun and making new friends. After all, should we not strive for the process of shaping change to be just as enjoyable as delighting in the end result?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
This interactive publication shares a summary of the SSF Guidelines Curriculum's co-development process, activities, outputs, and outcomes with the proposed next steps for feedback consultations, thoughtful dissemination, further piloting, participatory research, and the development of the curriculum's 2nd edition.
To download the curriculum, please sign up here.
The Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines
Youth & Education in SSF Communities
Pilots
Inland: Amazon & Andes
Integration into the SSF Guidelines Curriculum's 1st Edition
Outputs & Outcomes
Monitoring & Evaluation Plan
Insights & Lesson Learned
Next Steps
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
From November 2021 to January 2023, throughout the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture (IYAFA 2022), Beyond the Surface International's participatory audiovisual and community-based movement, Coast 2 Coast (C2C), collaborated with rural educators and young learners from public schools, nonprofits, and social welfare centers located in inland and coastal small-scale fishing (SSF) villages in Peru, Nigeria, Madagascar, and India to co-create the Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines Curriculum. The curriculum uses the FAO Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication, or the SSF Guidelines, as a framework for local educators and young learners to explore, envision, and encourage sustainable small-scale fisheries at the local level through an emergent strategy.
The curriculum is an inspired outcome of the 2022 publication by Dr. John Kurien, "Involving the People - Democratizing the implementation and monitoring of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication." The report highlights the need for democratizing the implementation and monitoring of the SSF Guidelines at the community level through contextualized participatory assessment tools and mechanisms. The curriculum serves as a medium for raising awareness about the SSF Guidelines through young people's exploration of its themes as reflected in their daily lives growing up in fish-dependent villages. The learning framework contains dynamic youth action and community-based participatory approaches that enable educators to guide their students and learners in monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the SSF Guidelines in their communities, sharing their results as part of Too Big To Ignore's "20 Questions about Small-Scale Fisheries," inviting educators to create profiles of the SSF communities upon the curriculum's completion.
Applying the essential findings and processes described in the Involving the People report, the SSF Guidelines Curriculum transdisciplinary development team reviewed each paragraph of the guidelines' 13 chapters, highlighting the key takeaways and uncovering the overarching "story" each guideline tells about small-scale fisheries. In parallel, C2C met remotely with educators working in diverse small-scale fishing villages and initiated the co-design process through in-depth interviews. Educators generously offered their time and participation, sharing the specific challenges facing their SSF and the opportunities they foresaw. C2C inquired about the teaching and learning methods educators thought worked best for their local context and any innovative or alternative teaching methods they would be interested in developing new skills, for example, using audiovisual tools in teaching and learning processes. Educators discussed their personal goals as community members and professional goals as teachers, facilitators, and social workers. In addition, C2C learned about the local fishing practices, cultural values, and traditional knowledge that would inform the curriculum's design.
Together, C2C and educators co-designed a lively collection of lesson plans and enrichment activities that sought to meet the needs of SSF educators and make learning meaningful and relevant for participants through their own investigations and imaginations. C2C and educators employed different pedagogies, learning processes, and strategies within the curriculum's design. These include expeditionary learning, an educational approach that emphasizes hands-on, experiential learning through the use of real-world projects and fieldwork, as well as social-emotional learning (SEL) to help students develop the ability to manage their emotions, set and achieve positive goals, show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions. As SSF are integrated social-ecological systems, C2C also integrated offerings from common world pedagogies, emphasizing the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world. In this approach, education is seen as a way to promote ecological awareness and social responsibility towards non-human beings and the environment.
During IYAFA 2022, Emi Koch, the SSF Guidelines Curriculum Project Director, was awarded a Dalai Lama Fellowship, where she connected with a cohort of fellows with "compassion-in-actions" projects during monthly calls as well as mentors in education and mindfulness practices who offered guidance on the curriculum's process of co-creation.
From June through December 2022, Coast 2 Coast piloted curriculum dynamics in five SSF communities' public schools along Peru's northern coast, with two indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon and one inland fishing villages in the Andes, engaging over 850 young learners, more than 70 adults learners, and more than 65 teachers. C2C facilitate over 30 new dynamics involving youth action research and participatory audiovisuals and creative mediums such as murals, stop-motion animations, photography, map-making, cyanography, and more for learners to mobilize their knowledge gathered. C2C also facilitate workshops for teachers to share about the curriculum and integrate their insights into the drafted lesson plans and enrichment activities. The in-person pilots resulted in the audiovisual co-creation of two stop-motion animations, seven photography classes, three murals, and two thaumatropes (an optical illusion based on combining two images with movement) workshops.
Simultaneously, 12 educators from focus groups piloted select activities from each chapter of the SSF Guidelines with their own groups of young learners in Peru, Nigeria, India, and Madagascar, engaging over 60 young learners testing 10 lesson plans.
C2C also launched a region-wide photography contest calling on students and teachers across Piura to capture what Part 2 of the SSF Guidelines - Responsible Fisheries and Sustainable Development looked like in their built and natural community, capturing images from the local fishing pier, the marketplace, and local kitchens. Through social media, radio interviews, and pitching the contest in local schools, C2C reached almost 20,000 people across the state, raising awareness about IYAFA 2022 and the SSF Guidelines as the structure for the photography contest's call for submissions. While fewer students and teachers submitted their work than C2C had aimed to engage, the participants who did submit their photos and the select few who won first, second, and third place prizes based on their audiovisual pieces reported having a thought-provoking and enriching experience seeing their ordinary SSF communities as extraordinary for their contributions to food security and local livelihoods.
From mid-December 2022 through February 2023, C2C spent time with focus group educators integrating feedback into the lesson plans and enrichment activities, producing supplementary handouts, gathering resources, and illustrating materials. During this stage, C2C presented the SSF Guidelines Curriculum Project at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego to marine scientists, fisheries researchers, and students, appealing to academics to partner with local nonprofits and educators to get dirt on their white papers, mobilizing knowledge with those who need to apply it the most for their social-ecological well-being. C2C also presented the project at the 4th World Small-Scale Fisheries Congress (4WSFC) for Latin America & Caribbean in Merida, Mexico. With Too Big to Ignore's support, C2C could bring one of the local educators from the focus group in Peru to share their experience and connect with others. C2C gained invaluable feedback from both outreach experiences, connecting with researchers whose work lesson plans simplify for learners to engage with in their local SSF contexts.
The result is the inaugural SSF Guidelines Curriculum as a learning framework that engages young people (of all ages) to explore, imagine, and mobilize the FAO SSF Guidelines in their dynamic fishing villages as aquatic social-ecological systems and common worlds with non-human beings and elements. By using these guidelines as a framework for the curriculum, local educators can support local youth in thinking critically about their sustainable futures in the context of their own aquatic social-ecological systems.
After a yearlong co-development process, the SSF Guidelines Curriculum's 1st edition is ready for publication. The SSF Guidelines Curriculum development team is excited to share the participatory project with stakeholders across the FAO's network for feedback and with educators in SSF communities for further piloting and uptake. With a minimum viable product (MVP) to disseminate, C2C would like to work closely with international donors and community-based partners working for sustainable fisheries and quality rural education to envision the project's following stages and next steps. C2C anticipates a "Call for Submissions" from FAO volunteer multistakeholder consultants for feedback on the curriculum 1st edition, the opportunity to approach both Ministries of Education and National Fisheries Departments for input and to discuss how the curriculum supports improved policy coherence and possible interests or strategies for curriculum dissemination in national schools, the co-development of an onboarding experience for educators interested in facilitating the curriculum in their local SSF context, and work between focus groups to produce the 2nd Edition of the SSF Guidelines Curriculum with a set of new lesson plans and enrichment activities attuned to the needs of small island developing states and SSF in contexts of limited opportunities civic engagement.
ABOUT US
Beyond the Surface InternationaL (BTSI) is a community-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization working together with small-scale fishing villages to support social-ecological wellbeing, nurture resilience-thinking, and promote natural-cultural heritage through surfing, storytelling, and mindfulness workshops that engage youth and their communities for healthy seas and societies. We leverage surfing as a powerful relationship-building tool with ourselves, our peers, and our surroundings. Surfing cultivates both inner and outer strength and engages local youth from small-scale fishing villages to cultivate caring relationships with their aquatic and built environments. Through Coast 2 Coast Movement, BTSI's Peruvian nonprofit, we facilitate participatory audiovisual workshops for youth to use their voices to celebrate their community’s strengths, identify changes, daylight struggles, and co-create potential solutions. We also facilitate mindfulness practices as the ground level of emergent strategy for young learners to shape change in their daily lives. Through partnerships, we seek implement solutions for healthy, happy coastal communities and small-scale fisheries.
Mission: To provide innovative positive youth development tools, trainings, and safe-spaces for children from small-scale fishing villages to cultivate attuned, caring relationships with themselves, society and their aquatic environment, celebrating strengths and addressing challenges impacting their social-ecological wellbeing and sustainable futures.
Objective: To support rural youth from isolated fishing villages to realize and reach their potential while raising awareness on the importance of small-scale fishing villages in the context of food security, livelihoods, natural-cultural heritage and climate resilience through the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradications by the FAO.
Vision: A healthy planet with happy coastal communities situated along a thriving ocean. We aspire for a global society that considers access to a healthy environment as a basic human right. We imagine a world that values nonviolent communication as a tool to resolve conflicts and reveres humanity and nature's intrinsic interconnectedness for our collective social-ecological resilience.
Coast 2 Coast is Beyond the Surface International's Peruvian nonprofit that combines investigation with imagination using participatory storytelling tools and research approaches to engage young learners in SSF villages in gaining and contributing to a kaleidoscopic understanding of their aquatic social-ecological systems and shaping positive changes in their lives for bright, sustainable futures.
Through a positive youth development approach and emergent strategies, we champion learners and educators as change-shapers. We partner with public schools, social projects, environmental nonprofits, and community-run organizations to facilitate photography, photojournalism, comic, stop-motion animation, street art, murals, filmmaking, map-making, and other “edutainment” workshops, combined 6-month programs and touring audiovisual festivals that explore our relationships with and within our built-natural surroundings.
Guided by the SSF Guidelines, young learners explore their local waters and fishing community as resilient researchers and skilled communicators, identifying their villages’ strengths, investigating changes, daylighting challenges, and brainstorming potential solutions for optimistic futures. Participants mobilize their knowledge by co-creating their own stories rooted in traditional knowledge, fortified by science and expressed through learners’ imaginations that highlight their aquatic ecosystems and built environments as common worlds shared with non-human beings and dynamic elements with agency and rights.
We seek collaborations with regional and global partners to implement these youth-driven, community-based solutions for healthy aquatic ecosystems and SSF communities through valued partnerships. Coast 2 Coast is rooted in Lobitos, a small-scale fishing village in Northern Peru, and facilitates in-person and virtual workshops, programs, and festivals with SSF communities from coast to coast.
BACKGROUND
The Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication - known as the SSF Guidelines for short - represent a global consensus on principles and guidance for holistic governance and social development concerning artisanal fisheries, recommending policies, strategies, and actions that protect small-scale fisheries (SSF) people's human rights across the sector and along the value chain. The guidelines aim to promote the social, economic, and environmental well-being of small-scale fishing communities while also ensuring the long-term sustainability of fish stocks and aquatic ecosystems. The policy tool addresses the "State" as national governments and local municipalities, fishing community members, civil society, enterprises, and other stakeholders, detailing what each can do to support the lives and livelihoods of SSF people. Upheld by a human rights approach, the SSF Guidelines focus on promoting SSF people's participation in decision-making processes, Blue Justice, and strengthening their capacities for responsible use of fishery resources.
Between 2011 and 2013, the FAO led a participatory process involving over 4,000 representatives from governments, fisheries associations, research institutions, and other stakeholder groups across 120 countries to co-create the SSF Guidelines as the first policy instrument recognizing SSF for their enormous contributions to society, including economic stability and sustainable growth, food and household nutrition security, and buffering against extreme poverty and vulnerability. The SSF Guidelines recognize small-scale fisheries as a key component for healthy communities and consider sustainable fisheries within a human rights-based framework, emphasizing equality and nondiscrimination, participation and inclusion of actors in SSF´s diverse and dynamic subsector. Rather than addressing symptoms of poverty that can drive unsustainable fishing practices, the SSF Guidelines unearth the root causes, including discrimination, marginalization, exploitation, and abuse, by focusing on systems level social-ecological changes in policy, regulatory and institutional frameworks.
See an example activity from the curriculum's Introductory Lesson Plan: What are the SSF Guidelines?
Co-creating the SSF Guidelines was an achievement in and of itself. Still, for this comprehensive policy tool to achieve its objectives, people first need to know it exists and how we can use it to shape the optimistic futures SSF people (re)imagine for their communities. The FAO is committed to supporting the implementation of the SSF Guidelines through collaboration with all relevant rightsholders and stakeholders interacting in the SSF sector, including SSF people, fish workers and their organizations, governments, civil society organizations, research and academia, the private sector, and the donor community. However, real implementation of the SSF Guidelines begins with a wide and comprehensive process of understating the principles and objectives agreed in the policy tool and how they can be use by all relevant actors and, arguably most importantly, artisanal fishing communities to facilitate change for a more sustainable and encouraging future.
INVOLVING THE PEOPLE
While multiple initiatives and organizations are generating awareness about the SSF Guidelines and the important role of small-scale fisheries for both local communities and society at large, the implementation success of these efforts still depends primarily on States and civil society organizations. While SSF communities played active roles during the formulation of the guidelines, ample space remains for involving the people in knowing about and how to use the SSF Guidelines as a tool to shape positive change.
In 2022, the FAO published a special report by Dr. John Kurien entitled Involving the People: Democratizing the Implementation and Monitoring of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication. As argued by Kurien:
“A radical change is needed in order to mainstream community participation into the implementation and monitoring of guidelines. There is a need to ‘take back voluntary guidelines to the community;’ demystify their contents; assess from the community what indicators they will utilize to evaluate the progress of implementation; and think through with them the nature of tools to be used for this purpose. Basically, the call is for a democratization of the implementation and monitoring of voluntary guidelines making it by, for and of the community.”
(Kurien, 2022, p. 3)
To truly move forward with the democratization of the implementation of the SSF Guidelines, there is a need to identify potential priorities and entry points for SSF people and communities to actively participate in mainstreaming the SSF Guidelines principles and objectives to strengthen SSF communities' vision towards sustainable livelihoods and food security. Enabling conditions must be established for multi-level and multi-stakeholder SSF governance processes across all gender and age groups within SSF communities.
In many cases, initiatives with this mandate are designed far from the local communities they are designed to engage, forgetting that SSF people are often stretched for time and resources even to consider their participation. Why would SSF people care to use data on their mobile phones or tablets to reach the FAO's website, locate the SSF Guidelines, download the PDF in their language, and contextualize concepts when there is a lack of trust in local authorities and no clear pathway to realize these lofty objectives? This question does not mean any disrespect shown to the SSF Guidelines as a groundbreaking, powerful, and incredibly comprehensive policy tool for local actors to wield to support their human rights. On the contrary, since the SSF Guidelines exist as the first international instrument to defend the human rights of SSF communities, it would be incongruous not to implement them through the same participatory philosophy that multi-stakeholder groups took towards their co-creation. Moreover, the world does not need another white paper that sits in a digitable library. In a rapidly changing climate and industrializing planet, we need white papers that are unafraid to get dirt on them because these publication are being passed around and leveraged to shape real positive changes on the ground in a collaborative and emergent way.
To produce the report, Kurien assembled an international team of researchers who partnered directly with SSF localities around the world to gather insights and develop community-based approaches with tools by which SSF people could monitor and evaluate the implementation of the SSF Guidelines in their villages.
In Mũi Né, a fishing village in Southeastern Vietnam, rural educators and young learners collaborated with Coast 2 Coast co-founder, Emi Koch, to think critically about indicators for implemented guidelines reflected in their local contexts. Teachers and students from the local schools, and children no longer able to engage in the formal education system, experimented with community-based monitoring tools and knowledge mobilization approaches like participatory photography and interviews. Fishermen certified as sail instructors and swimming educators at Manta Sail Training Centre, a local social enterprise engaging young Vietnamese children in water sports and climate action, also joined the project, exploring the SSF Guidelines chapter themes through participatory photography workshops with local youth. The research co-produced by SSF educators and young learners compliments the incredible diversity of knowledge gathered by SSF people worldwide through the Involving the People initiative, now embedded in the resulting 2022 publication for the FAO. The dedicated participation of local educators and young learners provided invaluable insights which sparked genuine curiosity in engaging with the guidelines to effect positive change in the fishing villages. This was the idea for this curriculum’s co-creation so that educators and young rights holders in other fishing villages and communities to do the same.
Beyond the Surface International received support from the FAO to realize the SSF Guidelines Curriculum, building on the Involving the People publication, during the 2022 International Year of Artisanal Fisheries & Aquaculture. The UN General Assembly elected Peru to lead IYAFA 2022 as Chair of the International Steering Committee. Peru has been the main driver for establishing IYAFA 2022 since the 34th FAO Regional Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean, committing to promoting policies and actions for the sustainable development of artisanal fishing and aquaculture. Considering Peru's leading role in IYAFA 2022, Beyond the Surface International produced the curriculum under Coast 2 Coast as a Peruvian nonprofit rooted in Lobitos, an artisanal fishing village where C2C could strengthen existing relationship and forge new ones through the realization of the curriculum.
THE PROCESS OF CO-CREATING
THE SSF GUIDELINES CURRICULUM
From November 2021 through IYAFA 2022 and concluding in February 2023, C2C's transdisciplinary curriculum development team consisting of artists, scientists, researchers, educators, and young learners from around the world investigating the status of youth and education in SSF communities, developing a theory of change, co-designing and piloting lesson plans, identifying areas that needed improvement, and making necessary adjustments before passing the curriculum along for illustrations and finally, publication of its inaugural edition.
Gathering the Team
The multi-cultural curriculum development team establishes guidelines, builds rapport, and makes a work plan for the curriculum development's initial steps.
Creating + Onboarding Focus Groups
The director identifies and connects with public schools, nonprofits, and social welfare centers to onboard a group of educators who represent a diversity of perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds from SSF communities in Peru, Nigeria, Madagascar, and India.
Writing a Literature Review
An investigation on the status of youth and education in rural fishing villages to provide valuable insights and recommendations for developing a curriculum relevant and meaningful to the needs and interests of youth in these communities.
Developing the Theory of Change
The curriculum Impact Producer faciliates workshop with curriculum team s to articulate a clear and coherent vision for the impact of theicurriculum and identify specific strategies and actions necessary to achieve this impact
Finding Stories within the Guidelines
Using the research done in the Involving the People publication to uncover the storylines each paragraph of the SSF Guidelines tells about SSF themes - from tenure to gender - to create meaningful and relevant lesson plans.
Drafting Curriculum Activities
Educators in focus groups and C2C's team exchange dynamics and activities for feedback, integrating critiques and building on identified strengthens.
Coastal Pilots
C2C facilitates select lesson plans and enrichment activities in five SSF village public schools, engaging students, teachers, and stakeholders. C2C also launches a photography contest across the state of Piura.
Virtual Pilots
C2C supports teachers in Peru, India, Nigeria, and Madagascar to faciliate 10 sessions co-created with C2C with a participant group organized by educators.
Inland Pilots
C2C takes the lesson plans and activities piloted along the coast into the Peruvian Amazon and Andean highlands to engage indigenous and inland fishing communities.
Impact Assessments
The curriculum impact procducer reviews and analysizes surveys to draw conclusions from the pilots engagement with local students and teachers.
Intergrating Learning from Pilots into Content
C2C works with within focus groups to revise curriculum activities and lessons based on educators and student feedback during the plots. including content, teaching methods, assessment strategies, or student engagement.
Presentations
Curriculum director speaks on the project at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD and the World Small-Scale Fisheries Congress in Latin America & the Carribbean to gauge interest and support..
Illustration & Publication
C2C reviews final versions of the curriculum content to share with illustrator to make its pages compelling, designs website, and shares 1st edition with rightsholders, supporters, and key stakeholders.
GATHERING THE TEAM
Coast 2 Coast brought together an international transdisciplinary team of artists, marine scientists, university students, and rural educators from essentially coast to coast to co-create a curriculum that utilizes the FAO SSF Guidelines as a pathway for young learners from SSF communities to explore their relationships with their aquatic environments, communities, and social-ecological resources in playful, creative and actionable ways. Many had never worked together before, and one ultimate soft outcome of the project was that the co-creation process cultivated many relationships among people from completely different backgrounds. For example, social workers from Vihinjam, a vibrant fishing village experiencing extreme poverty and unresponsible development, build a friendship with a documentary filmmaker from Lima, Peru. An emergent philosophy, pleasure activism advocates for making justice (and liberation) feel good. As the team assembled together, it was a paramount first step that we strive to make working together a pleasurable experience. If our team was feeling good, that was innately good for the world and, therefore, part of our work. The first meetings were to get to know one another, share about ourselves, what our favorite fruit was, and if we could name a superpower we already possess and one we wish we had, what would they be? Without knowing at the moment, the latter two questions would end up becoming the basis for SSF Guidelines Chapter 12 Capacity Development: Identifying Personal Capacities - Superpowers Among Us. Enjoying one another company and cultivating a supportive environment both in person and virtually for our team was fundamental if we were striving to facilitate the same for others.
To learn more about the incredible people who collaborated during IYAFA 2022 to co-produce the SSF Guidelines Curriculum, view the 0.1 Credits in the curriculum.
There are many benefits of having a multidisciplinary team to design the SSF Guidelines Curriculum:
Diverse perspectives: Each team member brings a unique perspective and expertise to the project. The marine scientists provide scientific knowledge about small-scale fisheries, artists lead with creative design and visual communication, university students offer new ideas, fresh perspectives, and also, inspiration to local students interested in pursuing careers in ocean sciences, and most importantly, rural educators and learners shares provide insight into the needs and challenges faced by their small-scale fishing communities.
Collaboration and teamwork: By working together, the team can leverage each other's strengths and skills to create a curriculum that is comprehensive, engaging, and effective. Each team member can contribute their own ideas and feedback, resulting in a more well-rounded and meaningful product that integrates diverse perspectives.
Community involvement: By championing rural educators' and students' involvement in the project, the curriculum can be tailored to the needs and interests of the communities it aims to engage in, exploring the SSF Guidelines. This can help ensure the curriculum is relevant and meaningful to the SSF people and educational institutions where it seeks connections.
Holistic approach: By incorporating art, science, and education, the curriculum can take a more holistic approach to small-scale fisheries. It can address technical aspects of fishing and the social, economic, and cultural dimensions of SSF communities as social-ecological systems.
Innovation: By bringing together people from different backgrounds, disciplines, and cultures, the team can generate new and innovative ideas that may not have been possible with a more homogeneous group. This can result in a more creative, engaging, and effective curriculum!
LITERATURE REVIEW
The body of knowledge describing youth in agri-food systems is growing. However, there is a notable lack of evidence and studies explicitly related to the status of young people in fish-dependent communities, or the roles young learners, educators, and schools play in realizing sustainable small-scale fisheries and aquaculture. In order to begin developing a curriculum for young learners framed by the SSF Guidelines, the curriculum development team began writing a literature review to identify critical issues and challenges facing youth in small-scale fisheries and rural education, informing the curriculum to potentially address these issues and support the well-being of youth in these communities. The literature review sought to identify best practices and successful models from the existing literature. C2C connected with Gilles Hosch, former FAO Fisheries Officer in Samoa, after reading his paper, The use of students in surveying subsistence fisheries - a Pacific Island case study which described lessons learned from a field trial of a student census in which 112 fourteen to eighteen-year-old students from one rural school on Upolu’s East Coast, Samoa, were given a logbook containing one questionnaire on household specifics (socio-economic data), and seven daily log sheets, into which household seafood consumption and fishing trip and catch specifics were recorded. Mr. Hosch was kind enough to offer guidance during the very early stages of the curriculum design progress. Through the curriculum's future editions, Coast 2 Coast seeks to continue filling in the knowledge gap on young people in SSF and rural education's role in shaping sustainable futures as part of an ongoing investigation mobilized by the curriculum's dissemination and implementation.
Download a copy of the Literature Review here!
YOUTH & EDUCATION IN SSF COMMUNITIES
Historically, primary fisheries policy and research efforts have focused on fish stocks and the marine environment, with little attention paid to SSF communities' social context. Moreover, little attention has been given to youth groups and their role in fishing villages. The SSF Guidelines Chapter 6 - Social development, employment, and decent work identifies gender and age groups unrecognized and marginalized, where there is a need to invest in human resource development such as health, education, and literacy, as well as to provide and enable access to quality education.
Education provision and access in SSF communities are not always optimal due to their remoteness and lack of human resources and infrastructure. Despite having less favorable conditions, rural schools, educational institutions, and rightsholder-directed nonprofits have consistently played a fundamental role within their communities. In addition to providing primary education, they often serve as cultural centers fostering deep wells of social networks, traditions, and values often overlooked in nationwide curricula designed with urban learners and development in mind. Rural educational institutions and public schools embedded within SSF communities are uniquely positioned yet unused implementation partners with enormous potential for raising awareness about the SSF Guidelines at the individual, household, and community levels. Rural schools are trusted within SSF groups, with established channels for knowledge exchange, and serve as physical spaces for discovery and dialogue. With creative learning tools and inquiry-based pedagogical approaches, local educators can reimagine their SSF as a rich, dynamic learning environment.
Rural educators are often unsung advocates of social justice, ecological conservation, and sustainable development. They usually deeply understand the needs and challenges facing their communities. They can use their position as educators to advocate for policies and programs that promote positive change.
Education and Awareness: Rural educators are positioned to engage their students and community members on critical issues, such as well-being, human rights, health, and entrepreneurship, primarily related to sustainable fisheries. They can also raise awareness about issues that impact their fish-dependent communities, such as environmental concerns, poverty, food insecurity, and Blue Justice.
Community Engagement: Rural educators can facilitate youth action research opportunities for young learners to explore their communities using participatory investigation approaches to understand their needs, concerns, and aspirations. Educators and students can build trust and foster a sense of shared responsibility for the village's well-being by listening to community members and working with them to identify solutions.
Capacity Building: Rural educators can help build the capacity of their communities by providing training and resources that enable young people to invest in their own imaginations and development. This might include training in fisheries ventures, health, conservation, entrepreneurship, or other important areas for young people and the community's interlocking futures.
Advocacy: Rural educators can advocate for policies and programs that benefit their fishing communities. They can work with local leaders, NGOs, and government agencies to secure funding and support for initiatives that promote positive change. Educators are also eager for opportunities that enhance their capacities for growth.
Youth Engagement: Rural educators can engage young people in positive activities, such as sports, arts, and community service. By providing opportunities for youth to learn new skills, build relationships, and contribute to their communities, they can help shape the next generation of leaders and change-shapers.
There is ample space for involving the youth in this open process of implementing and monitoring the SSF Guidelines by incorporating local educators and young learners of all ages. Working with teachers, instructors, facilitators from rural schools, and community organizers allows the youth to become champions of the SSF Guidelines implementation within their SSF communities.
With the right additional learning tools and pedagogical approaches, rural educators and young learners from fish-dependent communities can simultaneously gain and contribute to a kaleidoscopic understanding of small-scale fisheries in the context of food security and poverty eradication while monitoring the SSF Guidelines implementation at a local level.
Therefore, the need emerges for a comprehensive curriculum to guide teachers and students in exploring their role in promoting sustainable SSF and increasing awareness of the SSF Guidelines among fishing families.
EDUCATORS & LEARNER FOCUS GROUPS
Who better to design the lesson plans and enrichment activities that comprise the SSF Guidelines Curriculum's contents than with teachers, educators, and social workers in fish-dependent communities from public schools, nonprofits, and social welfare centers committed to providing their students the best learning opportunities? C2C is immensely grateful for the chance in 2022 to collaborate with 12 educators and 62 young learners from four diverse SSF communities in Nigeria, Madagascar, India, and Peru to design the curriculum's first edition. We plan to continue co-creating content with these outstanding educators and learners and onboard new groups as this project evolves - all while raising awareness around the SSF Guidelines.
By including rural educator focus groups in the curriculum design process, their input can help ensure that the curriculum is tailored to the specific needs and realities of small-scale fisheries in the local context. This can improve the relevance and effectiveness of the curriculum in promoting sustainable small-scale fisheries practices. Additionally, involving rural educators in the curriculum design process can help increase their understanding of the SSF Guidelines, which can, in turn, improve their ability to teach and promote sustainable practices to their students and communities. This can contribute to the overall adoption and implementation of the SSF Guidelines in the local context, ultimately leading to more sustainable small-scale fisheries practices and improved livelihoods for small-scale fishers and their communities. The focus groups sought to:
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Gather insights and perspectives from local SSF educators: Educators who work in rural fishing villages have valuable knowledge and insights into the local context and culture. Focus groups offer space for local facilitators to gather their perspectives and ideas about what educational strategies and materials will work best in their SSF community. This input can help ensure that the curriculum is culturally appropriate, effective, and engaging for the students and young learners (both inside and outside formal education systems).
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Invite participation in and feedback on the curriculum design: Educators and learners provide input on the curriculum design during the co-development process, designing, exchanging, reviewing, and revising lesson plans and enrichment activities. Focus groups will late test lesson plans, activities, and assessments. This feedback can help refine the curriculum and ensure it is effective and engaging. This can help to refine the curriculum to meet the needs of the learners better and improve its effectiveness. Focus groups can foster collaboration and partnership between educators and learners, creating a sense of shared purpose and mutual support. This can help to build trust and understanding between rightsholders and stakeholders, promoting a sense of community around the learning process.
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Tailor the curriculum to the local context: Educator and student focus groups can help ensure that the curriculum is tailored to the specific needs and challenges of the local community. This can include topics such as sustainable fishing practices, climate change, and disaster preparedness. Tailoring the curriculum to the local context will be more relevant and effective for the students. This can help to promote student interest, motivation, and learning outcomes.
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Increase buy-in and ownership: Educator and student focus groups can help increase buy-in and ownership of the curriculum. When educators and students are involved in the development process, they are more likely to see the value in the curriculum and be committed to implementing it effectively. Local teachers and learners become advocates for their curricula and the SSF Guidelines' implementation, providing input on how to evaluate impacts effectively. This can help to identify potential challenges and opportunities for improvement and support the ongoing refinement and improvement of the curriculum.
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Foster community engagement: Finally, educator and student focus groups can help foster community engagement in the educational process while simultaneously raising awareness of the SSF Guidelines. When community members are involved in the curriculum development process, they are more likely to be invested in the educational outcomes of local youth. This can lead to increased community support for the curriculum and the students' educational goals to maintain relationships with the local fisheries.
There is no universal definition of Youth.
The concept of youth can vary widely depending on cultural, social, and political contexts. Generally speaking, youth refers to the period of life between childhood and adulthood, but the age range that this encompasses can vary depending on the culture or society in question. In some countries, youth may be defined as individuals between the ages of 12 and 18, while in others, it may extend up to the age of 30 or beyond. Additionally, different organizations or government bodies may define youth for specific purposes, such as determining eligibility for programs or services.
There is no universal definition of SSF.
Small-scale fisheries can vary widely depending on geographic location, culture, and socioeconomic context. In general, SSF are defined as fisheries that involve small boats, relatively simple gear and often conducted by family-based or community-based people. Social and economic factors, such as the level of community involvement, the importance of the fishery to local livelihoods, and the level of economic development in the area, can also influence the definition of small-scale fisheries.
Facilitating focus groups with rural educators and piloting co-designed lesson plans with young learners from SSF communities can help design a curriculum that engages both groups effectively. Facilitating focus groups provided valuable insights into rural youth and small-scale fishing communities' unique needs, perspectives, and learning styles while also understanding educators' professional goals and teaching limitations. Meeting with educators from public schools, environmental nonprofits, and social welfare centers engaging daily with youth from fish-dependent communities could ensure that the curriculum design could be relevant, engaging, and effective for rightsholders. Focus groups also enabled the team to think critically about the curriculum's delivery method. For example, for small-scale fishers who may not have access to formal education, a curriculum delivered through community-based training programs may be more effective than traditional classroom-based instruction. This is where the power of community-based nonprofits comes into play. Overall, focus groups with educators and learners can be essential in designing a curriculum for a rural fishing village around the SSF Guidelines. By engaging stakeholders in the process, the curriculum can be designed to be relevant, practical, and engaging and better support student learning and development.
Made possible through generous support from the
To realize the focus groups, the Lighthouse Foundation awarded Beyond the Surface International with funding that would enable the curriculum development team to compensate educators for their time and expertise to the project over the course of IYAFA 2022 and enable schools to run virtual pilots with young learners from the local SSF community. Coast 2 Coast reached out to the local public school in Lobitos - Institucion Educative Lobitos (I.E. Lobitos), which we have a longstanding relationships with the administration and several teachers, and presented the project. The principle, one elementary teacher, and one secondary teacher joined the focus group. Emi Koch, the SSF Guidelines Curriclum Director, spoke with educators at a second-chance education center in Southern India, Sebastian Indian Social Project, where she used to volunteer. Three teachers eagerly joined the project.
The focus group component of the curriculum design also sought to forge new partnerships. Coast 2 Coast connected with Blue Ventures in Madagascar, inspired by the nonprofit's community-based work and educational practices. Blue Ventures (BV) offered the focus group opportunity to three educators, two of whom lead the Radio Club with local teenagers from a fishing village is Southwestern Madagascar co-creating audio productions. Lastly, as a participants in the International Ocean Institute Canada's remote course on Ocean Governance in the UN Decade of Ocean Science: Key Issues and Challenges, Emi Koch and the director of the Nigerian nonprofit Nature Cares Resource Cente connected and a pre-produced a fourth focus group in Nigeria.
NIGERIA
NCRC
Local Environmental Eduation Nonprofit
Nature Cares Resource Centre (NCRC) is an environmental non-profit organization established in 2003 with a mission to promote environmental conservation and sustainable development in Nigeria. NCRC focuses on a range of environmental issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change and sustainable fisheries.
MADAGASCAR
Blue Ventures
International Marine Conservation Nonprofit
Blue Ventures is a non-profit organization that works to support sustainable coastal livelihoods and marine conservation in Madagascar and other countries. Blue Ventures was founded in 2003 and has since worked with local communities in Madagascar to develop and implement innovative approaches to marine conservation and management.
INDIA
SISP
Social Welfare & Second-Chance Education Centre
SISP stands for Sebastian Indian Social Projects, which is a non-profit organization based in Kovalam, India. S.I.S.P. strives to accelerate social and economic change in the rural context by collaborating with local community members to build a better society where all people have easy access to education, health care, and employment opportunities.
PERU
I.E. Lobitos
National
Public School
La Institución educativa Colegio Lobitos is a public school with elementary and secondary students from the local fishing community. I.E. Lobitos is part of the national school system in Peru and strives to provide a quality rural education for local youth. The director is open to partnerships with civil society organization in the area to further students' learning.
1. Logistics & Onboarding
The introductory sessions with educators focused on understanding their intentions and motivations to join this project; everything related to how educators feel when thinking about this curriculum co-development process. C2C sought to identify emotions, practices, and collaborations - not only about our team but also within educators' work. The first sessions also established the grounding guidelines for engaging with one another. We treated the project as an experiment that we were doing together. Everyone had the knowledge to share with others and insights to learn from colleagues. We built trust through our curious interactions and never took us or the project too seriously in the way that pressure to get exact answers might create feelings of inadequacy and hamper rich discussions. As colleagues, we could all respectfully provide feedback and receive feedback on our contributions to the curriculum as it was being developed, allowing for adjustments and revisions to be made in real-time. Everyone expressed curiosity about one another, wanting to know more about one another's past, present realities, and ideas for the future. The ultimate expectation for the curriculum was that it could be relevant to students' lives and "not just another paper." Educators also were eager to gain more skills through the process, especially using audiovisual tools to engage their students in and outside their classrooms.
Coast 2 Coast met with Peruvian educators in Lobitos (a 10-minute walk from C2C's home base) and virtually brought in team members in Lima, Peru's capital city. With educators in Nigeria, Madagascar, and India, C2C's team met either early morning or late evening. The unstable internet connection proved challenging to facilitate virtual calls, so focus groups also relied on Whatsapp and Google Drive to share materials. C2C presented the project's objectives to educators, sharing about the SSF Guidelines and their significance to SSF communities around the world. Educators in Madagascar and Nigeria were familiar with the FAO, while teachers in India and Peru had only heard of the United Nations. However, everyone was aware of the Sustainable Development Goals.
2. Needs Assessment & In-Depth Interviews
After our introductory sessions, we followed with in-depth interviews where C2C invited educators to share their strengths, interests, and needs in teaching environmental and social justice themes.
Session 1: Educators' knowledge of environmental subjects
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Have you ever taught environmental or social justice issues or included them in your teachings? Why?
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What kind of knowledge do you need to teach environmental subjects? Would you require training?
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What is your approach to teaching environmental issues? Are you more about science, community action, about creative practice?
Session 2: Educators' preferred pedagogical practices
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What kind of activities or exercises do you find work better with the students?
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What kind of activities and exercises would you like to do more or introduce to your class?
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What do you need to do for those activities?
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Is there any instance where you integrate local community knowledge into your teachings?
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How do you integrate creative processes into your teaching?
Session 3: Educators' needs for the SSF Guidelines Curriculum:
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What knowledge do you think is important for this curriculum to bring forward?
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What values and commitments do you think are important for this curriculum to bring forward?
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How does this curriculum need to be/have for you to incorporate it into your practice?
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What kind of activities would make it challenging for you to incorporate the curriculum in your classroom?
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Would you and the institution you teach in be open to more outdoor and creative-inclined activities?
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In what context would you be incorporating the curriculum? In a course? Extracurricular activity?
3. Review Knowledge-Shared
Educators were all implementing social justice and environmental conservation lessons in their schools. They were curious to receive more technical training in marine, fisheries, and climate science, so they felt more confident to speak about the issues impacting their SSF villages. Educators noted that their students love interactive and dynamic project-based learning, stressing the need to make the curriculum fun and engaging, an essential aspect for keeping youth interested and motivated to learn. Educators shared specific ideas: Incorporating interactive activities, games, and field trips to local fishing communities or aquatic ecosystems to provide hands-on learning experiences. There was interest in learning how to create audiovisual productions alongside their students on themes impacting their daily lives, like plastic pollution, irresponsible development projects, and trawling along the nearshore environment. Educators in India spoke more about gender equity than other groups, while teachers in Peru were more concerned about the consequences of industrial pollution. Educators in Madagascar were unable to join the virtual session due to extreme cyclone seasons that cut the electricity and phone connections. In our Whatsapp group, once with a signal, educators shared their concerns about climate change and how their students felt overwhelming emotions thinking about climate action in the face of such destruction. Teachers in India mentioned COVID-19 and how SSF people in their communities had taken extreme measure to survive the pandemic. Educators identified opportunities for their students through the curriculum to identify the positive in their lives and within themselves and nurture both these strengths to shape the future they desire without leaving their communities behind in the process.
Logistically, educators also communicated their desire for the curriculum to be flexible enough to incorporate activities where they saw a knowledge gap or to contextualize youth's rural experiences. Implementing activities that completely removed students from their classrooms would be challenging for teachers. Still, they advocated for a hybrid model with some moments outside and discussions within their classroom.
Before moving on to co-creating lesson plans together, the SSF Guidelines Curriculum team needed to establish our impact strategy. This needed to be done early on in the project so that every step that followed, especially those involving the co-creation of lesson plans and materials, would envision the same goals and results.
4. Theory of Change
In order to develop and design the project’s impact strategy, we decided to use the theory of change method, which helped the team clarify the underlying assumptions and logic behind the project, identify the desired outcomes and design the project’s activities and final outputs as a group.
The curriculum development team co-created the project’s theory of change through workshops and discussions, continuously check-in and revising when needed over the course of the IYAFA 2022. We discussed the problems the curriculum should address and mapped the context in which it will operate. Team members offered different perspectives and together identified the project’s impact vision, which refers to the ultimate goal of the project and the outcomes that will demonstrate progress towards that goal.
"Utilizing the FAO SSF Guidelines as a framework for young learners to explore and engage with their aquatic social-ecological systems in creative ways can inspire a generation of local change-shapers who are better prepared to address anthropogenic stressors threatening their fishing communities' sustainable futures and support the SSF Guidelines' implementation at the local level."
The impact vision represents the big-picture change the project will contribute to as part of FAO’s Blue Transformation Roadmap 2022-2030. The impact vision is at the heart of the project; something partners can unite around and call upon as a reminder of what the project ultimately seeks to achieve as the curriculum evolves.We didn’t arrive at this version of the impact vision right away. It was an iterative process where the team continuously kept revising and adjusting the theory of change as the project progressed based on feedback and evidence from stakeholders and participants from the focus groups and pilots, incorporating their perspectives and priorities and considering the specific contexts. Using a theory of change model allowed the team, together with our focus group partners to agree and unite around a concrete real-world change and to develop a logical model that explains the necessary steps for achieving it.
The curriculum seeks to specific address the follow:
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Educational pains that lead to low retention rates, out-migration, and less adaptive and management capacity to the anthropogenic stressors threatening SSF's sustainable futures.
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Lack of youth engagement, involvement, and retention in their SSF communities. Youth in SSF feel they will be burdened with the stigma of failure because they did not move to urban centers.
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Rural schools overlooked as trusted, established channels for knowledge exchange, social capital hubs, and physical spaces for discovery and dialogue. Support SSF community schools, so they play an active role in monitoring SSF Guideline's implementation.
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Lack of awareness about SSF Guidelines. The guidelines are not widely known nor readily available to SSF communities, so a lack of attention needs to be addressed.
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SSF communities and their knowledge are often overlooked and left out of decision-making processes. Monitoring the implementation of the guidelines should come from within the communities.
5. Uncovering the Story each Guideline Tells
After establishing our impact vision and synthesizing insights shared by educators during our needs assessment sessions, Coast 2 Coast began to review each chapter of the SSF Guidelines in-depth. The Appendix II from the Involving the People (Kurien, 2022) proved to be an incredible tool in and of itself. Researchers had "demystified" the guidelines by highlighting takeaways, keywords, questions considered, implementation indicators, and more. Referencing the SSF Guidelines and with support from the appendix, the curriculum development team was able to effectively grasp the overall argument of each guideline and how it might be reflected within a SSF community.
We then challenged ourselves to consider each paragraph of the SSF Guidelines as a story with different spaces, characters, and actions. Discovering the stories each guideline was telling enabled C2C to design a lesson plan or enrichment activity guided by this story. For example, a value chain tells the story of a fish's journey from ocean, river, or lake to plate. Who are the characters the main character (the fish) meets along the way? What actions are these characters doing? Where are they doing them?
With feedback from educators in our Madagascar Focus Group, we thought of learning goals in terms of what each activity asked learners to Think, Feel, and Do as characters acting with specific spaces. We designed exercises with a youth action research component and a way to mobilize learners' knowledge gathered from their investigations. Educators could learn to use accessible audiovisual tools for learners to create their own creative narratives as photo series, mural mosaics, comics, puzzles, maps, and more. Each story enabled students to use their imaginations and contribute their "childish" ideas, an opportunity teachers shared in their needs assessments that were missing in standardized curricula.
Coast 2 Coast's team spent several months in this creative process, communicating with focus groups through Whatsapp and exchanging ideas for different games, activities, research questions, and projects.
Informal interviews with subject matter experts supported co-creating the initial lesson plans and mentorship with educators through the Dalai Lama Fellowship, in which the SSF Guidelines Curriculum Director is a 2022 Fellow.
VIRTUAL PILOTS
With the co-creation of draft lesson plans, educators in our focus groups were ready to pilot these ten activities with their group of participants. Each activity corresponded to a specific chapter and theme from the SSF Guidelines from the Introduction (Chapters 1-4) through Chapter 13 for ten lesson plans to pilot. C2C originally had planned to join these sessions with educators and students. Still, the poor internet connection for either the educators or the C2C facilitator (both calling from rural fishing villages) made joining the session virtually impossible. This development placed more ownership on local educators to deliver the lesson plans. The C2C team supported educators remotely, and educators shared feedback on sessions with C2C to consider for the final compilation of lesson plans, enrichment activities, and supplemental materials.
PERU
Because I.E. Lobitos is located in the same community as Coast 2 Coast, the SSF Guidelines Curriculum Director, Emi, could join the Peru Focus Group in person for their pilot. C2C invited Henry and Jesús Espinoza Panta, nonprofit educators and brothers from a treasured local fishing family, to join the focus groups. Henry is the Director of WAVES Lobitos, a longtime community-based educational partner of Coast 2 Coast. Founded by Dave Aabo, a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer, in 2004, the nonprofit is now run by Henry, one of its former participants. WAVES focuses on sports for youth empowerment and uses surfing and skateboarding as tools for local children to build self-esteem, healthy relationships, and care for the environment around them.
Henry's brother, Jesus, started participating in Coast 2 Coast photography workshops in 2014. He is now a professional fashion photographer, earning his undergraduate degree in communications, and teaches photography to local youth in Lobitos through Coast 2 Coast, WAVES, and the municipality. Henry, Jesus, and Emi worked to refine lesson plans to meet the Lobitos-context. Around 15 elementary and high school students created one mixed-age focus group organized by their communications teacher, Lino, and science teacher, Italo. The group met once or twice a month for eight months of testing activities from the SSF Guidelines Curriculum. All students eagerly participated in the games the lesson plans employed. When revelations about the game's hidden messages were revealed to students, the younger participants looked to the older ones for their perspectives. Gradually, young students began sharing their ideas with the group, encouraged by the high schoolers to speak their minds.
The focus group's participation gained attention from a Mexico-based nonprofit currently editing a book with students' images of places in their built and natural environment, imagining if the guidelines had been implemented and how these spaces would transform. Students developed their indicators to measure against changes. This activity created the core lesson plan for Chapter 13: Implementation Support and Monitoring.
INDIA
Teachers from Sebastian Indian Social Projects (SISP) facilitated and gathered a group of 20 students to participate in the "SSF Sessions." Half the participants attended government schools, while the other ten were enrolled in SISP's Second-chance Education Program for young learners who left formal education systems. All students were from the same fishing community, but many did not know each other. Teachers partnered with students in government schools and those at SISP as learning partners. The students and educators, Treeza, Aravind, and Praveen, explored each chapter of the SSF Guidelines through the lesson plans the educators had developed with Coast 2 Coast. The teachers worked to contextualize the main takeaways for students, coming up with the assessment questions at the end of each Core Lesson plan in the curriculum's 1st edition: ◊ What is the main takeaway or message of the activity? ◊ What does this main takeaway or message look like in your community?
In the participants' fishing community in Southern India, Vizhinjam, a massive development project to build India's "Port like Singapore," as students described it, along the seaside village dangerously eroding the coastline, causing over 280 fishing families to lose their homes and live in relief camps. Recently, protests have erupted over the project's lack of consideration for the welfare of residents. For Chapter 10 of the SSF Guidelines' activities, teachers and students went to the protests with their own signs and the goals of sharing about the SSF Guidelines (in Malayalam) with organizers to see how the guidelines could be leveraged to support their cause. Despite having to leave earlier due to the burning of a police station by protesters, teachers were thrilled to share with C2C's team intention and direct application of lesson plans. It was a memorable moment to share with educators that the lesson plans led to concrete actions taken by students on behalf of their community's human rights.
NIGERIA
Olusola "Sola" Adeoye is a marine conservation educator representing Nature Cares Resource Centre (NCRC). Sola worked with 12 young people from Rabaka, a fishing community in one of the most rural, inaccessible areas near Lagos. Rabaka is located in the ancient town of Ikorodu, a hotspot for Lagoon based fishing and a gateway to the Atlantic Ocean. NCRC provided the community with initial training on waste management before the pilot began. After receiving permission from village elders, Sola began weekly learning pilot sessions and added illustrations to the lesson plan that needed community-relevant examples of the themes from the SSF Guidelines. Sola incentivized learners to attend the weekly class by providing light refreshments and creating t-shirts, bags, and writing materials as if the participants were part of a club.
According to Sola, the facilitation created several impacts: "The learners have a clearer understanding of their parents' everyday jobs and how important fishing is to human well-being. They understand how difficult fishing sometimes has become and the high level of inequality. They better know what kind of transformation can occur in their community if their parents, who do daily fishing, can incorporate certain sections of the SSF Guidelines into their working processes. Learners are educating their parents on the danger of fishing fingerlings and sea turtles. They are helping their parents understand what equality means between men and women and why women must be paid more because they work more in the supply and value chain than men. The learners also share their experiences with peers who could not be part of the pilot project. The provision of uniform shirts and customized bags to the young learners attracted some adults in the community to listen more to the young learners and take them seriously."
MADAGASCAR
Symphorien and Solontena, both former scholarship recipients from Andavadoaka, are Blue Ventures staff members leading the Radio Team - a group of 15 young men (six) and women (nine) ranging from 20-26 years old who gather community voices and footage from three local fisher associations' management activities for a weekly radio broadcast and community outreach events. Symphorien and Solontena developed and adapted lesson plans for the youth of the Radio Team as agents of communication and change within their community.
The challenges the guidelines aim to address are a lived reality for Vezo fishing communities. While many of the communities have formed associations and work alongside NGOs and local, district, and regional government authorities to secure tenure rights and manage their marine resources, the majority of fishers remain unaware of their rights or the solutions to their challenges that are already being implemented around the world in similar settings. The Radio Team was excited to participate in this initiative to gain a deeper understanding of the global context of SSF and to create tools to engage the broader community with the FAO SSF Guidelines.
Over the six months from July to December 2022, Symphorien and Solontena facilitated six two-hour sessions, completing two lesson plans (Intro and Governance of Tenure). While each lesson plan was intended to be completed in one session, sessions were prolonged by translation, debate, and discussion among participants about integrating the activities into their work in the community. The lesson plans used basic communication techniques the Radio Team now deploys when creating content - asking what they want their target audience to know, feel, and do. Icebreakers and activities within the sessions prompted participants to put themselves in someone else's shoes - either other people or other creatures - emphasizing the critical value of empathy in holistic storytelling and managing relationships across social and environmental landscapes. In between sessions, the radio team met weekly to plan and produce 20 radio emissions and short spots about various themes within the SSF Guidelines contextualized for the community, including seagrass no-take-zones, temporary octopus closures, alternative livelihoods, fisher exchanges, traditional knowledge, and changes in fishing practice, catch, and the marine environment in recent history.
IN-PERSON PILOTS
PERU
The UN General Assembly elected Peru to lead IYAFA 2022 as Chair of the International Steering Committee. Peru has been the main driver for establishing IYAFA 2022 since the 34th FAO Regional Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean, committing to promoting policies and actions for the sustainable development of artisanal fishing and aquaculture. Leveraging IYAFA 2022 and Peru's leading role in the region, Coast 2 Coast utilized the medium of our annual participatory audiovisual and creative arts festival, Festival Somos Mar (FSM), to further pilot the co-created lesson plans and enrichment activities that resulted from sessions with educators in Peru, Nigeria, Madagascar, and India.
Festival Somos Mar, or We are the Sea Festival, tours public schools in SSF communities along Peru's northern coast, and our transdisciplinary team of multimedia artists, marine scientists, and dynamic educators facilitate workshops grounded in investigation and imagination using accessible audiovisual mediums like photography, photojournalism, stop-motion animation, street art, murals, and short films, and co-create their own stories. Rooted in traditional knowledge, fortified by science, and expressed through their own creativity, students co-create stories that celebrate their community's strengths, identify changes and daylight struggles, and pitch potential solutions.
Festival Somos Mar served as the curriculum's in-person pilot series returning to Negritos, Talara, Lobitos, El Ñuro, and Los Órganos to build upon these relationships with students and teachers, introducing the curriculum as a new tool for their classrooms (and beyond). We also launched a photography contest for students across the state of Piura in Northern Peru to document Part II of the SSF Guidelines.
During IYAFA 2022, Coast 2 Coast would also take the spirit of Festival Somos Mar into the Peruvian Amazon and Andes to work with inland fishing communities and Indigenous peoples. This was a first for Coast 2 Coast (a coastal and marine-based nonprofit) to see if the lesson plans and enrichment activities created for the SSF Guidelines Curriculum could be relevant and meaningful for local youth living in SSF communities along rivers deep within canyons and rainforests.
Coast 2 Coast produces an audiovisual experience summary each year of the festival. This IYAFA 2022, after learning about the SSF Guidelines through piloted lesson plans and enrichment activities, students from our focus group in Lobitos, Peru, co-created this year's video of Festival Somos Mar with Coast 2 Coast's team of educators. C2C presented the video co-production as an opportunity for students to explore critical questions concerning the SSF Guidelines' main chapters and highlight the answers coming from their own SSF communities. The video was used as an opportunity to assess students' understanding of the SSF Guidelines after participating in the co-development and piloting of the SSF Guidelines Curriculum's content. This approach to monitoring and evaluating young learners' retention can be replicated in other communities as students ask and find the answers in their own SSF communities. The co-creation process of these videos pilots ways that learners and educators can highlight their understandings gained through engaging with the curriculum.
Chapter 5: Participants created a stop-motion animation exploring the relationship between local legends and tenure; how stories may be intangible evidence of a SSF community's relationship with the spaces and resources over time. This piloted activity became Enrichment Activity 5.3: Time as Tenure in the curriculum.
Chapter 5: Young Learners also painted murals illustrating their ocean's rich biodiversity while noting legal regulations for sustainable resource use. This was transformed into Enrichment Activity 5.4: The Beauty of Biodiversity - Mural Mosiacs, where students draw pictures of their favorite aquatic non-humans with any management rules they uncover for safeguarding them.
Chapter 7 + 8: Students in El Ñuro piloted a lesson plan to illuminate the characters facilitating a fish's journey from ocean to plate along the supply and value chain. This activity was integrated into Core Lesson 7: Following the Fishes' Mapping' Labor, Geography, and Value Post-Harvest.
Chapter 7 + 8: Students also in El Ñuro painted a mural of a woman in fisheries' hands, complimenting those of a fisherman on a mural realized during FSM 2021. The two murals together represent gender equity in fisheries from the net to the pot, celebrating the vital role of women in SSF as described in Chapter 8: Gender Equality in the SSF Guidelines.
We also engaged teachers across the schools in piloting lesson plans with us for one hour, and in the second hour of the session, teachers gave their feedback, having experienced the dynamic themselves. They either redesigned the activity based on their understanding and limitations or looked through the guidelines and created a new one.
Tupén Grande, one of the most populated and least accessible communities in the Andean highlights of Peru, was chosen because of the link between Marañón Experience, a rafting company and colleagues of Coast 2 Coast, and one of the teachers from the only primary school in the area. Through this connection, C2C coordinated with the educational center and the students who would later participate in the festival. A team from Coast 2 Coast and Marañón Experience, with volunteers and members of an upriver community, set off on a 2-day rafting trip to the Tupén Grande community. A total of 18 students participated in three days of photography workshops and piloting the same mural activity as C2C facilitated in Los Órganos, highlighting the nearshore aquatic biodiversity and ways to care for it. The move was perfectly translatable, and rather than top-down fisheries regulations, young participants learned more about customary laws related to the co-management of the river.
One of the reasons for holding the festival in Oxapampa was the previous link with the director of Fundo La Gorda. This project belongs to a network of initiatives for conservation areas in the region. This network established contact with CEARE, one of the few organizations working with Indigenous communities that still fish in the rivers. In this way, CEARE became a strategic ally, and work meetings were held for several months to organize the festival, gaining permission from local authorities. C2C realized thaumatrope workshops where youth and elders from the Yanesha Indigenous peoples produced their own simple animations, an optical illusion based on combining two images with movement. This became the curriculum's very first lesson plan. We also facilitated photography workshops exploring the rainforest's biodiversity
The lesson plans C2C piloted with local educational partners connected to marine and freshwater ecosystems were relevant and meaningful for participants despite their geographic and cultural differences. The unique insight gained from the experience comparing the festival and workshops was that youth in inland fisheries - the rainforest and the Andes - did not think of themselves as from a fishing village but rather from the river itself. Like the river, they felt a more fluid connection between the land and the watery ecosystem. In contrast, students on the coastline felt pride in their identities as SSF people rather than being of the ocean itself.
IMPACT
Developing an impact strategy for the project was important for several reasons; it helped to define more specific and more measurable goals, identify the specific outcomes that the project aims to achieve over time, and determine the indicators that will be used to measure progress towards those outcomes in the short, mid and long term. Focusing on outcomes helped us ensure that the project’s team and resources were used effectively and efficiently to achieve the set goals and visualize the big-picture change to which the project seeks to contribute as part of FAO’s Blue Transformation Roadmap 2022-2030.
The impact strategy development process enabled our team to engage with multiple stakeholder groups invested in small-scale fisheries’ sustainable futures and those sharing space with artisanal fishing communities, such as tourism operations. Through one-on-one interviews with educators. Not only is it a great way to communicate the project to others, but by involving them in its development, we can ensure that their perspectives and priorities are considered in the project design. It also provides a framework for monitoring and evaluating. By regularly monitoring progress, we can make adjustments to ensure the project is on track to achieve its intended impact over time.
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OUTPUTS & OUTCOMES
The outputs and outcomes describe the different types of results and impacts the initiative aims to achieve. The outputs refer to the tangible products and interventions the project has delivered, and the outcomes refer to the changes and benefits that we expect will result from these outputs.
OUTPUTS
The project’s main output is the first edition of the Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines Curriculum, which enables participants as a fishing village's youngest rightsholders to explore the SSF Guidelines as reflected in their realities, focusing on strengths, changes, challenges, and opportunities in the context of food security, poverty eradication, natural-cultural heritage, biodiversity, health, climate, and sustainability. The SSF curriculum also includes sub-outputs: A Literature review which consists of the research and foundations of the curriculum, a Participant Workbook for participants who want to dive deeper into some themes, and an SSF Curriculum’s Website, a platform to share about the project and reach educators in SSF communities from coast to coast.
A second output is the Monitoring and Evaluation Plan (M&E plan), which has been designed to help track the initiative’s progress over time and to gather evidence to test against the outcomes and assumptions. It includes a set of different Collection and assessment tools as sub-output.
The final output consists of a Concept Note: Strategy to Scale the Curriculum & Co-Create the SSF Guidelines Curriculum’s 2nd Edition. A strategy and comprehensive work plan to scale the curriculum which includes a process for updating and adapting it after the co-creation of the 1st edition concludes.
OUTCOMES
Setting expected outcomes is important because they will provide evidence of the effectiveness of the project outputs in achieving the desired goals. However, making a positive difference in people’s lives might take a long time, and some of the evidence will not be visible for a while. We have organized the outcomes in the long, mid and short term.
Long-term outcomes:
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Support quality education for learners in small-scale fishing communities around the world - Support the conditions for quality education for learners in small-scale fishing communities around the world. Specifically focused on adapting to young people’s social-ecological realities and aspirations through working in partnership with local educators and stakeholders.
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SSF Youth Capacity Building - youth have the social and ecological capacities that are involved to some degree in their SSF and allow them to deal with anthropogenic stressors threatening their community’s future.
Mid-term (interim) outcome:
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Youth are Involved in the Monitoring & Evaluation of the SSF Guidelines’ Implementation at the Local Level - Local youth in SSF communities are in charge of the implementation & monitoring of the guidelines at a local (even regional) level, as well as proposing relevant indicators and tools.
Short-term outcomes:
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SSF Youth (and their communities) are Increasingly Aware of the SSF Guidelines - Implementing the core lessons of the SSF Guidelines Curriculum and additional activities increases awareness of the SSF Guidelines among learners, educators, and local fishing families.
Soft Outcomes
These refer to the internal changes in the way SSF youth and other community members feel, think or behave, and that might be difficult to observe directly or measure soft outcomes objectively. We have identified possible behavioural and attitude changes that could help evaluate the program’s effectiveness over time, such as levels of youth engagement within the SSF community or levels of youth self-esteem. However, these should continuously be discussed and agreed on with the curriculum’s facilitating partners so that they adapt to each specific circumstance and context since soft outcomes are difficult to measure and evaluate.
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Monitoring & Evaluation Plan
The theory of change should help guide the initiative’s design, implementation and evaluation, but it is not a fixed strategy; it should continuously be tested, adjusted, and improved with the help of the Monitoring and Evaluation Plan (M&E), which has been designed to help track progress over time, gather evidence to test against the outcomes and assumptions and identify areas where there is need for improvement.
The M&E plan is one of the project’s main outputs; it includes descriptions of the goals and intended outcomes, the assumptions on which these are based, and the indicators that will be used to measure the project's progress. It also outlines the specific information collection and assessment methods and tools that will be used to evaluate the project. Finally, the M&E plan provides mechanisms, such as digital surveys, for the curriculum’s facilitating partners to report findings and share feedback with FAO and other stakeholders.
Festival Somos Mar (FSM) supports young learners in small-scale fishing communities in Northern Peru to learn more about their built and natural environment and resources. The festival facilitators engage learners and educators through creative workshops and theory classes.
One of the festival’s goals is to share with young people ways to explore and learn about their natural surroundings and how to protect it from threats. During FSM’s third edition, we used the SSF Guidelines as a framework for each activity, even those not designed through a lesson plan with our focus groups. The purpose of this was to raise awareness about the guidelines and to start testing and piloting some of the activities and content in the SSF curriculum.
The educational institutions in El Ñuro and Los Órganos were chosen because they were favourable places for knowledge exchange. Both are public institutions and representative of schools in other SFF communities across Peru. In addition, Coast 2 Coast has had a continued presence on the area for several years, making it easier to monitor and evaluate the dissemination and application of the guidelines over a more extended period.
In order to evaluate the different workshops and classes, we created a set of data collection instruments based on mixed techniques that allowed us to collect quantitative and qualitative information and to obtain a broader view about the objectives of the festival regarding the learning of the SSF Guidelines from the perspective of the participants and the overall satisfaction levels with the activities. Most of the information collection was carried out in person through surveys taken out on-site at the end of each class or workshop; however we also used other information collection methods such as interviews and the assessment of the audiovisual materials and creative products created during the festival activities.
Some of the results we were able to collect from the coast pilots include:
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Almost all students who participated in the festival had not previously heard about the SSF Guidelines.
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75% of surveyed educators (from both schools) stated that they did not know about the existence of the SSF Guidelines before the FSM. Only 25% said they had heard about them previously.
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Most students (over 80%) from both educational institutions (El Nuro and Los Organos) expressed high satisfaction with the festival activities and content.
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Most participants from both schools expressed satisfaction and happiness with participating in interactive dynamics and artistic techniques such as stop-motion animation and mural painting, among others.
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100% of the educators surveyed said that the content and methods used in the FSM activities were helpful for them, and 80% stated that it was very probable that they would apply them in the future.
Based on these results and other observations, we were able to draw insights and learn some lessons during the FSM coastal pilot:
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The high satisfaction levels among participants might be because they appreciated the opportunity to do something different from their regular classes and wanted to please the festival organisers.
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Based on the surveys results and on the creative products produced during the festival activities, we learned that creative arts were an effective channel for participants to learn about the SSF guidelines.
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We observed significant differences between El Nuro and Los Organos students. While both educational institutions are public and the participants ages and grades were practically the same, it was clear that the educational level and comprehension capacity of the students from Los Organos was higher than that of the students from El Nuro. We believe one reason for this may be linked to the fact that El Nuro is a much more economically impoverished community with far less opportunities for youth than Los Organos.
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We also observed that the levels of school dropouts in El Nuro were very high, and that the number of students decreased considerably each year, from approximately 30 students per classroom in the 8th grade to only seven students in the 11th year. This was probably due to the fact that older kids in El Nuro have to start working at a young age to help their parents.
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This difference between students from both communities made us reconsider how the surveys were designed. While all students expressed overall satisfaction with the festival activities and content, we noticed that students from el Nuro had a more challenging time understanding some specific questions regarding the guidelines. Therefore some of the results were probably skewed. For example, half of the surveyed students in El Nuro answered that they did not consider that women in fisheries were treated unfairly; however, based on our conversations with them, that perception was inaccurate. Therefore, we designing curriculum surveys in a much more simple and straightfoward manner for students from diverse educational backgrounds to understand.
After the pilots, C2C debriefed with educators in the focus groups about the different experiences. C2C provided surveys; however, even the way to monitor and evaluate the impacts of the pilots resulted in a pilot. Students in Peru co-produced a video with C2C sharing their insights, while students in India shared their testimonies. Young learners in Nigeria and India also shared survey results where, as participants in Madagascar, had tailored the lesson plans to meet the goals of the community radio. However, this proved insightful and informed the final development of the curriculum's accompanying monitoring & evaluation plans with more straightforward, simpler questions. One result was evident across all groups. Everyone had "made new friends." This was true for facilitators as well. Although considered as a "soft outcome," a tight network of relationships built on play and trust can lead to resiliency and can be more difficult to break.
Abilash | India Focus Group
The 2023 SSF Guidelines Curriculum is ready for publication after a yearlong participatory development adventure from coast to coast. We are thrilled to share it with the world and build momentum around the SSF Guidelines at the grassroots level.
C2C is excited for an opportunity to work further with educators from our focus groups to develop SSF Youth Club, where students can continue to engage with one another (especially if from separate schools) and the SSF Guidelines, working more closely to shape their deserved change for their SSF villages exercising the guidelines as a tool. For the following stages, we hope this curriculum can reach educators in schools and nonprofits in fishing villages around the world to experiment with in their classrooms, providing feedback to us on what seemed to work and what was left alone so that we might improve the curriculum each year. For our next step, we hope to develop and facilitate onboarding and training for teachers on how to utilize the curriculum while offering teachers new teaching tools and supporting quality rural education for students.
