SHEFCE Transnational project meeting in Brussels

From the 24th to the 26th of May ACUP-GUNi participated at the transnational project meeting of the SHEFCE project in Brussels. The meeting was held at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) and around 10 participants from Croatia, Austria, Belgium, Ireland, and Spain participated representing the following institutions of the consortium: Institute for the Development of Education, University of Rijeka, Danube University Krems, Ghent University, Technological University Dublin, University of Girona, Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) and ACUP-GUNi.

The central aim of the transnational project meeting was for the partners of the consortium to share the advancements on the intellectual outputs of the project, exchange experiences and reflections, and plan the following steps. As exposed in previous communications, SHEFCE is an international project has been launched to support community engagement of European universities, understood as university partnerships with external stakeholders to address societal challenges.

SHEFCE Meeting

The sessions of this meeting were focused on the evolution of the four main outputs of SHEFCE:

  • University action-plans for community engagement at five partner universities
  • Policy recommendations for system-level support for community engagement in higher education in five countries and at the EU level
  • A European online platform for community engagement in higher education with resources and tools to support universities and communities.
  • Piloting a European university-community engagement ‘heatmap’ to help universities learn from good practices at universities in other countries

ACUP is focused on the second output researching on policy frameworks in order to construct national policy recommendation on how the system level could support community engagement in higher education. These policy recommendations will go under a process of national consultation for their enrichment, and they will be shared with the partners of the consortium to write European-level policy recommendations.

To inspire our meetings, the working days started with a cross-project networking session between the members of SHEFCE and the CIRCLET project – Curriculum Innovation through Research with Communities: Learning cicles of Educatiors and Technology. Both projects share the mission of promoting community engagement in higher education. On this basis, Thomas Farnell, coordinator of SHEFCE, exposed a keynote on the essentials of SHEFCE and opened the field for participatory discussion tables to deepen in different aspects of community engagement. It was a truly inspiring exchange of enriching ideas, innovative learning and working methodologies that surely enhanced the community engagement mission of all partners.

SHEFCE Meeting

You will find more information about the SHEFCE project on the website shefce.eu

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SHEFCE Meeting