The "Consortium for Oceanographic Activities for Students and Teachers," or COAST, is a working collaborative designed to
effectively deliver oceanographic and coastal processes education to pre- and inservice teachers from kindergarten through the
twelfth grade (K-12). Each of the COAST members offers expertise in different areas and through focused efforts at specific
educational levels provides depth of knowledge and resources in these areas. As a collaborative, the partners provide the broadest
spectrum of means, methods and materials for ocean science education, as well as a nationwide telecommunications infrastructure.
The COAST partners include: Operation Pathfinder, a nationally recognized inservice program for elementary and middle school
teachers of predominantly minority students and the development of curricular materials; the Ocean Voyagers program, a middle
school teacher preservice/inservice training system featuring integrated curriculum development, World Wide Web page construction
and maintenance, and teachers-to-sea experiences; and STARBORD, a high school level effort combining training with
teacher-student research partnerships to leverage computational science tools for ocean science research. Each of these programs
individually creates bridges between ongoing Naval research and formal and informal learning environments through focused teacher
education.
Together, the COAST collaboration fuses the strengths of each partner to provide ocean science activities for educators ranging from
hands-on experience aboard research vessels, through Web-based instruction, curriculum resources, and videoteleconferencing, to
computational science and visualization of the highest quality. Each consortium partner is actively forging connections between
research and the classroom in ways that all of the others may leverage and which may serve as national models. Operation
Pathfinder provides hands-on experiences in marine research and empowers teachers to make these experiences relevant and
exciting for their students. Ocean Voyagers works to place marine and ocean studies into a broad curricular context, using, for
example, literature, music, the arts, history, geography, or economics to provide students with personally meaningful points of access
to oceanographic studies. STARBORD transforms hard data and raw numbers into visual representations of complex problems and
conditions in ways which make those data engaging, understandable and useful in local contexts. Each of these approaches makes
oceanography and coastal science both pertinent and real in the lives of learners of all ages and suggests the breadth and richness
of careers in any of the maths and sciences.
