Making learning visible: collaboratively designing assessment for sustainability education

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) challenges educators to foster critical, reflexive, and transformative learning in response to complex sustainability issues. While many higher education institutions have embraced transformative pedagogies, assessment practices often lag behind, remaining tied to outputbased formats that inadequately capture personal, emergent, and value-driven learning. This workshop addresses this gap by introducing co-design methods developed through a Comenius Teaching Fellow project, grounded in design-based research. Participants will engage with tools from the ‘ESD Assessment Design Toolkit’ and follow a pressure-cooker design process to develop innovative assessment elements. The process begins by exploring students' voices to identify meaningful learning moments, moves through defining personal assessment challenges, and culminates in prototyping ESD-aligned assessment elements. The workshop offers hands-on experience in designing assessment that supports learner agency, complexity navigation, and the integration of uncertainty and multiple perspectives. Participants leave with tangible ideas to apply in their own context. Ultimately, this session responds to urgent calls in ESD literature to stop reinventing frameworks and instead focus on operationalising sustainability assessment meaningfully in real educational settings.