There was a great buzz this year at the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association, which met at the Institution of Education, University of London from 6th to 8th September. Nearly 1000 delegates turned up, including some 300 from overseas. Highlights included a keynote lecture by Baroness Onora O'Neill on 'intelligent accountability', which discussed the potential distorting effects of accountability systems and the importance of retaining trust and commitment. The relevance of this was picked up by ESCalate's Director, Andrew Pollard, when he introduced the panel of the Research Excellence Framework to the conference. There was discussion of how powerful, centrally-managed initiatives must be so careful in going about their business. Some have been concerned about the policies of the Higher Education Academy in this respect - but BERA was also an occasion when ESCalate was able to welcome Kathy Wright, the HEA's new lead on Education. Kathy was introduced to senior representatives of many education associations, including SRHE, BERA, BESA and FACE, and to colleagues from the four countries of the UK who have worked with ESCalate. The subject centre also sponsored two poster competitions and Andrew Pollard presented the prize winners prior to the Presidential Lecture by Professor Mary James. She too argued that there need to be more alliances within our subject community. ESCalate's publications, made available at this event, simply flew off the shelves. Overall then, BERA 2011 was a considerable showcase for research in the fields of Education and Teacher Education and ESCalate was delighted to have taken part - albeit for the last time.
12 September 2011
9 September 2011
Earli 2011 @University of Exeter
The European Association of Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) host a biennial conference which, this year, was held at Exeter - EARLI 2011. The conference is one of, if not the largest, I have ever attended - I heard there were over 2000 delegates. Certainly there were between 17 and 23 parallel sessions at any one time during the paper presentations which spread across the entire campus and five refreshment halls. The presentations are organised by Special Interest Groups (SIGs) into themes and I was impressed by the invited symposia for each SIG which brought together some of the most well-known names in the fields of education and educational psychology. The weather and campus grounds were lovely which was just as well as we were walking what felt like several miles a day between sessions however, regularly getting out into the fresh air just helped stimulate thinking following a presentation.
The conference theme was Education for a Global Networked Society and I followed sessions that largely focused on learning through collaboration and creative use of digital tools. However, you could have followed many other themes that included assessment, conceptual change, early childhood, motivation, teacher education, religious or moral education, instructional design, social interaction, professional development, neuroscience in education, cultural diversity and metacognition amongst others.
I noticed two reoccurring foci that were novel (well to me). The first being self-regulation which was presented variously as time-on-task, a metacognitive process, a reflective task and in relation to synchronous online learning environments. The second was the role of external representations and my sincere thanks go to Shaaron Ainsworth and Anniken Furberg who in separate presentations gave me much food for thought about the role images and animations play in supporting learning through multimedia resources. Look out for Shaaron's paper in Science last week on 'Drawing to Learn in Science'.
Two other keynotes I particularly noted were Andrew Pollard & Mary James' distillation of the 10 year Teaching and Learning Research Project (TLRP) into ten evidence-informed principles for teaching and learning or pedagogies that ground learning throughout all sectors. And Michael Reiss who raised questions about the role school science currently plays. He then presented a framework for conceptualising the scope of science education that emphasised the whole life course before, during and beyond formal education and the importance of informal, outside school science learning.
The conference theme was Education for a Global Networked Society and I followed sessions that largely focused on learning through collaboration and creative use of digital tools. However, you could have followed many other themes that included assessment, conceptual change, early childhood, motivation, teacher education, religious or moral education, instructional design, social interaction, professional development, neuroscience in education, cultural diversity and metacognition amongst others.
I noticed two reoccurring foci that were novel (well to me). The first being self-regulation which was presented variously as time-on-task, a metacognitive process, a reflective task and in relation to synchronous online learning environments. The second was the role of external representations and my sincere thanks go to Shaaron Ainsworth and Anniken Furberg who in separate presentations gave me much food for thought about the role images and animations play in supporting learning through multimedia resources. Look out for Shaaron's paper in Science last week on 'Drawing to Learn in Science'.
Two other keynotes I particularly noted were Andrew Pollard & Mary James' distillation of the 10 year Teaching and Learning Research Project (TLRP) into ten evidence-informed principles for teaching and learning or pedagogies that ground learning throughout all sectors. And Michael Reiss who raised questions about the role school science currently plays. He then presented a framework for conceptualising the scope of science education that emphasised the whole life course before, during and beyond formal education and the importance of informal, outside school science learning.
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