The last week of the student survey is here! So far, our survey has received altogether 700 responses with respondents from every faculty at the University of Helsinki. There is time until Friday, so if you have not done it already, go ahead and fill out the survey here!

Even though proper analysis is still pending, it seems that the majority of the respondents (74%) are female. This is maybe less surprising considering the majority of the students at UH are female  (64% in 2018). Furthermore, whilst reading answers to our open-ended questions, I noticed many respondents mentioned the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic as an important moment for them in thinking about sustainability. It also seems that many students identified the Australian bushfires and the decision made by Unicafe to remove beef from its menu as impactful sustainability-related experiences for them in the past academic year.

Once the survey is closed, we will begin a more careful analysis of student responses. I hope that we will be able to tell you more about the results soon, but until then, thank you to everyone who responded – this information is vital to the project!

Last week started a set of four parallel workshops. The workshops were open to all staff members. The aim was to explore the university community’s perceptions of what kind of knowledge or skills a student graduating from the University of Helsinki should have about sustainability. The first two workshops were organized last Monday and Tuesday via Zoom.  

Despite the exceptional times and the fact that every event – also the workshops – have been moved online, the developing of the sustainability course has not stopped or been delayed. The course developer Rami Ratvio has with the help of the HELSUS trainees Lotta Ruippo and Arttu Jokinen continued the development work even if meeting people in person is not a possibility for the moment.  

The first two workshops have now been organized and the next two will be organized on Wednesday 6th and Tuesday 12th of May. In total, there are 62 people registered for all the workshops. The first workshops highlighted students ability to deal with multidimensional environmental problems which requires multidisciplinary thinking and the understanding that there might be several ways to approach and solve an environmental problem. There were also discussions about the ways to teach students these abilities in just one course since the course aims were put quite high.  

The workshop participant raised several aspects which should be fulfilled during the course. Not only should it offer facts about environmental problems but also the ability for the students to see their expertise in relation to others expertise. The workshop participants thought that understanding others way of thinking is at least as important as the environmental facts itself.  

The participants were also asked how the course should end and how the knowledge and skills of the course should be summarized. Most of the participants thought that a group project could be a way to do it. There were thoughts that a group project that is shareable online could be a functional solution. Also here the multidisciplinary approach were present. The workshop attendees thought that the group work should be done in groups with students from several degree programmes, not only with students from their own programme.  

Altogether it has been great to notice that university staff members with all kind of backgrounds are interested in participating in the course development. The knowledge they offer is priceless information for the course development and will bring us one step nearer to carry out the sustainability course for all students!  

 Amidst the slight change of plans brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic, we have been working on a student survey with plans to launch it in April. Having an idea of what students think of sustainability and sustainability education is very important to us.  

Once the survey goes live, students will be invited to fill out the classic e-lomake survey – we’ll announce things over e-mail, in Flamma and through social media channels. And here on the blog, of course. So stay tuned!

The UN Sustainable Development Goals are underpinned by the notion of inclusion, so it wouldn’t be great if we didn’t at least try to include students in the course development process. That’s exactly what we’re aiming for with the survey – we want to know what the students think so we can drive our course development based on their experiences.  However, the survey won’t be the last chance for students to get involved – more on this later!

 Photo by Sofia Lavaste 

Things don’t always go the way you plan them. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and the consequent actions taken by the Finnish government, we will suspend our plans for hosting campus workshops, at least for the time being.

So instead, we will do remote workshops for everyone who wants to participate, likely in late April. We also want to encourage any interested parties to join our course planning Teams area. Joining is easy – just drop a line to uhsustained-team@helsinki.fi and one of our team members will add you.

Things are not entirely clear as of right now, and we will do a trial run of the workshop before official invitations go out. For now, we hope you take care of yourself and those at risk.

All the best,

Course coordinator team

Photo by Sofia Lavaste