dr. VC (Valentina) Tassone

“How do we cope with the demands of a modern (un)sustainable life? What does the ongoing climate crisis mean to me and what is my role into it? How can we responsibly jointly address socio-ecological matters of concern, when we all think so differently?”

These questions are an example of the questions we as young or less-young learners are confronted with. I am dedicated to exploring educational, teaching and learning approaches that empower learners to deepen this type of questions and respond to today’s sustainability challenges. By drawing from the dilemmas people face and from the ecological needs of the earth, my research focuses on innovative educational design, deep and relational pedagogies that transform people and practices and that enable learners to be responsible agents in our complex world. My research studies take place in the context of (higher) education, community setting or society at large, and often at their crossroads.

Currently I supervise the following PhD projects:

• Integrating Ethics in Climate Change Education (PhD candidate Thijs Loonstra).
• Transformative learning for sustainable development: living labs as powerful learning spaces (PhD candidate Marlies van der Wee)
• Responsible and reflexive higher professional education for a more sustainable future: practices and challenges (PhD candidate Saskia Weijzen)
• Towards a Transformative Learning Ecology for Watershed Stewardship in the Manafwa Watershed, Eastern Uganda (PhD candidate Doreen Misanya)
• Fostering critical pedagogies of place as a means for engaging youth in environmental vulnerable bioregions in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia (PhD candidate Daniel Couceiro)
• The role of human agency in transdisciplinary learning for sustainable development (PhD candidate Liu Weiwei)
• Relational system-oriented pedagogies in living labs for soil health and sustainable development (upcoming Post-doc)