Geography of food summer school: International exchange for sustainable food value chains

Abstract

Providing regular access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food for a growing population without depleting natural resources is one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century. Universities can play an important role in educating future decisions-makers to be able to design sustainable food value chains (FVCs) that contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN Agenda 2030. We present the ‘Geography of Food’ educational programme as an example for sustainability education through intercultural exchange. The programme not only focusses on knowledge transfer and participatory problem-solving approaches, but also acknowledges the importance of international exchange to facilitate joint learning and experience capitalization. For this purpose, the programme has been realized as a blended learning course including e-learning, individual case studies and an international summer school. Each year, the summer school took place at one of the three participating universities in India, Slovenia and Switzerland and was dedicated to one specific SDG with special relevance to the food system. From 2017 to 2019, a total of 87 students from 20 different countries participated in the programme. The evaluation showed that participants highly appreciated the e-learning course and the programme of the study period. The opportunity for international and intercultural exchange during the study week period was especially highlighted. The blended learning course design therefore proved to be very suitable. However, room for improvement could still be identified. Opportunities may arise from (i) a better integration of students’ backgrounds into the programme to benefit more from their interdisciplinarity, (ii) more directly addressing cultural differences to improve cross-cultural education and (iii) a more methodological problem-solving approach to find more creative and elaborated solutions.