From my perspective, the FISH SAFE Stability Education Program has been 30 years in the making. Back in March 1975, it was the loss of 10 vessels in one herring season, including my father’s fishing vessel the Bravado off the BC coast that raised many questions about what contributes to a capsizing. Are they operational issues? Structural issues? Both? That same year, a special enquiry into vessel capsizings identified vessel stability as a key contributing factor and recommended a national program for stability education.
The Fish Safe Stability EducationProgram is designed for fishermen and their unique operating conditions and we hope it will provide answers and practical knowledge on stability.
Gina Johansen
FISH SAFE
How is the Fish Safe Stability Education Program Different?
Traditional marine training presumes the teacher is the “expert”, providing facts to students who are expected to embrace and incorporate that information into their operating practices. In most cases the teacher has a deep sea background, and little knowledge about commercial fishing and the real world challenges that making a living from a moving platform present.
The Fish Safe Stability Education Program offers stability information in a manner that respects and is situated in the context of the real world experience of fishermen. It is student centered and recognizes that learning is an interactive process. Fishermen create new ways of knowing by incorporating past experience and knowledge with new facts and information. The instructor is a facilitator who coaches, mediates, prompts, and helps students develop and assess their understanding of stability, and thereby their learning.
Instead of lectures and workbooks, Fish Safe Program facilitators use instructional techniques that are “most likely to impart useful knowledge” to fishermen. Techniques include group work, participatory learning activities, critical questioning, problem solving, and decision making, experimental inquiry, case studies, learning games, personal narrative, and participant experimentation with hands-on models to demonstrate stability principles.
From my perspective, the FISH SAFE Stability Education Program has been 30 years in the making. Back in March 1975, it was the loss of 10 vessels in one herring season, including my father’s fishing vessel the Bravado off the BC coast that raised many questions about what contributes to a capsizing. Are they operational issues? Structural issues? Both? That same year, a special enquiry into vessel capsizings identified vessel stability as a key contributing factor and recommended a national program for stability education.