Abstract:

We present an interdisciplinary experience of Service Learning, which has been part of the broader project Sharing ideas: the university goes to high school. In this project university students divulgate, dialogue and contrast knowledge acquired at their university class through the organization of workshops at high schools. In our case we invited sociology students from the course Sociology of Genders and medicine students doing a Pharmacy course to design an intervention on drug consumption.

Our general objective was to innovate university teaching and bring it closer to real-world issues. In concrete we aimed firstly, to foster interdisciplinary thinking of our students, secondly, to introduce a gender perspective on drug use, and thirdly, to make them contrast their theoretic knowledge with real-world experiences of high school students. Our students defined themselves the objective to empower the secondary education pupils on autonomous and critical decision-making concerning their drug use.

Methodologically we based our project on service learning, enriching it with the notions of feminist methodologies and public sociology. In order to control both, the community impact as well as the satisfaction and consolidation of knowledge and competences of our students we opted for a mixed method approach: Our students responded a questionnaire and wrote a final reflection; the secondary students and their teachers responded a mainly quantitative questionnaire.

The results indicate that the participating secondary students and their teachers strongly appreciated the intervention of our students. Our students underline that service learning gives them the possibility to concentrate on one topic and contrast it permanently. They consider that the contents are interiorized better than in a theoretic exam. However, they also indicate that service learning implied much more work and admit that the interdisciplinary part has been very difficult.

We can conclude that an interdisciplinary intervention on drugs in the mark of service learning is a very promising way to innovate teaching in Gender Sociology and Pharmacy. Difficulties concerning the inequal effort should be foreseen by teachers; difficulties concerning interdisciplinarity need to be worked on, enhancing interdisciplinarity.

Keywords:

Pharmacy, sociology, gender, drugs, service learning, interdisciplinarity.