Conference 2018

Professor David Hopkins

Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Bolton and Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Education, University College London and the University of Nottingham

Keynote: Globalisation, Moral Purpose and Emancipation – An Agenda for School Improvement and System Reform

In this keynote presentation David Hopkins will explore the themes of the conference as they relate to that part of the educational vineyard that he has tended for over forty years. He will begin by exploring the values underpinning what some call ‘the global education reform movement’ (GERM) and its impact on the practice and outcomes of school improvement and system reform. Taking his cue from Paulo Freire’s felicitous phrase that “… methodological confusion can always be related to ideological error” David suggests that contemporary educational reform efforts that are infused by the GERM virus result in a stagnation of standards, a lack of empowerment and systemic fragmentation. The seminal work of Jurgen Habermas, particularly Knowledge and Human Interests, is then drawn on to explain why we are, where we currently are. This analysis leads to the formulation of a series of criteria for what David terms ‘authentic school improvement’. The resulting framework predicated for moral purpose and emancipation, is then used to propose a series of guidelines for future practice, policy and research that will ensure sustainable progress in student learning, leadership practice and collaborative working into the future.

Doctor Karen Pashby

Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University in the Department of Childhood, Youth and Education Studies and the Education and Social Research Institute

Keynote: Complexity and Complicity: Engaging Education Studies with Sustainable Development Goal 4.7 in an Era of Internationalisation

United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.7 includes education for global citizenship and sustainable development. Unlike the previous Millennium Development Goals which focused on action in so-called ‘developing countries’, all signatory nations are bound to take action towards the meeting of SDG targets. At the same time, institutions of higher education are under increasing pressure to ‘internationalise’ in line with neoliberal rationales, and education for global citizenship and sustainable development has been substantively critiqued in recent scholarship. This presentation will share insights from Dr. Pashby’s recent research projects drawing on postcolonial theory and critiques of extant approaches to internationalisation of higher education, education for sustainable development and global citizenship education in the Global North. She will argue for a mobilisation around approaches aimed at complicity and complexity.

Professor Carol McGuinness

Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Queen’s College, University of Belfast

Keynote: Thinking……… Skills, Dispositions, Capacities, Competenc(i)es: Making sense of a curriculum jumble!

Curriculum documents are now populated with a range of broader learning goals – beyond subject specialist knowledge – that refer to students’ cognitive and psychosocial attributes but that use different names, e.g., skills, dispositions, habits of mind, mind-sets, capacities, competenc(i)es. The purpose of this presentation is to help schools and teachers make sense of this ‘jumble’, identifying similarities/differences and clarifying the implications for curriculum design and pedagogy. Initially, the talk will examine recent shifts in terminology, noting the growing prominence of the term ‘competency’. The reasons for this shift will be explored. Then, international curriculum frameworks as well as research syntheses on 2lst century learning will be interrogated in order to identify what types of learning are being identified as key competencies. Finally, a classification is proposed that captures skills, dispositions and values within a key competency framework and articulates the relationship with knowledge domains, both subject specific and transdisciplinary.

Doctor Sam Sellar

Reader in Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University

Keynote: Rewiring education studies: The methodological challenges of researching datafication in schooling This keynote will examine the datafication of schooling, with a focus on new developments in large-scale assessment, data-driven modes of accountability and education technology. ‘Datafication’ has been described as the great infrastructure project of the 21st century and it has been occurring as rapidly in education as in any other field. New data-driven modes of education policy and governance create tensions between educational values and the value of what can be measured. I will share some insights and reflections from a multi-national comparative study of data infrastructure in schools and school systems in Australia, Canada, Japan and the USA. Fieldwork for this project has involved talking with a range of new actors in education (e.g. bioinformaticians and business intelligence managers), which has generated a range of methodological challenges. I will share some examples from fieldwork conducted with staff in an education department who are developing new cloud-based approaches to data analytics and visualisation, and with technical staff working for private education technology companies. I will also discuss a national media debate provoked by our research on education data standards in Australia. The talk will consider some implications for education studies of new data-driven education policy and practice globally, as well as the role that our field can play in researching these transformations.