SERVICE-LEARNING AND THE ASSESSMENT OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION BY EXTERNAL PARTNERS

Undergraduates often find their learning process too theoretical, so they demand a bigger amount of practical training to develop the competences that will be required from them once they enter the job market. The situation is especially clear in the BSC Degree in Education, because future teachers need to test their ability to deal with children before they finish their University studies. Among the competences that society expects them to show in their career, social responsibility plays an essential role. That is why, in order to work on that competence, we conceived a project based on Service-Learning methodology. Firstly, we contacted the NGO Save the Children, and we agreed to collaborate with them, providing them with didactic proposals for their project "Solidary Race". After that, we organized our pupils in groups of four-five people, and every group had to create a didactic proposal for the "Solidary Race" that the NGO could use with the schools that collaborate with it. Finally, the NGO's voluntary workers came to the oral presentation of our students' projects and evaluated them, too, determining whether they had worked on elements linked to social responsibility or not. In this paper, we present the project's different stages and we sum up our conclusions, considering the results showed by the pupils' final mark, as well as the NGO's evaluation of the experience.