From 2 to 14 February 2025, the Earth Charter Center for Education for Sustainable Development at the University for Peace participated in the training of trainers’ phase of the ACT4SDGs project, an ERASMUS+ funded project called: ‘Professionalization of Academic Teaching to Infuse SDGs in Latin American Universities’.
This two-week training process had the purpose of sharing and enhancing knowledge and skills around sustainability and the SDGs, education for sustainable development, the Earth Charter, and how to incorporate these into academic courses. Professors from National University of Costa Rica (UNA), University of Costa Rica (UCR) and National Technical University (UTN) participated in this training process, and they are now in charge of sparking a larger process within their universities to inspire other professors to incorporate sustainability and the SDGs in their courses.
For this, they started with one of their own courses. Using methodologies offered during this training course, participants created a proposal to integrate ESD pedagogy and content associated with the SDGs in at least one of their courses. In groups, participants developed a plan to create a short course inside their universities on how to integrate the SDGs in their courses, this course will escalate to reach around 100 – 200 professors in each university. In addition, participants proposed plans to further a whole institution approach for sustainability in their respective universities, that is, connecting actions done in teaching, research, extension and environmental management in the campuses. All these plans are considering current institutional structures and resources to make the plans more feasible.
This training process involved the organization of several field trips, the idea was to learn in a more active way what is going on in each university regarding their implementation of the SDGs and sustainability related actions. It was inspiring to learn about research projects that are tackling important problems such as water pollution, alternatives to plastics, how to make agricultural production more sustainable, and long term efforts to support vulnerable island and coastal communities with alternative economic activities, such as aquaculture and tourism, among many other initiatives.
The Earth Charter Center for ESD at University for Peace is the regional coordinator of the ACT4SDGs project, in this sense, it supported this training of trainers process giving content and advice to participants. In the coming weeks, an adapted version of this training process will take place in Mexico (State of Mexico and Morelia), and later during the year in Colombia and Argentina.
This project started as a collaboration between members of the UNITWIN Network on Education for Sustainable Development and Social Transformation.
“This is a European Commission CBHE project. The content reflects the views of the authors and the European Commission cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein “.
