PBL for Sustainable Cities. Results of the CITYLAB LA Project

“PBL for sustainable cities” is a three day academic conference held from 19th until 21st of September 2018. The conference will be hosted by the University del Rosario in Bogota, Colombia. The academic conference is open to all academic fields involved in sustainable and urban development in relation to Problem Based Learning experiences. The conference themes are: • PBL experiences in Architecture and Planning Schools , Geography, Sociology, Engineering, Political Science, Urban Management, Economics etc. • Other innovative teaching/learning methods and tools. • Teaching governance and participatory approaches. • Collaborative process with external actors: relationships between stakeholders (universities/ public and private agents/citizens…) • Collaborative process with international exchanges between univesities • Potential from the point of view of the scalability of processes and experiences • Sustainable Development Goals (Sdgs). The Project “Citylab. Engaging Students with Sustainable Cities in Latin America”, co-funded by the Erasmus + Programme of the European Union (www.citylab-la.eu), is aimed at enhancing the quality of HEI’s in Latin America through problem based-learning. Problem-based learning is assumed as an innovative approach for introducing real-world problems into educational programs with huge possibilities to transform the quality of teaching and learning. In order to introduce and spread PBL, the partners of the project (12 Latin American and 5 European) have worked on specific problems through multidisciplinary approaches, with the support of campus teams formed by teaching and administrative staff and policy makers from the different faculties. The Project works on typical urban problems, such as urban planning, conservation, energy and climate change, poverty and crime, employment, etc. which are in general complex, and wicked problems that can only be properly addressed through multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary working methods. This academic conference is characterised by a wide range of inspiring lectures, discussions and networking opportunities with experts in the field of Problem Based Learning, researchers and key actors in Sustainable Cities development

Towards a movement-friendly city : lessons from activity scans of five neighbourhoods in Antwerp, Belgium

This paper describes the results of a research project in Antwerp, Belgium, aimed at developing a spatial analysis approach ('activity scan') assessing how the urban fabric on a neighbourhood scale can encourage physical activity and active transport. By outlining a set of recurring spatial challenges and describing the developed innovative toolkit, the research responds to the necessity for design-oriented insights on how to promote active travel and instigate concrete interventions. By critically analysing this co-creative research trajectory, this article emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary dialogue on what contributes to a movement-friendly urban environment

Методика публичного выступления: учеб. пособие

Shifting from a traditional lecture-based teaching approach to a student-centred approach, such as Problem-Based Learning (PBL), demands significant changes in Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs). It requires changes for teachers, students, institutional management, and even the physical learning environment. Once a university is not designed from the beginning to insert this type of pedagogy, it is difficult to promote a change of this nature if the institution is committed to a more traditional pedagogical approach. Therefore, introducing PBL as an important innovation faces problems of conservatism, institutional inertia, path dependency, lack of knowhow and knowledge among teachers, poor institutional support, and poor connection with societal and economic actors. This article presents the World Café technique as a participatory method to identify and overcome some of the challenges when implementing a PBL approach. We confront the results of the Citylab World Café with the challenges identified in the literature. The authors identify three aspects of the implementation process of PBL in HEIs that can be facilitated through the World Café technique: (1) understanding the principles of PBL through engaging in a constructive dialogue, (2) fostering critical reflections about teaching and learning practises, and (3) changing the organisational culture by promoting collective sense-making and the construction of meaning