Learning Conference 2007

THEMES

GENERAL THEMES FOR THE LEARNING CONFERENCE AND SYMPOSIUM

Theme 1: Educational Values and Values in Education

• What kinds of people? Reviewing the fundamentals of education.
• Education’s role in responding to social challenges.
• Developing people in a world of technology.
• Maintaining culture and identity in the face of global pressures.
• Creating community in educational settings.
• When minorities add up to majorities: the new mainstream.
• The changing purposes of education: shaping new kinds of worker, citizen and personal identities.
• Learning in and about cultural environments: identity, belonging and the cultural conditions of learning.
• Values in education and values education.
• The costs and benefits of freedom: citizenship, responsibility and community.
• Roles for learning: equity, social justice and social change.
• Special education, learning difficulties, disability.
• Diversity in the classroom: cultural, gender, (dis)ability.
• International, global, multicultural and cross-cultural education.
• Education for first nations or indigenous peoples.
• Knowing the world in order to transform the world: education for personal and contextual transformation.

Theme 2: Transforming Literacies

• Languages of Power: literacy’s role in social access.
• Literacy and literacies: new perspectives and approaches.
• Reading and writing since the computer: the screen and connectivity.
• The visual and the verbal: multiliteracies and multimodal communications.
• Literacy in learning: language in learning across the subject areas.
• Libraries in the digital age.
• Assessing literacies in a meaningful way.
• Languages education and second language learning.
• Multilingual learning for a multicultural world.
• Girls, boys and literacy.
• The arts and design.
• Academic literacies.
• Adult, community and workplace literacies.

Theme 3: Humanising Science and Technology

• Crossing the digital divide: access to learning in, and about, the digital world.
• Multimedia, the internet and today's media: educational challenges and responses.
• New tools for learning: online, multimedia and digitally mediated learning.
• Virtual worlds, virtual classrooms: interactive, self-paced and autonomous learning.
• Technology and human values.
• Apprenticeship and other models of technical and further education.
• Mathematics, science and technology learning.
• Learning in and about the natural environment: learning about science, nature and the human presence.

Theme 4: Sites of Learning

• Learning environments: the changing shape of educational institutions, and changing sites of learning.
• Curriculum and pedagogy revisited.
• Formal and informal learning.
• Lifelong learning for the society of constant change.
• Learning in local communities: community consultation as an educational process.
• Popular and community education.
• Adult, vocational, tertiary and professional learning.
• The learning organisation.
• Equity, participation and opportunity: addressing disadvantage in education.
• Pedagogies for a world in flux.
• Intelligence or ability, competence or capacity: what are the ends of education?
• Creating learning pathways: between the real world and places of learning.
• Teachers' work: how is it changing?
• Educational leadership and management: how to create institutional change.
• Educational reform and curriculum redesign for a changing world.
• Challenges for teacher training and professional development.
• Distance learning: reducing the distance.
• The future of the university: its links to work, citizenship and identity.
• Vocational education and training for the future.
• Educational leadership, management, and organisational change.
• New teachers and new teaching: the role of pre-service and inservice professional training.