Goodbye to Prof. Ramón Flecha!

End of Guest Professorship of Prof. Dr. Ramón Flecha

By August 2023 the stay of DAAD Visiting Professor Dr. Ramón Flecha (University of Barcelona, Spain) at the Professorship for Adult and Continuing Education has officially ended. The students and colleagues would like to thank him for coming to Würzburg and sharing his exceptional knowledge and outstanding perspective on adult education with us.

After having a close research collaboration between the Professorship for Adult and Continuing Education and the research center "Community of Research on Excellence for All (CREA)“ founded by Prof. Dr. Ramón Flecha for many years, it was a great pleasure to us to further strengthen our cooperation and having the opportunity to engage in in-depth scientific dialogue with Prof. Dr. Ramón Flecha.

We were very proud that Prof. Dr. Ramón Flecha has chosen the Professorship for a guest stay since he has extensive expertise in adult and continuing education. Not only is he the founder and first director of the first master program in Adult Education in Spanish Universities, but also, his scientific works have been published in world-class scientific journals such as Nature or Harvard Educational Review and many more. We were honored that he not only has offered three courses „Dialogical Model of Living Together in Adult Education“, „Dialogical Gatherings of Adults“ and „Contributions from Adult Education to Science and Society“, but that he also held the public speech "How to promote and evaluate the social impact of our interventions?" to national and international colleagues from science and from the field.

Looking back on the successful summer term 2023, we would like to extend our appreciation to Prof. Flecha for his excellent inputs. The impact he has made on students and colleagues gets evident when looking at the following quotes:

“I really want to let you know, the […] course with Ramon Flecha was actually one of the most impressive seminars since I started studying in 2016. Both personally and professionally, it has changed me in a way. His stories and examples from his life as a scientist, his input about websites with articles about social impact, his lectures about disadvantages on levels, I never thought which exists [and] his connections to interesting people (like we had a zoom session with a friend of him, who participated in the literacy gatherings in Barcelona)- all of that was impressive and is still present in mind. I highly recommend for the future, that the following students of this master have the possibility to get him to know and to hear what he has to say. [T]here are many important topics attached to scientific evidence and equality, which we need to know for our work. If a seminar is not possible in the future, even an online-lecture or similar setting could bring a huge output for the students.” – a student

“Working with Prof. Flecha was a unique experience that made me reflect and develop my own scientific and research methodological perspective. This is also because Prof. Flecha created at all times a conversational atmosphere in which we could grow together as a team. I am very sad that Prof. Flecha now has to return to Barcelona, and I hope that we will remain in dialogue in the future.” – a colleague

Thank you again, Prof. Dr. Ramón Flecha, for sharing your extraordinary expertise with us!

Thanks also to DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) for supporting the visiting professorship during summer term 2023 with means of BMBF (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research).