6 October 2023 – The NEMOS partners moved forward in their endeavour to integrate sustainability into food-related degrees at the 4th transnational meeting of the Erasmus+ project NEMOS – A new educational model for acquisition of sustainability competences through service-learning, hosted by ISARA school in Lyon (France), on 2-3 October 2023.
The aim of the meeting was to track the project’s progress and plan for the final actions to be implemented within the project’s lifespan. To that end, each of the higher education institutions involved in the consortium shared the approach they used to include service-learning activities into selected courses, and the methodologies applied to engage students, lecturers and local community actors.
Furthermore, they discussed the assessing tools developed to monitor and evaluate the impact of the service-learning experiences carried out, such as, questionnaires, reflective journals and rubrics. The initial results of the assessment already demonstrated the huge potential of service-learning as a green pedagogy that can trigger a transformative process and support students in the improvement of their sustainability competences. The ultimate aim is to move towards the integration of sustainability as a transversal skill throughout the higher education curricula to ensure that graduates are better prepared to face current and future global challenges.
All the work carried out by the consortium partners and the tools they designed to pilot their model in the food sector, will be collected in the NEMOS Methodological Handbook. This document will serve as a guiding tool for other educational institutions interested in adopting (and adapting) the NEMOS approach in other fields.
The Handbook and all results of the NEMOS project will be presented at a final conference to be hosted by the Technological University of Dublin (TU Dublin) in March 2024.
About the NEMOS Project
The NEMOS project acknowledges sustainability as an increasingly crucial skill for graduate and post-graduate students to tackle important global challenges such as climate change, food waste and the loss of biodiversity in their professional future. Therefore, the project aims to define a new educational model to integrate sustainability competences in the curricula of food-related degrees by means of service learning.
Co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, the NEMOS project is led by the Public University of Navarra and includes the following consortium partners: Technological University Dublin (Ireland); Technological University Graz (Austria); Rhône-Alpes Higher Institute of Agriculture (France); University of Pisa (Italy); and IGCAT.
More information at www.nemosproject.com
