22 March 2024 – At the 5th Transnational Meeting of the Erasmus+ project NEMOS – A new educational model for acquisition of sustainability competences through service-learning, hosted by TU Dublin (Ireland), on 13-15 March 2024, the NEMOS consortium embarked on the final stages of the initiative.
Launched in February 2022, the two-year project will officially conclude on 31 March 2024. The meeting was thus an opportunity to take stock of all the activities carried out during the project lifespan and agree on the last steps before publishing its final results.
After establishing a Food Sustainability Profile, which identified the competences related to sustainability that students should develop throughout their learning path with the support of a community building methodology, the consortium started designing the NEMOS Methodological Handbook as a guide to embed sustainability in the curricula through service-learning.
In the meantime, the university partners started implementing service-learning activities with their students, piloting the integration of sustainability in the curricula in some specific courses. Furthermore, they developed specific assessing tools 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 Methodological Handbook, to be published soon in the different languages of the consortium (English, French, German, Italian and Spanish), will also collect experiences and case studies from the universities involved, serving as a reference for further institutions to implement the methodology developed by NEMOS and adapt it to their specific context.
The ultimate aim is to encourage the integration of sustainability as a transversal skill throughout all education curricula to ensure that students are better prepared to face current and future global challenges.
During the transnational meeting, the NEMOS partners had the chance to visit TU Dublin’s state-of-the-art facilities and labs, as well as meet from Prof. Jesus Maria Frias Celayeta, Academic Leader of the Environmental Sustainability and Health Institute, and hear about the Geek4Food project, aimed to advance the food system transition towards sustainable and green solutions through AI-based tools.
They were also pleased to meet students from TU Dublin’s BSc in Food Innovation and MSc in Sustainable Food Safety Management, and learn about their experiences with service learning as a means to develop sustainability competences for their professional future.
The meeting also coincided with the final NEMOS event on Education for Sustainability and the European GreenComp Framework, organised on 14 March 2024 by the Technological University of Dublin’s Sustainability Education Unit and Faculty of Sciences and Health Sustainability committee, in collaboration with the NEMOS consortium. The event offered the opportunity to the partners to share their experiences with service-learning, as well as get involved in a Scaffold workshop with lecturers and students of TU Dublin.
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
