Lisa Bockwoldt and Prof. Marco Rieckmann
On the 14th of April the German “Virtual Academy for Sustainability” celebrated its fifth anniversary. For this event, teachers facilitating Higher Education for Sustainable Development around Germany were invited to a conference at the University of Bremen to present and discuss best-practice examples under the headline “Innovative transformation of teaching and learning environments for teaching sustainability competencies”.
Prof. Marco Rieckmann and Lisa Bockwoldt from the University of Vechta presented transformative project-based courses for sustainable development and sustainability-driven entrepreneurship in which students worked together with regional partners in service-learning projects. The first service-learning course was implemented in 2014 (students developed communication strategies for a local environmental NGO) and then was further developed as pilots in the context of the CASE project in the summer and the winter semester 2015 and 2016 when students developed sustainability-oriented communication strategies for two local sustainability-driven enterprises.
In the current semester, the course design has changed to foster especially entrepreneurial thinking: the students discuss challenges with different regional actors and then work on own sustainability-driven start-up projects to solve regional problems.
