The ECEM project consortium (see for more details ACA Newsletter – Education Europe, May 2023) met in Berlin earlier this October to cover two activities: a transnational project meeting and Learning through engagement lab, an activity conducted by the project partner Citizens Lab.

In the project meeting, the partners discussed the ongoing progress and agreed on next steps. With one area of interest of the project being service-learning, especially in the context of student mobilities, the consortium has launched a survey to gather views of service-learning, which can be accessed here and which takes less than 5 minutes to complete. To complement the ongoing survey of universities practices in implementing service-learning, the ECEM project consortium is currently also organising online focus groups with university staff members working on education design or academics that are implementing a community-engaged methodology. The findings of the focus groups will help us gain a more thorough understanding of the service-learning landscape in higher education. You can get involved by joining the focus groups and sharing your insights. The sessions will last maximum one hour and you can choose the date and time you prefer. Register here.

Another activity, which took place in Berlin was the Learning through engagement lab. The lab was conducted in a highly participatory format. Their meaningful conversations and sharing of experiences, learnings, approaches, and challenges have played a crucial role in collectively co-creating and envisioning potential scenarios, recommendations, and actions to be taken in bringing together service learning and internationalisation. The approach of the Citizens Labs was designed to create an environment of deep listening, sharing, and reflection, enabling us to explore the complexity of the challenges we face, while harnessing the collective intelligence and expertise of the group. The participants also had the chance to visit the Futurium, the “house of futures”, where “foreseeable, conceivable and desirable future concepts are presented and discussed.”