1 Transformative Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: From Evaluation to an Embodied Relational Theory Professor Laura Formenti University of Milano Bicocca laura.formenti@unimib.it Abstract This paper develops some ideas around the process of participatory evaluation of transformative learning in higher education, more precisely in the context of a Master Course in Pedagogy, where the author teaches Family Counselling. The case study is based on a corpus of letters produced by the students at the end of the course, whose explicit aim is transformative learning, i.e. a deep challenge of the students’ perspectives of meaning. The texts here analysed convey much information about learning: ideas and metaphors of stability and uncertainty, reference to edge emotions, a panoply of feelings, from exhilaration and curiosity to the sensation of being disoriented and shaken, and different ways of positioning by the students in relation to knowing. Other data that are taken into consideration for the case study come from the teacher herself (and author of this paper), through auto-ethnographic writing and personal reflection/reflexivity. This research was a pilot project, continued in the following years, with increasing involvement of the students as researchers in the whole process of evaluation. The theoretical and epistemological framework for this study is a systemic, dialogic and cooperative theory of learning; a qualitative interpretative approach to research seems reasonable for transformative learning, since it celebrates a deeply subjective as well as relational view of learning. The paper is meant to be used to raise a debate about models/approaches of research and assessment for the theory of transformative learning. Foreword of the author This paper offers a theoretical, epistemological and methodological framework aiming to make connections between the systemic and complexity view and the theory of transformative learning. At the same time, it tries to open space for a wider - relational, contextual, dialogical and