Between May and June, 2022, 20 doctoral students from 9 universities and research centers in Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, the United States and Vietnam participated in the GCUA course Working and communicating across cultures. The course is part of a course package of short PhD courses focusing on enhancing participants’ ability to integrate the SDGs into research and teaching.
The aim of this particular course was to allow students to familiarise themselves with how intercultural competence and communication might impact and contribute to the work towards the SDGs. The course was led by SLU Educational Developer Natalie Jellinek.
Some quotes from course participants when asked what new skills they had gained form their participation in the course:
"Openness to learn different cultures and their impact in the learning environment."
"A greater awareness of the challenges of working across multicultural teams and ways of approaching this, new insights about diversity of cultures and its impacts on many aspects, how we should behave in a multi-culture environment and respect others."
"Effective group communication skills are not only described as techniques, but also step-by-step leading to individual self-discovery in a cross-cultural communication environment. I myself began to be able to reflect more on things (not only in working, teaching but also family) that I had difficulty explaining in detail before."
The second course was held from June to July 2022. 20 doctoral students from 8 universities (New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden and USA) took part in the course Education for sustainable development: Teaching for sustainability. The course was led by SLU Educational Developer Peter Aspengren.
"The course strives to co-create knowledge production with students to ensure that knowledge from academics does not merely stay within the academic space, that students are able to take it back into the different contexts they come from and become changemakers."
"The clearest insight about this course is the relationship between Education and Sustainability—I learned how to design a course that could help students to address sustainability issues around the world."
