How would you define validation, and how does it show up in your work and your organisation?
Validation means making learning visible, valued, and transferable across different contexts. It also means making learning socially meaningful, especially learning that happens outside formal education systems. In the context of aufZAQ, validation is strongly connected to transparency, quality standards, and competence-oriented learning outcomes. We try to create trust in non-formal youth work training without reducing it to purely formal assessment logic. Validation therefore does not only mean measuring competences but also creating recognition for learning processes that are often overlooked despite their strong impact on young people and youth workers.
What can we do to advance recognition?
We need to keep in mind that the path to formal recognition is not a sprint but a marathon, which is taken step by step. We need to stay engaged and maintain our commitment to quality assurance in order to gradually build and strengthen trust. We at aufZAQ will continue to strengthen advocacy for the field of youth work by maintaining communication with the various stakeholder groups we are involved with.
Perhaps the challenge is not to fully align youth work and higher education, but to develop forms of validation that create trust and recognition while still respecting the distinctive character of non-formal learning.
Both youth work and higher education support the validation of non-formal learning — and yet it still barely happens. What is the single biggest reason for that?
Many stakeholder groups support validation in principle. But Higher education institutions often struggle with recognising learning that was developed outside their own systems, and youth work organisations are sometimes cautious about becoming too formalised. So validation creates a structural tension for both systems involved. While both systems support validation conceptually, they often operate with very different understandings of what counts as legitimate evidence of learning.
This raises an important dilemma for Verena: If non-formal learning becomes more formalised and standardised in order to gain recognition, does it gain visibility — or risk losing some of the qualities that make it valuable in the first place?
How far can or should youth work education stretch towards higher education?