Freedom for students, staff and sea turtles: Travelogue from summer school in Malta

During the last week of October 31 international students from seven European countries met for a one-week summer school in Malta, within the Erasmus+ project Shape2Gether. Four NTNU students are part of this group, together with students from Finland, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic and Malta. Shape2Gether is the fourth Erasmus+ project that NTNU (IGE and ILU) joins together with partners from the same consortium.

 Through the years, and thanks to these projects, more than 200 students in total have joined this kind of summer schools/field courses. In these times of war in Europe, this type of cooperation across countries is more important than ever! With follow-up research we have showed that this type of education is highly appreciated by the students, and an effective way for educators in tackling wicked problems. 

The importance of international cooperation 

After participating in eight different Erasmus+ projects over the last 10 years, we see how our students gain unique competences; and the staff gets incredibly valued international cooperation and networking experiences related to teaching and the development of teaching. In addition, participating in such projects is important because it stimulates research cooperation and scientific publications. Unfortunately, we are underfinanced within these projects, as EU use fixed rates for travel and staff costs. Within a sector with decreased budgets, we are afraid that these Erasmus+ projects will be less attractive and not prioritized anymore.

As a message to our research council, ministry of higher education as well as university leadership we would like to highlight how important and pivotal Erasmus+ projects are. We do see the need for extra incentive grants from for example NFR, automatically granted when we get EU fundings to such projects. This kind of collaborative and across-borders projects are highly needed in a Europe in war, and with environmental and societhal issues on the doorstep. In this travelogue from a summer school organized by the Erasmus+ project Shape2Gether we will give some examples of how such courses are organized and the value for students and staff. 

The Erasmus+ project Shape2Gether 

The week in Malta was one of three mandatory in-site courses the students needed to attend throughout 2024-25 to full-fill the course “Shape2Gether – Shaping innovations in education for sustainable development by contextualizing geosciences, new tech, and serious games with climate change”. NTNU is partner of the project through a cooperation between the Department of Geography (IGE) and the Department of Teacher Education (ILU). 

The Malta-week was a follow-up of a field course organized in Norway by NTNU (Trondheim city and at island Tautra) last week of May, focusing on learning how to use VR technology to communicate environmental and climate change issues. The last gathering in Bochum, Germany (March 2025), will focus on game-based teaching and learning.

Moreover, students are invited to prepare their final Master thesis related to the Shape2Gether project. Based on results from this project the consortium wants to develop an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s program application in Education for Sustainable Development. 

Students’ feedback from the summer school in Malta October 2024 

One of our Norwegian students, commented as follows:

“One of the highlights was to participate in beach clean-up the last day, and to participate in the release of turtles.” 

This comment refers to our participation in the release of three wild injured Loggerhead Sea Turtles (Caretta caretta), recovered by a local NGO, “Nature Trust - FEE Malta”. 

The students highly appreciated the possibility to experience Malta from “inside”, together with local students and staff, as expressed by another of the Norwegian students:

“It was nice to see the country from an inside perspective and talk to locals and hear their experiences and thoughts about sustainability in Malta.” 

“I look back on the week in Malta with gratefulness. Mostly according to the cross-disciplinary work across ages, as well as a possibility to build relations with students from the whole Europe.”

Nature and culture challenges in Malta 

During the whole week the students were guided and taught by the local Malta university staff, Prof. Mark Mifsud, Prof. Paul Pace and Dr. Martin Musumeci, as well as local staff from NGOS’s, farms, factories and local authorities. Based on the four important topics/pillars of Education for Sustainable Development: Economy, Environment, Society, and Culture the students themselves made a multimedia presentation from Malta.

During the week they experienced challenging issues affecting the Maltese society like: enormous pressure from tourism, lack of fresh water, various agricultural issues, and competition between aggressive investors and local population who wants to keep nature and society in a sustainable way.

In this regard, the group had the opportunity to meet and discuss with the mayor of one of the small communities at Gozo Island, who had been able to fight against the massive pressure from real estate agencies. After a 22-year-long process against the investors, including several trials and attacks against his person and who opposed the building project, he managed to stop the establishment of huge hotels by raising the issue at local and national level. 

When visiting Gozo Island, just north of Malta, the students visited spectacular historical places like the Ġgantija temples, that are older than the pyramids of Egypt and Stonehenge in UK, showing an advanced stone age agriculture community from 5500 BC. As an interesting comparison the same students in May visited the rock carvings from 1500 BC in Frosta, near Trondheim, established in early Norwegian bronze age with a relatively primitive agriculture society.

During the week we visited Marsalforn, an area with a 3 km-coastline used for salt production over the last 350 years, and a coastline under the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, Dwejra, with spectacular landforms and protected geological (lots of fossils), historical and biological spots. 

Plastic pollution and wildlife threats 

During one of the days the students experienced to participate in a school beach cleaning activity, where they got information about plastic threats to the wildlife. One threatened species is the Loggerhead Sea Turtle (Caretta caretta) which by accident can end up eating plastic (undigested, like the whales). The organisation Nature Trust - FEE Malta are following up nests of turtles and take care of hurt individuals, and they showed an impressing success in helping turtles to survive during the last years. 

At the end of this activity our Erasmus+ students, together with local secondary school students, participated in the release of three turtles that had been hospitalized for months to be recovered from injuries of plastic. The turtles were released in Ġnejna Bay, Malta, ten metres from the seawater, and soon they recognized the direction to the water, crawled down to the sea and then swam away. 

The turtles from Malta can travel far around the Mediterranean Sea. Tracking devices on a couple released some years ago, showed their migration trajectories between Malta, Italy and North Africa several months after the release. This shows how global and interconnected environmental issues are. 

The importance of Erasmus+ projects and student mobility 

The costs related to environmental footprints because of travelling through Europe to attend all these events have been heavily debated in the consortium through these years, but our follow-up research, based on the students’ evaluations, highlight the tremendous value of meeting in person students and staff from foreign cultures. This was clearly highlighted in the feedback received during the Covid version of the intense-week, when one of the field courses was turned into a fully digital one thanks to the use of VR technology. 

The students appreciated that we managed to do a virtual field course, but explicitly said that this cannot fully substitute to go to a new country together with a multicultural group of staff and students. The methodology of this type of intensive field courses/summer schools with students and staff working in tight cooperation through the whole week, is well described in a research-based anthology from one of the first projects – Educhange.

To be forced to plan teaching together with colloquies from different countries and cultures is a great advantage of Erasmus+ projects like Shape2Gether. Through such cooperation we have developed our own way of teaching, as well as broadened our understanding of others’ way of developing it. Increased focus on teaching in HE increases the need for: focus on diverse understanding of teaching and learning, different understandings of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) approaches, and how to cooperate across different cultures. 

Through this Erasmus+ project Shape2Gether this consortium of seven Universities plan to establish the baseline for an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Program application in Education for Sustainable Development.