Abstract:

Universities play a crucial role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through their activities in research, community collaboration, institutional management, and, most importantly, the education of the next generations of leaders and professionals who will continue working towards creating a more sustainable world. Training individuals committed to advancing the SDGs requires a comprehensive approach incorporating sustainability, social responsibility, and ethics principles into the academic curriculum. The objective is to integrate these principles organically, besides learning the technical concepts inherent to each discipline, and ensuring that this process occurs within an international and multicultural environment that acknowledges the importance of generating solutions to problems that arise in a globalized context.

This pedagogical experience was titled Nourishing Communities: Promoting Slow Food in the Fight Against Malnutrition and its objective was to create a multidisciplinary and multicultural learning environment to foster the development of disciplinary competencies and promote diversity and inclusion while solving challenges related to the advancement of SDG 2: Zero Hunger and SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being. For that, this experience used the Global Shared Learning Classroom” (GSLC) model, based on the COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) methodology. This experience involved two universities from different countries: the University of Boyacá, Colombia (UdB), and Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico (ITESM). Three groups of students participated in the project: two from UdB, comprising students from Industrial Engineering, Systems Engineering, Multimedia Engineering, Environmental Engineering, and Business Administration, and one from ITESM, comprising students from the Food Engineering program. The project was conducted during the period February-March 2024.

The challenge presented to the students involved developing a kit containing all the ingredients necessary to prepare a meal by the Slow Food concept. This included designing a healthy meal and preparing its nutritional information (ITESM), conducting market research, designing the packaging, and creating food preparation instructions (UdB), all within a context of sustainability and circular economy. The students were organized into nine multidisciplinary and intercultural teams and worked on solving the challenge using creativity techniques and the Design Thinking methodology to achieve the final prototype. The teams work for four weeks using technological tools for asynchronous and remote collaboration, such as Zoom, Teams, and Slack.

The students reflected on the importance of advancing the SDGs and were able to propose viable solutions to the challenge. The activity enabled students to recognize the significance of multidisciplinary collaboration in solving global problems while practicing their negotiation and interpersonal communication skills to reach agreements in multicultural environments that promote respect for human diversity and inclusion.

Keywords:

Global Shared Learning Classroom, Collaborative Online International Learning, Undergraduate Students, Educational Innovation, Sustainable development goals.