Prof. Dr. Daniel Fischer

Prof. Dr. Daniel Fischer is Professor of Sustainability Education and Communication and head of the Sustainability Education Research Group (SERG) at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Since 2023 he has also held the UNESCO Chair in Higher Education for Sustainable Development.

His research and teaching ask how more sustainable lifestyles and responsible consumption can be promoted through educational and communication interventions. From the perspective of educational theory, he is interested in how reflexivity can be strengthened and how individuals and collectives can reshape their relationships with the consumer societies in which they were born and socialised. In recent years he has studied how teaching and learning formats such as mindfulness practices, storytelling and citizen science contribute to this. His current work focuses on transformative approaches to assessment and evaluation and on participatory teaching and learning formats.

Before joining Leuphana, he held professorships in Sustainability Education at Arizona State University (ASU) in the US and in Consumer Communication for Sustainability at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in the Netherlands for five years. He completed his doctorate in sustainability science with a dissertation on the role of schools in addressing global consumption challenges. Before that, he trained as a teacher and earned a master’s degree in Educational Management and School Development.