After debating a little while about what to write about, who to interview and what to focus on, I decided to concentrate my effort in something that has become an important personal project and that one day I hope to implement back home in the University of Porto; the establishment of a student-started centre that focuses on using multidisciplinary approaches, specifically about environmental, development and sustainability studies, to promote a more just and sustainable world, mimicking the concept already in place in the University of Uppsala in the form of CEMUS, the Centre for Environment and Development Studies.
I decided to interview the other person that has been involved in co-conjuring this idea, Jan-Ole Brandt, a student of the MSc in Sustainable Development in the University of Uppsala, in Sweden, and a course coordinator at CEMUS, the aforementioned centre we intend to replicate in the future.
Brandt’s background is in Sociology and Intercultural Business Communication, with a BA from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, where he was also chairman of the Sociology Student Council.
What is CEMUS?
“CEMUS is a student-run university centre focused on environment and development studies, founded in the 1990’s focusing on student-led interdisciplinary education.
The approach is that students are asked to organise their own learning processes and there are course coordinators (mainly students), acting as facilitators.
The teaching is essentially based on workshops, seminars and other more flexible methods of learning, though it is very versatile, because the students are part of the planning process and it therefore varies.
As part of that liberty, students are free to invite speakers and teachers to better suit their interests, and are also responsible for co-authoring their own evaluation criteria and material, in an attempt to make the student feel part of the whole process.
The courses offered by the centre are open to all students of the University of Uppsala, ranging from 5 to 30 credits, some including internships, and from a period to a semester.
As a student of the university, I was able to apply for the position to create a new course called “Experts in teams – Interdisciplinary projects for sustainable development”, which we are working on now.
I got the position because I had taken many of the available courses myself, I was and had been in touch with the people planning other projects in CEMUS and also from my previous experience as an intercultural trainer and team developer.”
Jan-Ole Brandt’s LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-ole-brandt-ba0a91a8/en
CEMUS – http://www.web.cemus.se/
https://www.facebook.com/cemuscsduppsala