Education on Sustainability and Sustainable Development Goals in University Teaching Through Community Service Delivery

Universities are committed to training students in competencies that extend beyond professional knowledge. Sustainability is a new paradigm that seeks to build a better world for today’s generation as well as those to come. The main tool for building this objective is training. A group of teachers from the Department of Economics and Business at the University of Almeria has been to contribute to training people to work for sustainability in their respective environments, both professional and personal. The service learning methodology has been chosen to meet this objective. To this end, we have tried to strengthen ties with representatives of the local community (associations, non-profit organisations, administrations), so that students come into contact with the reality around them. In addition, this allows them to become aware of the problems existing in their social environment and to contribute to their solution by putting into practice the theoretical contents taught in the classroom through the provision of a service to the community. This chapter covers the main aspects of implementing the service learning methodology to put into practice the contents on sustainability taught from the perspective of applied economics. Based on the experiences presented here, it can be concluded that this methodology is not only suitable for training university students in the different aspects of sustainability, but also allows them to work on a wide range of skills such as empathy, active listening, teamwork, self-knowledge and civic awareness, among others.