Service-learning: a strategy for developing competencies in sustainability

Abstract

The article presents the teaching strategy of Service-Learning as a tool to develop competencies related to the challenge of sustainability, as it is established from the guidelines of the CRUE and in other local and global institutional levels. It analyzes the teaching experience of the author, who has utilized the methodology of Service-Learning in university education in order to train future educators in the achievement of key competences for sustainability: critical and systemic thinking, collaborative decision-making, and taking responsibility for present and future generations (UNESCO, 2014). The aim of the article is to situate Service-Learning as a catalyst element to transform oneself and a strategy in the service of education for sustainable development. It assumes United Nations guidelines claiming for the need of empowering educators through a learning that achieves the own transformation as a platform from which to lead ourselves to more sustainable ways of life for people and the planet we inhabit. It concludes confirming the capacity of Service-Learning to provoke academic contends facilitate the formation in competences for transforming action in the searching of the construction of more sustainable realities.