Transforming society may require transforming education
Transforming society may require transforming education
An update on the 3-year "Comenius Project", by Edwin van Meerkerk, Elize de Mul, and Britt Broekhaus
*See the end of this post for two student research assistantship opportunities to support research on integrating sustainability into higher education curriculum.
The three-year Comenius project 'You Have a Part To Play: Higher Education for Sustainability' was launched at the end of 2022. The aim of this Comenius project is to work, together with teachers and students, on tools for teaching and learning to give the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 'sustainability competences' a firm place in the curriculum of all programmes. To implement the SDGs in Radboud University's programmes, the core team - consisting of Edwin van Meerkerk, Elize de Mul and Britt Broekhaus - is working with the Radboud Sustainability programme, the Radboud Sustainable Development Network, the Radboud Centre for Sustainability Challenges, and the faculties. There is also a collaboration with ArtEZ University of the Arts to develop forms of education that help students become aware of the complex issues of the SDGs. This project funded by a Leadership Fellow scholarship from the Comenius Programme.
In the project, we work in close cooperation with teachers and students from the study programmes, exploring together what the meaning and role of sustainability (in the broad sense) is in the study programme and how we can strengthen and/or broaden it. This may, for example, be in the form of a new course, the adaptation of an existing course or the development of smaller components and tools that can be fitted into different courses.
By now, we have been well underway for several months and have access to all 7 faculties. We have had a first interview with 26 programmes and have also finished the second interview with 17 programmes. This is slowly giving us a better picture of the current state of sustainability in education, with the main insight being that the commitment and motivation for sustainability in education is incredibly high. Another thing we have observed is that many of the teachers and students associate sustainability only with ‘green’ sustainability, and with knowledge of, instead of skills for sustainability at that. We do see that once the teams start viewing their curriculum through the lens of sustainability competences, this opens many opportunities for education.
After the summer, we will follow up on the interviews with two workshops, first bringing together the various teacher-student pairs from each faculty to work on sustainability in the curriculum. A second, university-wide workshop will follow in January 2024.
Student assistant vacancies
We are still looking for student assistants for the Sociology and English Language and Culture programmes. Are you or do you know a suitable student? Then take a look at these vacancies below:
https://www.ru.nl/studentenbanen/@1385646/english-language-and-culture-student-for/?reload=true