The VU University (Athena Science Shop and the Community Service Learning project ‘A Broader Mind’) organized together with the municipality of Amsterdam two local workshops in which VU students, VU lecturers, and various social organizations of the New-West district in Amsterdam collaborated to find solutions for emerging social issues. The aim of these events was to extract societal issues from the district and allow students (within educational activities/courses) to make a contribution to the questions these social organizations have.

The first workshop on the 30^th of January was an introductory meeting to get to know each other and to explore the potential social issues and questions in the district. For the second workshop we opted for “Loneliness” as the main topic for the second workshop. The results of these workshops provide input for new Science Shop projects in which students collaborate with the community to solve societal issues.

During the second workshop, we had as a starting point that the loneliness among the population of the Amsterdam New-West district must be reduced. In the district New-West, loneliness is greater than in other parts of Amsterdam. This loneliness is mostly present among people between 45 and 54 years old, unemployed people and low educated people with little money. The largest percentage of lonely people is among the Turkish-Dutch population.

That is why around twenty lecturers from the VU University went to the community centre of the district to discuss together with the municipality and social organizations about the approach to this societal issue. These lectures work mainly within the health and social science field. Together with, among others, local estate agents from the municipality and people from social organizations such as student housing project “Vooruit”, housing corporation “De Alliantie” and healthcare institution “Philadelphia”, the lecturers worked on ideas to involve students in solving problems related to loneliness in the district in groups.

Learning from status holders

 

In one of the groups, they talked about people who emerge from social shelters and status holders who get their own house. Floor Wijnands, project manager at “Vooruit”, said: “They are happy when they get their own house, but they come from a close community and are suddenly alone. How do you keep all those different people in a neighbourhood together? And how can you also use the experience of the newcomers with living together with a group of people that you have not chosen yourself?” Her group members agreed with her and the group leader wrote the questions on a post-it. In this way, they collected questions that students may find an answer to. Some of the questions were: “How do you make a senior citizen centre more vibrant? And how can you better guide people who speak the language badly?” One of the conclusions from this group was that it is very important to have a good conversation with everyone beforehand to avoid a stiff cooperation in the future.Overloading vulnerable people with students.

In another group, Barbara Bijlstra, project manager at “Boot” which is an organization of the “Hogeschool van Amsterdam” that links students to questions from residents and organizations in Amsterdam neighbourhoods, shares her concern that you should not overload vulnerable people with students. The group concludes that it is good if the VU University can join activities that have already been set up in the neighbourhoods.

Most groups did not come further than drawing general conclusions during the workshops. However, the workshop also aimed to allow the participants to make new possible future cooperation partners. This networking started right from the walk-in and was present until the end of the workshop.

Learning to build a community

Nevertheless, one group did succeed in getting something more concrete during the workshop. A representative from “Philadelphia”, a healthcare facility for people with intellectual disabilities, suggested that you can also reduce loneliness by building a community. She wanted to know how you can teach that to healthcare providers so that they not only improve the health but also the well-being of their clients as a group.

Prof.dr. Marjolein Zweekhorst of the Athena Institute and Dr. Peer Smets of sociology saw opportunities during the workshops for students to get started in successive courses or internships. How exactly, they still have to work out, but the beginning has been made during these workshops.

See also in the media:  Wat kunnen studenten doen tegen eenzaamheid in de stad?

 

Shailaja Baichoo on behalf of BDS Université de Lyon

For the year 2018-2019, the association Mouvement de Palier worked on a project with the Science Shop of Université de Lyon through the following social demand: To analyse the sense of engagement of ambassadors who volunteer to carry out waste management in residential buildings, their social relations and how they establish a dialogue in between neighbours and other inhabitants.

Created in 2015, the association Mouvement de Palier based its foundation on the aim to find better ways to sensitize waste management in residential buildings and the neighbourhood in the city of Lyon. Today, the association’s main aim is to form citizens who have the will to accompany their neighbours as well as social and professional sphere in how to effectively manage wastes in their own residence and at the job place.

These formed citizens can then become ‘waste management ambassadors’ and sensitize other people in their close network on the subject matter of zero waste and proper recycling. The association also accompanies citizens towards behavioural change in their daily activities in order to better manage and go for zero wastes.

Posters with indications of good practices in waste recycling set by ambassadors in their residential building. ©Floriane Ordonneau for MouvementdePalier

The social relations and sharing of good experience are the main ingredients for a successful action from engaged ambassadors. Therefore, what encourages an ambassador to engage himself in this association is a crucial question in order to establish a sense of sustainable engagement. The association also offers workshops to teach ambassadors how to properly manage recycling wastes and how to aspire for zero wastes. They need to develop a playful and pedagogical tool in order to embetter their trainings. For this purpose, the association needs a thorough feedback from the ambassadors’, their sense of engagement through their interventions and what are the risks of disengagement. The project is on data gathering from ambassadors who are engaged in the association, those who are not actively engaged with the CSO and others who would like to invest themselves in such actions.

The student intern engaged on the project, Miss Floriane Ordonneau, carried out a brilliant field work on the subject matter. Floriane is a ‘Masters 2’ student in city planning and urban development. She carried out the six months of Science Shop project under the supervision of her pedagogical referent at University of Lumière of Lyon, the CSO’s project officer and the guidance of the Science Shop referent. This Science Shop project started in February 2019 and finished in July 2019.

Floriane started through a first field work by carrying out a census survey on the practice of recycling and how to go for zero waste in the city of Lyon. She started the task of evaluating all the training tools set forth by the association Mouvement de Palier to prepare for a more adapted training allowing the sustainability of the sense of engagement from ambassadors.

An ambassador of Mouvement de Palier offering training to adolescents during an open event. ©MouvementdePalier

Through a series of open questions addressed to waste management ambassadors, Floriane collected a set of qualitative data based on narratives of concrete experiences that the participants could relate to her. She developed her analysis of the data by finding the successful factors, the repetitive challenges and expectations as perceived by the participants. Floriane went through the trainings offered by the association Mouvement de Palier in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the existing pedagogical tools applied.

To have a comparative analysis of the existing training tools, Floriane visited and participated in sensitising as well as pedagogical activities from the recycling centre of domestic waste of Saint-Fons, the centre for textile recycling at Pélussin and the station of water purification at Pierre Benite. These areas are sub urban regions of Lyon and are the three main recycling centres of the region.

A second part of the project implied a more quantitative approach through a series of thirty five multiple choice questions addressed to 347 ambassadors who are actively engaged and others who are still in the network of the of the association Mouvement de Palier but who are no more active members. The field work brought forward the importance of citizens’ engagement on environmental and climatic change issues.

Results of the Science Shop project

The blend of qualitative and quantitative approach of the question of citizens’ engagement in the subject of recycling and waste management gave way to a thorough interpretation of change of behaviours as they have been perceived by the ambassadors. Some of the ambassadors are engaged in the CSO due to the global urgency of climatic change issues. Others base their engagement on a sense of civic activities to contribute to local problems in terms of respect to the environment. In both cases, the ambassadors’ engagement depended on how they could apply their knowledge on the issue of waste recycling and how their close surroundings could respond through their contribution to this change of behaviour to aspire for zero waste.

Ambassadors tend to stay engaged in the association Mouvement de Palier when their interventions towards neighbours, family members and professional network in the field of waste recycling show concrete impact through change of behaviours and responsible consumption of food as well as technology to alleviate global warming. These factors are now being integrated in the design of new training tools from the association Mouvement de Palier. It is quite inclined on equipping the ambassadors with impact evaluation tools that can be measured in the short term after their intervention to their close surroundings. A new dimension on how citizens can collectively take other measures such as the installation of compost bins in their area and how to effectively communicate their actions in the process also contribute to the new trainings that will be offered to the ambassadors from the association Mouvement de Palier.

With the aim of returning the results of the project and to share about the experience of working with a Science Shop in partnership with the CSO Movement de Palier, a short video has been realised by the Science Shop of UDL. Please visit this website to have access to the video as well as the end of year report of this project.

“I saw that there was a real need to inquire more about forms of IEC (Information, Education and Communication) in the subject of Chagas; it is a real need, not a demagogy”. This is how Evelyn Wendy Pardo Flores, a nurse from Cochabamba, Bolivia, who has a master’s degree in public and international health from the Postgraduate Curse in Tropical Medicine (Universidad Mayor de San Simón, public university), begins to answer the questions of our interview.

Her research topic has tried to respond to a social demand in Chagas disease coming from inhabitants of the High Valley region of Cochabamba: they have expressed a concern about how to increase knowledge about Chagas as an essential step to improve access of care for people affected by this unattended and high prevalence disease in Bolivia.

Evelyn focused on testing a communication model based on the peer education strategy (meaning teaching or sharing health information, values and behavior in educating others who may come from similar social backgrounds or life experiences), and she did it with patients treated in the Chagas Platform’s center of Punata, High Valley’s capital, located 45 km away from the city of Cochabamba.

Her work has been framed in the InSPIRES project, that is performed in Bolivia by the CEADES Foundation (Science and Applied Studies for Development in Health and Environment. The project wants to link academic actors (UMSS University) and researchers to social actors in order to respond to needs expressed by the community.

“Why did you choose this research topic, how did it attracted you?”, we ask Evelyn. She tells us about the moment and the person that arose her interest in Chagas and participative research, who later accompanied her as tutor: “Dr. Claire Billot had given us a class, I remember, about the social demand that exists in relation to the various diseases that prevail in our environment and one of the quests that caught my attention was to find out how to better inform people about Chagas disease”.

Collecting social demands in Chagas was a task conducted by CEADES researchers in October 2017, in Punata. This region is known for being one of the most affected by Chagas disease in Bolivia. These social needs were later converted into scientific questions and proposed as research topics to academic spaces, researchers, among others, the Postgraduate course in Tropical Medicine.

Evelyn acknowledges that this kind of research process has required a lot of commitment, but she feels very satisfied with the results. “A postgraduate thesis is another level, there is a greater intellectual demand, it is a process that requires a careful preparation. Then comes the field work, the writing of the results, the defense of the thesis in front of a court and, after that, to give back the results to the community, and finally, the preparation of a scientific article for publication.”

“What was the most challenging issue?”, we ask Evelyn. She answers: “To find an education method that could be appropriate to the sociocultural level of the Punata people… appropriate to their sociocultural context, a method that responds to their real needs”.

Afterwards, the results were communicated to the people that formulated the demand, as well as to Punata’s hospital health staff, students and UMSS researchers. Finally, the experience was translated into a scientific article, which shows that the same patients (who had accessed the diagnosis and treatment of Chagas disease) are the best informants about their disease inside their family circle and beyond: they can positively influence their environment to request medical attention for this disease that does not give symptoms in its early stages, when it is still treatable. They only need a brief training, encouragement and support to devote time to their community, to inform and educate about this life-threatening disease that affects them.

The paper is in the process of being published in the Bolivian Medical Gazette, of national circulation, which will allow disseminating the strategy in professional fields. We hope that other nurses and nursing teachers, will take this initiative and put it into practice.

“And now, what interests you in your professional future?”, we ask Evelyn. She answers without hesitation: “My biggest professional dream is to continue doing research, better if it is in public health and attending to real social needs”.

 

In the spring of 2018, at ESSRG we collected research needs related to green care services (therapeutic approaches which integrate the power of nature). Reviewing the claims, we perceived that the key players of this field had lacked the impact evaluation researches that would have verified the effectiveness of these services and the healing power of nature.

In June 2018, a vice headmaster of Szentendrei Móricz Zsigmond Grammar School in Szentendre (a town near Budapest) invited us to set up a school garden inside the school courtyard. This fieldwork enabled us to address the impact evaluation-related concerns mentioned earlier and to conduct assessing experiments throughout a whole school year in order to give responses to the following questions: What happened to a first-year Mathematics, Physics oriented class (aged between 14-15 years) who participated in establishing a school garden? How did their relationships with each other and with nature changed during this journey?

But let’s start at the beginning!

Creating something totally new together with first-year students who had just started their high school student “careers” was a real co-learning process. We gradually got to know each other, the head teacher, the headmaster, those teachers who were keen to join the school garden project and the piece of land we filled with new meaning and energies.

At our first visit, we asked the students to make joy-sorrow maps of the courtyard in order to identify the coolest and the least cool parts of the yard. We were brave enough to choose one of the most problematic areas to work with. The students described this part as weedy, chaotic but at the same time calm and quiet as it was far from the noisy school buildings.

At our second meeting, students planned their dream school gardens in small groups. They created four plans by making a montage of pictures and drawings for which the whole class could vote for an entire week.

And the winner was:

Everybody was impressed with the unique spiral shape in which they planted the flowers, herbs, vegetables and berry bushes.

Based on this montage of the dream garden, we created a garden plan down to earth, which meant that we selected suitable plant species and paired them according to their general requirements. Then, with the leadership of the committed and enthusiastic head teacher, the students started to dig, get rid of the tons of weed, plant and water in parallel with the scientific work in the frame of Biology and Chemistry lessons to examine the quality of the soil and those plants which could be identified near the garden.

And the spiral shape was born:

In parallel with this co-creation process, at ESSRG we compiled our own plan regarding the evaluation research. We planned to apply six different approaches in order to assess the changes in the students’ relationships with nature and with their classmates:

1. Observations during the planning and implementing phases
2. Interviews with the head teacher and other attending teachers
3. measuring the changes of the students’ environmental attitude with the Children’s Environmental Attitude and Knowledge Scale (CHEAKS) and the New Ecological Paradigm Scale (NEP)
4. Online questionnaires with the parents
5. Photovoice participatory evaluation
6. Facilitated group discussions

Luckily, in the same time when we started the gardening project, we also run an Ecological Economics field course at Eötvös Loránd University engaging Human Ecology master students. This allowed us to merge the school gardening project with university teaching for the autumn semester and involve the students in the impact assessment process. As part of the course we first offered an introductory block, then students had to create and implement their own research plan in small groups (3 or 4 students in one group), choosing their method from a predefined list. Supervision, technical and methodological support, and several occasions for personal reflection were provided all along the process by the two course organizers.

One group of university students chose environmental attitude survey as their approach to impact assessment. The class working in the garden and a control group of Literature, Grammar, History focused students at the same age had filled in the attitude questionnaires before they started to involve deeply in the gardening program. The other group of university students facilitated a photovoice research process: those students who attended the gardening media team took photos during the garden preparation sessions and talked about them in a group discussion as the first step of the photovoice project.

After the semester had finished, we carried on the impact assessment research. For us one of the most memorable group discussions was when the students compiled the guidebook of the school garden for the future garden owners (the plan was that from now on the first-year Mathematics, Physics oriented class would be responsible for the garden).

They expressed that the garden had played really important role in their life. During gardening sessions, they had a chance to make new friends, to have fun, to experience how to work as a team, to learn practical things and to spend time in nature after a long, tiring day. We perceived that the students established collaborative relationships with each other as the borders of cliques are getting blurred when they were in the garden. Their relationship with nature became more tangible and more articulated as they spent more time in contact with it: “During gardening, I recall plenty of good childhood memories”.

“The garden is a sensitive being. Take care of it”. “If you nurture it properly, it will provide more delicious vegetables”.

Besides, they felt that they left a mark on the school life with this garden.

They did it indeed.

Since September 2019 two classes have been taking care of the school garden allowing us to repeat our environmental attitude survey and to follow up how the garden changes the school life…

Photos by Alexandra, Hanna, Simon, Vince, Rita Szentendrey, Eszter Kelemen, Janka Horváth.

 

 

 

Hearing Impairment (HI) is one of the major health problems worldwide. The 2014 national census reported that 37% of the Tunisian with disabilities (2.3% of the whole population) are children; among them 16% have auditory disabilities.

Despite several efforts made so far for better childcare, the absence of communication between the various stakeholders dramatically impacts on the management of hearing Impairment in early infancy in Tunisia.

The Institut Pasteur de Tunis Science Shop “Science together”, created in 2017, aims to implement innovative and collaborative research projects between Tunisian associations and researchers based on concerns brought forward by civil society representatives.

Within the framework of the call to express social needs, launched by “Science together”, ICHARA (Signs in Arabic) —an association involved in promoting better education for children with deafness— submitted the request to identify an effective way for the early detection of Hearing Impairment (HI) among various age groups.

During eight months, a Bachelor student was selected to perform the Science Shop project with ICHARA and the laboratory of Biomedical Genomics and Oncogenetics (IPT), together with various stakeholders from their network: the Department of Congenital and Hereditary diseases (the University Hospital Charles Nicolle), the department of ENT (the University Hospitals La Rabta and Habib Thameur) as well as decision-makers from the Tunisian Ministry of Health.

The project included 304 children aged between four and six years-old from Northern Tunisia (Ras Djebal-Bizerte), who underwent for the first time in their lives the following tests: a Quick Ear check-up, the audiometric tests (subjective and objective audiometry, Acoustic Oto-Emission and acoustic impedencemeter tests) as well as the speech therapy tests (speech-language assessment: words, sentences and language).

Results showed that 37 children (12.17 %) presented hearing impairment (33 conductive, two sensorineural and two mixed). The ear examination showed one malformation of the external ear, 11 impacted cerumen and two ear discharge. The audiometric tests showed the occurrence of 33 children with conductive HI, two with mixed HI and two sensorineural HI (30 mild, six moderate and one severe). The speech-therapy tests showed that 14 children presented articulation disorder, 10 with language delays, five children presenting speech delays.

The children have been referred to the ENT Department for appropriate management and care.

Thanks to the support provided by “Science Together”, ICHARA and collaborating researchers were able to conduct a preliminary field study and mobilize various stakeholders. Taking into account the various challenges encountered by the families with HI, this trans-disciplinary team is now willing to tackle this public health problem by establishing their own Science Schop on auditory health. The new ICHARA Science Shop will lead to the establishment of a national strategy for auditory health and education for people with HI.

The experience of “Science Together” projects showed that Science Shops provide not only an appropriate environment for Participatory Action Research by building a bridge between researchers and civil society organizations but also helped to unite several stakeholders including decision makers and family representatives for advocacy for a common cause.

“I felt like I was flying!” an interviewee nods repeatedly, eyes wide open, reviving the moment in which she lifted both feet off the ground and the bicycle – the most efficient mechanical device designed for transport – took her swiftly down the gentle slope of the public square where she was taking a cycle training session. The Civil Society Organisation (CSO) Biciclot (a cycling co-operative founded in mid-1980s) had the feeling that the courses for adult cycle training that they had been delivering for years were having a very positive impact in people’s wellbeing, but they didn’t have the resources to evaluate them. When ISGlobal researchers working in the InSPIRES project showed up at their meetings, the CSO shared their willingness to explore together the impact of cycle training in adults. The study was co-designed between the CSO and the researchers, non-participant observation and interviews to alumni of the courses have already been undertaken. With this evaluation, Biciclot is also seeking for evidence to support the funding search for these courses’ sustainability.

The lady that felt she was flying, used that expression during her interview, referring to a specific exercise in the course in which, after two or three sessions of doing repetitive exercises to train their balance on the bicycle, they finally are asked to lift their feet and see if they have acquired that balance. If they do, it is their first time feeling they do not touch the ground, but they’re moving. It is a moment of pure accomplishment and joy.

 

Another interviewee, a middle-aged woman, drew my attention to an unusual cycling group. When asked why she wanted to learn to cycle she said it was because of her husband, who was on a wheelchair. Of course, I asked for more information and it turned out that her husband was having a great time joining the events of a charity that provides a wide range of inclusive cycles for people with disabilities. This participant wanted to join her husband in such activities, but she didn’t know how to cycle, so she learned in order to share those times with him. What was even more interesting is that the lady reported that shortly after she learned, she unfortunately had a fall (which caused a broken bone injury) nevertheless, she persevered and went back to cycling when she recovered and is planning to do more cycling activities with her husband.

Some participants reported that their goal of learning to cycle was to be able to use it for leisure. Some of them had a very clear intention to use the bicycle for their daily commute. This was the case of a participant from Venezuela, who had arrived six months earlier and was working as an engineer in an industrial estate, far from the urban area. The public transport connection was very poor and, due to his shifts, he needed to reach his job very early or very late, out of public transport times. He then realised the bicycle was an option and took the course. He was interviewed a few weeks after the course, and he was already commuting to his job by bicycle every day. That interview was also especial in another way, because he brought his partner, who had just arrived from Venezuela, the day before, with their daughter, to join him in his new home in Terrassa, Barcelona. He did say he was aware that he had to be very careful riding his bicycle, he didn’t want to hurt himself as he had to provide for his family.

By Giovanna Pacini and Franco Bagnoli

The term “urban garden” combines two words that, in the common language, have opposite values: the idea of the vegetable garden is linked to the countryside, whereas with urban we normally refer to the cities and in general to the industrialized areas.

The theme of urban gardening is the core of the first project of the Florence Science Shop. It was planned according to the new methodology, trying to enhance the participative and collaborative approach during all the process, from the initial idea to the dissemination of results.

We received a manifestation of interest from the non-profit association Orti Dipinti in 2018, who runs a public “open” garden where citizens can learn how to deal with plants and gather aromatic herbs. The garden is used also as a didactic experience for children and therapeutic tool for mentally impaired people. They asked us to help them in promoting this idea, enlarging the participants to their and other experiences in this field.

Our first step was to organize a science café to illustrate the request and the spirit of the science shop and to collect questions on this specific topic, in order to set up a research project. The experts of our science café were Ugo Bardi, a physical chemist at the University of Florence and the University delegate for sustainability, Marina Clauser, from the Botanic Garden of Florence, and Giacomo Salizzoni, president of Orti Dipinti. Franco Bagnoli, who moderated the event, introduced the subject and the idea of Science shop to the public. Ugo Bardi, during his activity as the delegate for sustainability, introduced the idea of urban gardens run by students in the university and Marina is hosting school classes in the Botanic Garden in Florence.

Both citizens and experts proposed research issues and expressed their needs, like for example: to create a network for the exchange of information, the necessity to have a dialogue with the institutions, the requirement of financial support to urban gardens for social/recreational purposes, and the desire to have answers to questions about the new methods and techniques in horticulture.

After the event, other researchers from the Department of Agri-food Production of and Environmental Sciences of the University of Florence (DISPAA) joined the project.

Photo by UNIFI researchers

 

We performed a first analysis (Bagnoli et all, Urban Gardening in Florence and Prato: How a Science Shop Project Proposed by Citizens Has Grown into a Multi-Disciplinary Research Subject, Journal of Sustainable Development, vol 11 p. 111-119, 2018) about the wide varieties of realizations of the idea of publicly accessible urban gardens open. Among them, those that are assigned by municipalities to retired or unemployed citizens are the most common and those that globally involve most citizens. So, we decided to further investigate this aspect.

From the stakeholders’ point of view: the Municipality of Prato expressed its interest in monitoring its assigned public gardens, and a thesis project on this subject started with the title “Impact of urban horticulture on water resources: the case of the social gardens of the Municipality of Prato”.

An agriculture student, 24 years old, following the guidelines of the researchers, developed a questionnaire to evaluate both the agronomic aspects and the social/psychological impacts. This first project is arriving at its end. Some preliminary results about the general details are:

• the average age is 73 years. They are all retired except for a 55-year-old who is unemployed
• almost all of them have a healthy, economic and social motivation to cultivate.
• all, although having a scale from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum) to indicate their social and economic satisfaction, voted 5 (80%) and 4 (20%)

The science shop during all the phases constantly monitored the progress of the project organizing meetings with the tenants of the urban gardens, with the Municipality of Prato and with the research group, often also together with more than one of them.

We are now near the last event, planned for the end of March 2019: a science café organized in close collaboration with the municipality of Prato in a public place (a municipal library), to return the results of the project to the population.

Following the new idea that has permeated the whole process, we have invited as speakers not only the student and the researchers but also the Councillor for the Environment of the municipality of Prato and one of the elderlies who runs one of the analysed urban gardens.

Moreover, other science shop projects are sprouting, some of them in collaboration with the municipality of Prato, which has greatly appreciated this way of working… Stay tuned!

In Bolivia we spent the whole month of December, 2018, giving back to the community a summary of the results of our three Science Shop studies carried out by master students in Chagas disease.

We organized events in five different contexts: civil society of Punata (a province nearbye Cochabamba), health staff of Punata’s hospital, students of medicine of UMSS (public) university, Association of patients with Chagas disease, and finally in CEADES office.

First, in Punata, the full activity was recorded and broadcasted by the local television channel which has an audience of 35,000 people, and in parallel, via the Facebook page. We had the participation of local leaders, health representatives, technical staff for vector control, representatives of education sector. We have enriched the event with a beautiful artistic exhibition by photographer Ana Ferreira.

Second, in the hospital: with the participation of medical doctors and nurses.

Third, with students of medicine organized by the Scientific Association.

Fourth, with the members of the Association of patients with Chagas Disease “Corazones Unidos”.

And, finally, with the full staff of CEADES.