Alexandru-Cosmin Apostol

In recent years, education for sustainable development has assumed an increasingly important role in shaping the key competences needed to understand and adopt responsible consumption behaviors. In such a context, this article proposes an analysis of the way in which an elective course on Sustainable Consumption Behaviors, introduced recently into a university educational program at a higher education institution in Romania, can create opportunities for engaging students with knowledge and values related to sustainability. The article is built around a case study on the curricular design of the course, examined in relation to the conceptual framework of education for sustainable development and to the UNESCO competences. The analysis maps the teaching assessment activities onto the framework of key sustainability competencies proposed by UNESCO. It presents both the content and architecture of the course, as well as the thematic distribution of the choices made by students for the assessment tasks. The results indicate that students’ assessment choices were predominantly oriented toward applied topics closer to their everyday experiences: food waste, recycling, reuse, organizational practices for promoting sustainable consumption, and others. Overall, these results suggest that pedagogical approaches centered on practical relevance, critical reflection, and creativity may create favorable conditions for engaging with values associated with sustainability. Therefore, through this article, we highlight the real potential that such thematic elective courses could have in strengthening education for sustainable development and sustainable consumption in higher education.

De-influencing is an emerging trend that appeared in 2023 on the TikTok platform as a reaction to overconsumption. De-influencers are content creators who, through their videos, seek to discourage consumers from purchasing products or services widely promoted by major brands. They position themselves in opposition to traditional social media influencers, who are oriented toward paid brand promotion and driven by the commercial logic of the influencer marketing. Through their content, de-influencers advocate for the mindful use of the planet’s resources and for the consumption of goods and services in a way that meets present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own. Thus, the de-influencing movement has been grounded in the growing awareness of the multiple dangers posed by excessive consumption of goods, products, and services—overconsumption having negative effects on natural resources, which are diminishing exponentially and ultimately generating major imbalances in both the environment and society.

In this entry paper, we propose a brief analysis of the use of the notion of “paradigm” in sciences in general and in social sciences and sociology in particular. A “paradigm” expresses a worldview and/or a unified perspective—at the level of the scientific community—on a given situation. Paradigms represent a collection of beliefs shared by the scientific community or a set of agreements through which social issues should be understood and interpreted.

Background/Objectives: Our research paper aims to analyse the relationship between the perceived impact on mental health due to the COVID-19 pandemic, social well-being, and psychological well-being among social work students. As we transition from the pandemic phase to an endemic phase of COVID-19, it is necessary to examine these aspects, recognizing the interdependence and complementarity of social and medical care within the healthcare system. Methods: The research was conducted nearly three years after the lockdown measures imposed by the spread of COVID-19, during a period when onsite academic activities had resumed, as they were prior to the pandemic. The sample consisted of 235 social work students from both bachelor’s and master’s programmes studying at a large university in Romania. Data was collected between December 2022 and January 2023, during a time when onsite educational activities were once again taking place. Results: Our results show that, despite the significant amount of time that had passed since the pandemic began, its negative effects were still strongly felt on a psychosocial level. Conclusions: This finding leads us to conclude that there is a long-term COVID-19 impact on mental health. Most study participants reported experiencing high (42.10%) or moderate (23%) levels of being mentally affected, which also affected their psychological and social well-being, key factors in preparing future social-medical care professionals to provide adequate integrated healthcare services.

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, educational systems were forced to adapt to the new reality of online learning, causing practical academic specializations, such as social work (SW), to be severely affected. To highlight the perspectives of SW students during the pandemic, we used a mixed sociological approach that combined exploratory qualitative research (using the focus-group technique) with cross-sectional quantitative research. Participants who had both on-site and online SW studies before and after the COVID-19 outbreak were included in the study. The study was conducted during a period when almost all educational activities were held online. We aimed to investigate students’ perceptions of the educational process during the pandemic, how their wellbeing was affected, and their perspectives on educational and professional development. Students identified advantages of online learning, such as discovering online learning tools, and disadvantages, mainly marked by concerns about their career path once practical activities were heavily limited by institutional measures and policies. Our conclusions suggest that in a post-pandemic context, universities should provide continuous feedback, integrate students’ opinions into policies, offer material and technical support, facilitate access to high-quality resources, enrich the SW curricula with resilience programs, and organize peer-to-peer mentoring activities.

In the context of global social and economic changes caused by Covid-19 pandemic, our study wishes to bring to light the main transformations within the training process of the future specialists in the medical and social field in the context of Romanian online education. This study fbcused on the analysis of 211 questionnaires applied to final-year university Bachelor's degree and Master students at the Social Work speciality and medical speciality (Physical therapy and Rehabilitation) recruited from two public universities of the north-east part of Romania. The comparative study analysed the opinions expressed by the university students regarding the training of skills and competences, the involvement in practicum and volunteering activities during the emergency period, the intention to migrate towards another profession or another geographical area. Through this study, we outline a diagnosis regarding the impact of the state of emergency on the academic training process of final-year university students. The purpose of the study is to highlight the progress of the educational process (framework, accumulation of skills and theoretical and practical knowledge, educational and professional concerns and adapting strategies) in the context of the pandemic, among students within the two specialities in their final academic year. This a crucial year for the transition towards a professional career in the healthcare fields chosen. Our results allow us to formulate the conclusion that a high degree of concern regarding the perspectives of finding a job is accompanied by a high propensity towards working abroad after finishing the studies.

In this paper, we present some key features regarding a quantitative panel study conducted in 2020 at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social-Political Science, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași. To examine how the undergraduates perceive distance learning in the context of university closure due to the spread of COVID-19 disease, we organized two „waves" of research by questionnaire: 593 respondents in March 2020 and 499 respondents in June 2020, both samples being representative. This research had four main objectives: (a) studying comparatively the university students opinion about the decision to suspend the traditional face-to-face teaching activities; (b) studying the university students opinion about the online communications with professor or tutors, with their colleagues; (c) studying the main online activities initiated during the pandemic for academic formation; (d) constructing a statistical index of pandemic difficulties for comparative analysis within specific groups of the target population. Some of the conclusions of this study showed that during this semester, marked by pandemic context, the intensity level of the communication process between students and their teachers has increased relatively balanced for all years of study. Also, the online teaching activities carried out at a constant pace respected the pre-pandemic schedule. Thus, the time spent on learning was quite similar compared with the pre-pandemic period.

The last six months have been marked by the worldwide spread of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) which has triggered a global pandemic crisis. Thus, among the most affected fields of activity is education, educational institutions being forced to transfer all the curricular activities in the online environment, by using various digital tools and also Social Media. Due the rapidly spreading of the novel coronavirus, since the beginning of this year, thousands of higher education institutions around the world have been gradually constrained by local gouvernments and public authorities to replace traditional in-person educational activities with distance education, mediated by the digital environment. In turn, the Romanian educational system, as in the case of other countries, has been forced to respond promptly to the arising pandemic crisis challenges. Over the past decades, several researchers from various scientific fields have shown a growing interest in studying the ways in which technology (Marchello and Kelly, 1989), information and communication technology – ICT (Campbell, 2006; Aczel and Hardy, 2007; Saadik, 2008) or digital tools (Säljö, 2010) can be successfully integrated into curricular activities. Nowadays, all these contributions acquire a special significance, once the educational system has had to adapt, willingly or unwillingly, to the current context. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to present several results of an exploratory quantitative sociological research conducted between 26th of March - 20th of April 2020, at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social-Political Sciences, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, on a sample of 643 students. The main purpose of this research was to highlight the impact of the pandemic crisis on the learning process among students. Among the main research objectives were: (a) to identify students perceptions about the closure of face-to-face university courses and seminars; (b) to measure the proportion of students who were considering, at the time of the study, that the Romanian educational system is ready to switch traditional learning activities with online courses and seminars; (c) to analyze the main concerns among students toward the effects of pandemic crisis on their future educational path and educational outcomes.