Author: j.sedlak

“Sustainability Communities” is a CASE pilot course that was delivered during the winter semester at the University of Vechta, Germany, by Senan Gardiner. In the context of this course, the students spent one weekend in December 2016 at the ecovillage “Lebensgarten” (English: “Life Garden”) near the village Steyerberg in Lower Saxony, Germany.

Over 120 people are currently living there as a community, trying out ways to live as sustainable as possible – concerning social, cultural, ecological, economic, and technological aspects. The course culminated in this excursion to show the students that many changes to communities, in order to make them more sustainable, can be both simple and profound.

This experiential learning was enriched by sessions lead by one of the founding members, former TU Berlin Professor Declan Kennedy, and some of his community colleagues who introduced the students of the course to principles of permaculture, e-mobility, and sociocracy over the three day stay.

 

Pictures by Florian Schmitt

Read more about the Pilots in all CASE Regions.

The Sustainability Challenge is one of the pilot projects in CASE. It is an interdisciplinary university course involving four Viennese universities and focused on service learning projects and how to establish start-ups under sustainable auspices.

The Touch Down event of the Sustainability Challenge will take place now on 11 January at 5 pm in the Kuppelsaal at TU Vienna, Karlsplatz 13, 1040 Vienna. The CASE team would kindly invite you to this event! The invitation can be found here.

14 student teams will present the results of their work of the past 11 months. The service learning partners (Ministry of Economy, Ministry of Environment, Verbund, Spar, AGR, MA22, GB2*20, the NGO Mutmacherei, Verein Wiener Jugendzentren) and the start-up experts from the RCE Vienna, ECN (Entrepreneurship Center Network), BOKU, and Dream Academia will be among the participants.

If you want to be on board of the Touch Down event or if you want to become a partner of the Sustainability Challenge please contact Renata Krenn at the RCE Vienna.

On 11 November 2016, Prof Dr Marco Rieckmann and Lisa Bockwoldt from the University of Vechta offered a CASE teacher workshop at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna), in the premises of the RCE Vienna. Numerous members of the “Alliance of Sustainable Universities in Austria” participated in this event.

The workshop aimed at capacity building for teaching and learning with competence-oriented, inter- and transdisciplinary methods in the area of sustainability-driven entrepreneurship. A fruitful and rich discussion took place between the participants. They shared their own teaching experiences with each other. Furthermore, they discussed opportunities as well as (structural) barriers for innovative teaching and learning practices.

 

Prof Dr Marco Rieckmann and Lisa Bockwoldt, CASE team members from the University of Vechta, Germany*, presented the European multi-stakeholder process of developing the CASE master program at the international conference “Internationalization of the Curricula” at the University of Göttingen, Germany.

They emphazised the importance of a strong knowledge alliance with diverse stakeholders: multidisciplinary students, teachers, researchers, university staff, and praxis partners from sustainability-driven enterprises, NGOs, and the public sector.

The collaboration is not only important for the successful development of a master program in which students learn to tackle challenges for sustainable development. But the alliance is also important for the actual teaching and learning in the master program.

In diverse cooperation formats (see the CASE pilot projects), students can learn in transdisciplinary settings and learn to solve real-life problems together with the partners.

Among the conference contributions, the CASE approach to jointly develop a master program with different European partners from universities and businesses was quite unique and innovative.

 

* Both on the picture above (photo by Magnus Frampton, University of Vechta).

CASE presented at the Long Night of Research at the Free University of Bolzano

Friday, 30 September 2016, from 5 p.m. to midnight

When looking at the present crises that have been causing havoc with mankind, one comes to realize that our world will be different in the future. What we need is a broader, more open-minded perspective that enables us to peer beyond the boundaries of our habitual ways of doing things, our specialized disciplines and our conventional ideologies, and that can also visualize the pluralism and the inherent contradictions of our modern, globally-networked world.

This year’s edition of the Long Night of Research (LUNA) showed that in times of political and economic crises scientists can provide this “big picture” – a broader point of view gained through networking with colleagues across the EU and based on their knowledge and the results of their research. People learned that scientists can help them understand what is happening in the world and that their research aims to provide concrete solutions to confront the manifestations of global problems in our region.

Susanne Elsen and Claudia Lintner, CASE team members from the Free University of Bolzano, informed visitors about CASE, its goals, current developments, and the next steps of the project.