Service-Learning Projects in University Degrees Based on Sustainable Development Goals: Proposals and Results

Abstract

We present several Service-Learning projects developed considering Sustainable Development Goals to provide the students skills for the support of a sustainable society. This project begins with collecting initial impressions from surveys and reflections to know both the students’ expectations and their degree of involvement in the development of a sustainable society. Next, the students design academic projects taking into account the needs of the specific collective to which the Service-Learning activity is oriented. When this design has finished, such projects are developed with the users and the activity is evaluated. During 2019–2020, these projects were done with four entities oriented to people either with Asperger’s syndrome, Down syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease or mental health illnesses. A total of 35 and 10 students, respectively, from the Bachelor’s Degree of Engineering in Industrial Design and Product Development and from the Master’s Degree in Professorship of High School have participated in this experience. We analyze the results from the perspective of the different agents involved, considering both qualitative and quantitative metrics. The results show that both users and staff are satisfied with this collaboration between the university and their entities. Moreover, this experience clearly has contributed to a better personal and professional student’s development.

How Higher Education Institutions Walk Their Talk on the 2030 Agenda: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Those in the former group concentrate on balancing the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability in course planning. They often prioritize the dominant SDGs based on the different field/courses and future job profiles, as well as incorporate general sustainability concerns (e.g., gender equity and poverty) into coursework (Baena-Morales et al, 2020;Castro et al, 2020;Gómez-Llanos and Durán-Barroso, 2020;Manolis and Manoli, 2021;Orozco-Messana et al, 2020a, b;Perales Jarillo et al, 2019). The studies that consider all SDGs involve the application of innovative solutions and technologies (i.e., course-tailored and scaffolded methods), along with the redesign of majors and courses to integrate SDGs (Adach-Pawelus et al, 2021;Ashraf and Alanezi, 2020;Ličen and Jedlicka, 2020;Priyadarshini and Abhilash, 2020;Useh, 2021) Table 3 summarizes the main takeaways from the literature on teaching and SDGs at the micro-level.…”

Moving to e-Service Learning in Higher Education

“…SL is a methodology in which students achieve these transversal competences while performing service for the benefit of the community through hands-on experience in a real-world setting [7][8][9][10][11][12]. This methodology was successfully used by other authors [13][14][15][16][17] and in recent years, in engineering contexts by the authors of [18].…”

A Longitudinal Study of the Effects of Service-Learning on Physical Education Teacher Education Students

“…At the higher education stage, there exist multiple possibilities to prepare SL programmes aligned with SDG ( Castro et al, 2020 ), also in the teacher training arena ( Byker and Ezelle-Thomas, 2021 ). For example, Daum et al (2021) state that PETEs should interact and work hand in hand with children of different cultural backgrounds and diverse characteristics in order to enhance teachers being more culturally responsible.…”