Maxim Tomoszek

SOCIETAL CHALLENGES Lectures 2023

Preparing the Next Generation to Fulfil SDGs: Teaching for Social Innovation

23 March 2023, 14:00-15:30 CET

Sustainable development goals formulated by United Nations summarize the biggest challenges currently faced by humankind. We hope today’s university students will be able to tackle and resolve them. What does this expectation mean for higher education? How do we prepare the next generation to transform the society? I would like to highlight three important aspects, on which universities should focus.

First, we need to make sure that university graduates are really well equipped to face these challenges – through clear identification of learning outcomes and their valid assessment.

Second, the problems at the core of SDGs will not be resolved by application of existing knowledge. The future graduates will need to be creative problem solvers able to persuade others to collaborate in order to transform the society, to identify the deficiencies and stereotypes and formulate innovative solutions – in order to do that, they need to develop not just their knowledge, but also their skills, attitudes and values.

Third, social innovation does not happen in lecture theater or even on university campus. In order to be able to resolve real problems of real people, the students must learn how to do that. And what better way there is than to learn, how to do that, by helping real people resolve their real problems?

Besides addressing and discussing all of these three aspects, I would like to offer inspiration how to implement them into educational activities.

Maxim Tomoszek started teaching at Law Faculty of Palacký University in 2004. Between 2008 and 2016, he was the head of the Centre for Clinical Legal Education. Since 2016, he serves as vice-dean for education. He obtained a Ph.D. in constitutional law in 2012. During his engagement at Palacký, Maxim has been teaching constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, human rights, various human rights oriented legal clinics (human rights clinic, patients‘ rights clinic, asylum law clinic, anti-discrimination clinic), professional ethics, legal skills and regularly coaches moot court teams for national and international moot court competitions. In 2013, he was a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University, School of Law, in Lexington, Virginia, USA, teaching about protection of fundamental rights in Europe. From 2017 to 2019, he was teaching in the Master programme in Human Rights in Valencia; he conducted seminars on ethical issues related to students’ work in legal clinics at Warsaw University (2018) and University of Brescia (2019). From 2017 to 2020, he was collaborating with colleagues from four other European universities (Luxembourg, Brescia, Bucharest and Roma III) within the framework of the first Erasmus+ project dedicated to clinical legal education: Skills Transfer in Academia: A Renewed Strategy, where he is responsible for preparing the quality standards for legal clinics.

Maxim is dedicated to promoting clinical legal education on international level. Between 2013 and 2019, he was the president of the European Network for Clinical Legal Education, where he now serves as a treasurer. Since 2013, he represents Central and Eastern Europe in the steering committee of the Global Alliance for Justice Education. He regularly presents at national and international conferences, and publishes about constitutional law and clinical legal education in the Czech Republic and abroad. He also regularly organizes conferences, workshops, trainings and other events related to clinical legal education and teaching law in general.

Within Aurora University Alliance activities, Maxim is Palacký University Resource person for implementation of Aurora Competence Framework – Learning Outcomes in Universities for Impact in Society (LOUIS) and member of LOUIS Expert support center.

https://www.pf.upol.cz/cihol/people/maxim-tomoszek/