Evaluating Learning in ESD: A UNESCO Chair Exchange with Sebastian Galindo
It was good to host Professor Sebastian Galindo at Leuphana for an extended exchange with Harald Hantke and Daniel Fischer, both Co-Chairs of the UNESCO Chair in Higher Education for Sustainable Development at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Professor Galindo was recently appointed to lead the new UNESCO Chair on Evaluation in Non-formal and Informal Learning Programmes at the University of Florida — an addition to the global network of UNESCO Chairs working at the intersection of education and sustainability.
The conversation circled around a question both Chairs find pressing: how do we assess and evaluate learning in Education for Sustainable Development in ways that do justice to context? How do we honour place-based agency and the need for local adaptation, while also building research approaches that let us learn across cases and distil insights that can inform both theory and practice? These are not easy questions — but the dialogue made clear that they are exactly the kind that an international network of UNESCO Chairs is set up to take on together.
Concrete points of overlap surfaced between the Leuphana Chair's work on Education for Sustainable Development and the evaluation focus of Professor Galindo's incoming Chair. The exchange pointed towards possibilities for future joint inquiry into how to embed evaluation in non-formal learning settings without flattening the contextual specificity that gives those settings their value. Exchanges like this one are a reminder of the values of international collaboration and global partnership that the UNESCO Chairs Programme was built for.
Our thanks go to Professor Galindo for the time he invested in this visit. We look forward to continuing the conversation — and to seeing what comes next.
