Aboard We Explore, the ambassador catamaran designed by Roland Jourdain, a multidisciplinary crew with backgrounds in higher education, research and citizen science set sail from Brest on Monday June 19, 2023.
The aim?
In an inspiring setting, away from routine, the crew members spent several days getting to know each other, working together and testing citizen science protocols. The purpose of this innovative initiative was to set the stage for interdisciplinarity and creativity, harnessed for the benefit of the socio-ecological transition.
The crew members all have different academic and professional backgrounds – an oceanographer, a fab lab manager, a fine arts student and instructional design engineer for example – and yet they share the desire to go beyond merely acknowledging climate change by taking action, through meaningful, tangible steps tailored to higher education in Brittany.
We spent our days participating in work sessions on education, including imagining what “my institution in 2040” might look like, and citizen science sessions. On day three, we launched Kosmos, an open-source method for observing coastal underwater biodiversity,” explains Gwenola Bailly Martin, an instructional design engineer at ENSTA Bretagne.
Bringing about positive change
Led by Roland Jourdain, his We Explore teams and the hub IsBlue, the project brought together an eight-person crew, three of whom were from ENSTA Bretagne.
This is one of the innovative initiatives of the Holi-D Blue project, a scheme run by ENSTA Bretagne aimed at empowering future maritime engineers to take up the challenges of the green transition.
The program from June 19 to 22, from Brest to Concarneau, was a busy one. “This team venture gave us an opportunity to compare perspectives and experiences and thus to bring an interdisciplinary vision to the issues of training in the socio-ecological transition. Proposals were outlined that we will share with our institutions,” clarifies Gwenola Bailly-Martin.
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