How to cooperate with industry on a problem within Sustainable Waste Management

One focus in EduEnvi has been on Learning Innovation and Entrepreneurship through University Industry cooperation. During the project a serie of workshops have been organized within the theme and a handbook of How to cooperate with industry on a problem within Sustainable Waste Management is published. The work is led by UCL University College from Denmark.

The purpose of the workshops organized within the theme has been to introduce the participating teachers to industry/university collaboration in order to instruct them in including casework in their teaching.

According to UCL teachers Elisabeth Agerbaek and Ellen Houmoeller, the Enhancing Competences of Sustainable Waste Management, cannot be done separated from its contexts. In other words, the premise is that the learning of the competences are done best as “learning by doing”. Thus, the breeding ground of the workshops is for the teachers to learn how to place the students in this kind of context and provide with the necessary tools.

Involving industry challenges in everyday teaching involves a series of additional challenges for a teacher. In order to prepare each teacher to deal with these challenges, the workshops revolved around the context of an industry/university collaboration used at UCL, Denmark.

The workshops were constructed based on significant phases that are necessary when initiating the collaborations as well as phases during the project and after the end of project.

The first step of the workshop is to instruct the teachers in how to create contact with a local industry. The next step is to provide the teachers with tools in order to create a project description. Furthermore, the following steps of the workshop is to instruct the teachers in facilitating the project as well as executing the project themselves with focus on facilitation and collaboration. The final step in completing the workshop is to provide the teachers with the tools to evaluate the process and the outcome.

An excursion during the teacher-training workshop held in Kokshetau, Kazakhstan for participants from Sh.Ualikhanov Kokshetau State University, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University and M. Auezov South-Kazakhstan State University.