Plastic Ocean

2.1    Staff & Volunteers

Volunteer Requirements: Core organising team only

As only one demonstrator is required for each class, this event can be prepared and run by a single organiser. If other people are on board (a teacher helped develop lesson plans for different age groups in Malta based on the national curriculum), this can help in the process, but is not essential. If the event is held at many schools, recruiting volunteers that can run the activity is also helpful.
As the organiser, you need to be comfortable developing the activities and liaising with teachers to integrate this double lesson into their schedule. Any experiments need to be prepared in advance, and you should be comfortable working with children of various ages.

2.2    Venue Hire

Venue: School / Laboratory
Capacity: 1 – 20 people

There is no venue hire required, as the event is brought into schools. Depending on the setup of the activity, a normal classroom or a science classroom with laboratory equipment might work best, check with the teacher what is available to you. If any materials used can be supplied by the school, this would aid the event as well.
While Plastic Ocean should reach as large an audience as possible overall, each individual event is restricted by the class size. Keeping this under 20 is recommended, in order to make sure everyone’s voice is heard and all children can participate in the discussion and group activities.

2.3    Partner Institutions

Partner Institutions: Required

This activity must be run within a school, and it is crucial to contact teachers early on in the process, as the event cannot be run otherwise. Try and integrate the double lesson with the school curriculum, as this will make it easier for teachers to justify giving away a double lesson for this. Working with and through local education departments can be a good strategy as well to maximise your reach and make the project more appealing for individual schools.

2.4    Budget

Yearly / Project Budget: 0 – 500€

Each individual event can be held at minimum expenditure, but if repeated at many schools it might accrue costs of a few hundred euros. This is mainly for any licences required for the documentary screening, as well as demonstration materials and printing.

3.1   Target Audience

Target Audience: Secondary School (12 – 17)

In order to fully address the societal issues at stake, as well as the science behind the challenges we face, it is most appropriate to conduct Plastic Ocean or similar activities with a secondary school audience. Always make sure to check the background knowledge of students, as integration with your national curriculum is more important here than with other events.
Even within this age range, significant differences can arise in approaching the event. Older children might be expected to lead a more nuanced discussion using several concepts already learned, while the younger end of the age range will need more guidance and potentially experiments to illustrate aspects of the documentary.

3.2   Marketing

Plastic Ocean can not be marketed like other events, as you depend on the support of schools as partner institutions. Approaching teachers or heads of school on an individual basis has been proven the most effective solution, using allies to kick start the project and gain a wider reach. Initials pilots can be used to generate photos and other promotional materials that can be shown to teachers at other schools afterwards, demonstrating that Plastic Ocean has already been implemented with some success for other students.
If multiple schools can be contacted at once, e.g. through your local Department of Education or a similar institution, this would also be very useful. Mailshots etc. can be used to great effect, over and above any traditional marketing campaigns offline and online.

3.3   Dialogic Strategy

Starting with the documentary as problem scenario, the remainder of the double lesson should be made as interactive as possible. Initially, feedback on what they saw can be obtained from students to put the main problem into sharp focus. Asking what they observe and allowing them to form opinions means that the lesson plan follows the IBSE model: inquiry-based science education. In a fairly standard approach to this, questions can be answered through experiments, for which you can ask school children to describe and explain the evidence following the prepared demonstration.
If an extended discussion is desired, Edward De Bono’s thinking hats are a great way to get kids to play different roles and think about different aspects of the problem (see “Added Benefit” for a discussion of this method). Your role in any of these scenarios will be that of a moderator, as the lesson will be more of a dialogue and not involve and top-down teaching methods.

4.1   Project Timeline

4.2   Single Event Structure

4.3   Personnel roles

4.4   Materials

For Plastic Ocean, a classroom with a screen and projector is required to show the documentary. Any other materials needed depend on the activity, potentially requiring laboratory facilities in the school and thus a different room.
Make sure to liaise with the school about purchasing materials as well: you may be able to use certain chemicals, or common lab equipment from their end. Any basic facilities such as tables and chairs will be in the classroom and arranged by the school.

4.5   Other Logistics

Plastic Ocean does not require any larger scale logistics outside of what has been described in previous sections.

The idea of tackling societal challenges, in particular those in the environmental sector, through a trans-disciplinary approach that places emphasis on the co-creation of knowledge, has been pointed out in the literature.(1) While this mainly concerns the research needed to tackle these issues, it can be argued that starting at an earlier stage and engaging school children with these topics as well as the relevant processes can set about an important cultural change.

Allowing students to take a more active role in their education has become more commonplace in the last decades. The idea of inquiry-based learning is now deeply rooted in the mind of many science educators, and a recent meta analysis of studies that have investigated the efficacy of inquiry-based learning confirms that there is a positive effect on learning outcomes.(2) A possible way to bring about an extended discussion is the use of Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats: one group manages the discussion; one group focuses purely on facts, another purely on emotions; one group applies logical thinking to potential benefits, another applies it to potential concerns; and finally, one group takes care of creative, outside the box, thinking.(3) This process can be introduced and managed carefully, and can lead to results even the moderator does not expect.

1. Mauser, W. et al. Transdisciplinary global change research: the co-creation of knowledge for sustainability. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 5(3-4), 520–531 (2013).
2. Lazonder, A. & Barbagallo, F. & Harmsen, R. Meta-analysis of inquiry-based learning: Effects of guidance. Review of Educational Research. 86(3), 681–718 (2016).
   
3. De Bono, Edward. Six Thinking Hats (Book). Penguin (2016)
   

To evaluate whether the activity increased understanding of the subject matter as well as the scientific confidence of children, it is easiest to distribute a pre- and post-questionnaire. The former can be given at the beginning of the lesson, while the latter can be distributed by teachers a few weeks later, after students had time to reflect on the lesson and complete any follow-up assignments.

This allows for direct comparisons in attitude, e.g. whether children have seen the use of scientific concepts in real-life issues, consider plastic pollution of the oceans a serious problem etc. Any other feedback on the event itself will be useful as well and can be used to tweak the lesson plan for future events in a continuous self-evaluation process.

While the documentary is now available via Netflix, find information about the process behind it, along with more about the foundation “Plastic Oceans”, on their website:

https://plasticoceans.org/about-film/