This research concerning the experience and future of zoos was carried out from 2011-2012 and takes regional ideas concerning Zoo Emmen as well as global visions into account. The research focuses partly on Zoo Emmen, its present attractions and visitors while also comparing and contrasting visions on the future in relationship to other international zoos in the world. In this way, remarkable experiences and ideas will be identified and in the light of them, it can serve as inspiration for stakeholders of zoos at large. The main research subject is a look at the future zoos in view of: The Zoo Experience – an international experience benchmark; The Zoo of the Future – a Scenario Planning approach towards the future; The virtual zoo - zoo’s in the internet domain.
On 13 June 2018, Susana Menéndez said farewell as member of the Executive Board of The Hague University of Applied Sciences. To mark that occasion, a symposium was held on leadership in the internationalization of higher education, of which Susana has been a champion over the past ten years.
International education is a relatively new field and until recently, there was no formal education to prepare practitioners. This means that people working in international education are a colourful and diverse group, coming from a wide range of disciplines, which definitely adds to the attraction of the field. I call international education a field rather than a discipline since it is composed of a variety of established disciplines, such as languages, educational sciences, psychology, business, anthropology, history and even, in my case, classical archaeology. For this lecture, I have chosen to return to my original discipline and discuss global learning as the stages of an archaeological excavation. Cutting though the subsequent layers represents a history of international education but also my own professional history. By digging deeper down, layer after layer, I hope to uncover the essence of global learning in order to make its benefits available for all our students. This lecture consists of four sections. In the first section, I want to go back to the time when archaeology was a new discipline and see what we can learn from the research conducted at that time. In the second section I will reveal the layers of internationalisation and global learning until we come to the layer that we are currently exploring. In the third section, I will look at some of the factors and trends that will have an impact on global learning in the years to come. This shows that circumstances are quite different from when the excavation started and that global education is therefore dynamic. Finally, I will discuss what research the Research Group Global Learning will conduct, how and with whom, in the coming years.