Under the motto "Future Partnerships between Higher Education and Society. Campus Community-Partnerships revisited", representatives of higher education institutions and civil society actors recently gathered to jointly discuss how knowledge transfer and civil society engagement can be profitably combined. Areas such as service learning, community-based research, social entrepreneurship and citizen science offer a wide range of opportunities to promote exchange and cooperation between universities and society.
After a welcome by the organizers of the annual conference and greetings by the Minister of Education Martin Polaschek, the conference topic was examined and critically scrutinized from different perspectives using theoretical concepts and practical examples. In addition to classic lectures, there were poster presentations, keynotes and a concluding networking session in the form of a "Social Innovation Lab".
The conference also explicitly invited to reflect on collaborations between higher education, schools and civil society. The staff of the OeAD Center for Citizen Science took this as an opportunity to focus on the school context in their presentation, which took place on the second day of the conference. Under the title "Citizen Science as an approach for inquiry-based learning at school and out-of-school learning sites in teacher education and training", they suggested reflecting on interfaces between campus-community partnerships and Citizen Science in the school context and discussing how the two approaches can be integrated into teacher education and training in the longer term. In doing so, it is important to consider commonalities between service learning and Citizen Science in teaching. Both require cooperation between universities or research institutions and partners from society, so that a mutual knowledge transfer of all actors involved is made possible. Accordingly, both approaches include social engagement, with Citizen Science additionally contributing to research as well as awareness raising.
In addition to the presentation by the OeAD Center for Citizen Science, researchers from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern and desklab gemeinnützige UG Schriesheim also addressed the topic of Citizen Science in schools. They presented the project "GewässerCampus" as a practical example, in which pupils analyze water quality as Citizen Scientists.