Abstract:

In recent years, teaching sustainability at the University is becoming more and more relevant. Indeed, universities are increasingly willing to build relationships with local stakeholders and work in co-creation initiatives to achieve sustainable economic development at the local level. Service learning and challenge-based (CBL) learning are included among the above-mentioned pedagogies. CBL is a collaborative and hands-on approach through which students work with peers, teachers, and experts in their communities: by asking good questions, accepting and solving real-world challenges, acquiring deeper subject area knowledge and consequently proposing and taking action they develop skills and competences and can also share their experience with others.

This study presents the case of the University of Pisa, in the context of the NEMOS project, which applied a challenge-based learning (CBL) approach towards the achievement of a service learning perspective, in the Agricultural Sciences bachelor courses. Teachers invited experts from the agri-food sector in their classroom to present their challenges: students, divided into groups and guided by their teachers and senior students tutors, accepted their challenges and, through a series of learning tools retrieved from the participatory design fields, combined theoretical and practical knowledge to propose feasible solutions to their community stakeholders. The aim of this study is to assess the sustainability-related learning outcomes in terms of competencies and skills acquired by students with such an approach by submitting a survey to participant students and by organising focus groups with teachers, tutors and experts to assess the relevance of the applied approaches in terms of interdisciplinarity effectiveness. The research questions are: How and to what extent challenge-based learning promotes the acquisition of sustainability skills in students? What are the teachers, tutors and stakeholders’ perceptions about the effectiveness of such approaches in creating an interdisciplinary perspective on sustainability? Results will show the students, teachers, and stakeholders’ perspectives on CBL activities and how these can vehicle sustainability skills and knowledge and consequently concretely benefit the community.

Keywords:

Sustainability education, greencomp, challenge-based learning.