Combining Service Learning with Education for Sustainable Development

In his keynote address, Prof. Dr. Peter Beer, Chairman of the KU Foundation Council, spoke about future-oriented teaching and learning spaces that are opened up through engagement. He emphasized: “An educational concept, no matter what the institution, that is designed to try to hold on to the present as an unalterable status quo, confined in rigid teaching and learning spaces, defeats its purpose." He went on to say that Service Learning was a way to openly define, design, and fill learning spaces with life in mind. At Catholic universities, he underlined, this approach should always hold an important space for ethical and morally motivated reflection. “Acquiring inter-religious competence should play an equally important role as training sensitivity towards forms of expression of traditional religiosity in one’s own environment or, even, also in view of its rejection”, continued Beer.

In her presentation, Prof. Dr. Alžbeta Brozmanová Gregorová (Matej Bel University, Slovakia) defined Service Learning as a strategic answer of committed universities. Prof. Dr. Marco Rieckmann (Vechta University) and Prof. Dr. Anne-Kathrin Lindau (KU) presented a documentation of how Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is already being increasingly applied at universities, for example in the context of the systemic Overall Sustainability Concept at the KU. Kathia Reynders from Catholic University Leuven reported how the long-term initiative “KU Leuven Engage” served as a model for the Uniservitate Service Learning Program.

We are currently witnessing that Service Learning and ESD coexist alongside each other with no links at all, which means that valuable synergies remain unused. This fact was demonstrated by Claudia Leitzmann (Landesnetzwerk Bürgerschaftliches Engagement, LBE Bayern e.V.) and Danelle Rodarius (RENN.Süd, Zentrum für nachhaltige Kommunalberatung Bayern, LBE Bayern e.V.).