Youngsters nowadays are confronted with a world challenged by many wicked problems that seriously will influence their way of living, like global warming, poverty, degradation of biodiversity, child labour. Emotional commitment and passion are important to create change (Shrivastava, 2010). Instead of focussing on what goes wrong, the starting point for reflection and action is when actors feel at their best.
In this paper a “Students Swap Stuff” project (SSS) will be analysed as a learning laboratory at KU Leuven: what did the involved students and other actors learn from the project that might help them to contribute to more sustainable production and consumption alternatives? SSS wants to limit overconsumption, waste and spillage caused by short-term needs of students for equipment. International students come to study in Brussels for a short period. Often they don’t carry the stuff they need to equip their rooms. Therefore they often buy cheap necessities, left behind once they leave the city. In this way, materials are wasted, thrown away or just laying in some basement while incoming students need these same things for their rooms. The solution seems evident, but a practical system was lacking. Designing and starting such a system was the goal of the students of the Masters Program Environmental Health and Safety Management. The project was developed during the last semester of 2017-2018 and was part of the courses Corporate Social Responsibility and Qualitative Research Methods.
Some twenty organizing students, as well as swapping students and other stakeholders were part of the research process, following the guidelines of action research and appreciative inquiry. We used semi-structured interviews to ask the organizing students and stakeholders about their experience with the process. The swapping students were kindly invited to fill in a questionnaire with a limited amount of close-ended questions.
Preliminary results show that the SSS project is not only about swapping stuff, but also about swapping knowledge among the organizing students. Students from a faculty in management were open for this new approach built on giving without asking anything in return immediately. In the beginning they felt uncomfortable, but after a while they were very enthusiastic about it. In a spontaneous way students acquired sustainability competencies such as systems thinking, future thinking, personal commitment and action taking, that are still too often absent in higher education (Lambrechts, et al., 2013).
Inspired by Sumner and Wever (2017) the project was a learning case and an example of a multiplier effect. Despite the small acts that participants had to take, they had a cumulative effect, i.e. not only the organizing students were changing, but also other stakeholders. The project stimulated participants to rethink our economic systems where everything needs to have a price, to decentre the economy and to restore the value of just giving.
Core references
Lambrechts, W., Mula, I., Ceulemans, K. & Molderez, I. (2013). The integration of competences for sustainable development in higher education: an analysis of bachelor programs in management. Journal of Cleaner Production, 48, 65-73.
Sumner, J. & Wever, C. (2017). Learning alterity in the social economy: the case of the Local Organic Food Co-ops Network in Ontario, Canada.
Shrivastava, P. (2010). Pedagogy of Passion for Sustainability. Academy of Management, 9 (3), p. 443.
2b. Educating for sustainability
