Keynote Speakers
Cheryl Craig, Texas A&M University, USA
Cheryl J. Craig is a Professor, Endowed Chair of Urban Education, Program Chair of Technology and Teacher Education, and the Founding Director of the Collaborative for Teaching and Innovation for Teacher Education at Texas A&M University, USA. Her research takes place at the intersection where teaching and curriculum meet. She is an AERA Fellow, a winner of AERA’s Division B (Curriculum) and Division K (Teaching) Outstanding Career Awards, AERA’s Exemplary Research Award and the Michael Huberman Award for Outstanding Contributions to Understanding the Lives of Teachers. This year Cheryl Craig won the Texas A&M University Distinguished Achievement Award for Research, a cross-college/school honor.
The "Best-Loved Self": Learning from Stories “Given Away” and “Given Back”
This lecture revolves around the ‘best-loved self’ of teachers and how it animates teaching and learning. The ‘best-loved self’ has to do with Eros—longing to do and be one’s best. It surfaced as a catchphrase, developed into an image, and spread in the research, teaching, and teacher education arenas. Its trajectory crossed disciplinary boundaries and found strength in unexpected quarters. Its fruitfully blends emotion and cognition and overcomes dead spaces. In fact, “given back” stories of the ‘best-loved self’ appear to be as powerful (or more) as those “given away.” Critically important questions the ‘best-loved self’ raises are taken up. Queries posed by preservice teachers are particularly paid attention—with an eye to the future held closely in view.
Geert Kelchtermans, KU Leuven, Belgium
Geert Kelchtermans studied Philosophy and Educational Sciences at KU Leuven (University of Leuven), where in 1993 he got his PhD with a dissertation on teachers’ professional development from a narrative-biographical perspective. He is now a Full Professor at KU Leuven, where he chairs the Centre for Innovation and the Development of Teacher and School (CIDTS). His research focuses on understanding educational practices as resulting from the interplay between the agency of educational professionals on the one hand and the organizational working conditions on the other. He has published widely on his work and has been involved in the editorial board of several international journals (a.o. Teaching and Teacher Education, Teachers and Teaching: Theory & Practice, Educational Researcher). His international commitments further involved visiting professorships in Australia, Austria, Finland, Norway, U.S..
Zipping and negotiating: a metaphorical understanding of professional development
Ian Menter, Oxford University, UK
Ian Menter is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK and was President of the British Educational Research Association (BERA), 2013-15 and is also a past-President of the Scottish Educational Research Association. He is Emeritus Professor of Teacher Education and Emeritus Fellow of Kellogg College, at the University of Oxford.
He previously worked at the Universities of Glasgow, the West of Scotland, London Metropolitan, the West of England and Gloucestershire. Before that he was a primary school teacher in Bristol, England. He is now a Visiting Professor at three UK universities.
His main research interests are in research, policy and practice in teacher education, including comparative studies of this topic. Recent edited and co-edited publications include Teacher Education in Russia (Routledge) and Teacher Education in Central and Eastern Europe (Palgrave-Macmillan). His monograph, Raymond Williams and Education, was published by Bloomsbury in 2022. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Palgrave Handbook of Teacher Education Research (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2023)
Getting it all together?
Teacher education and professional development in a post-Covid era of glocalisation
Drawing on practice and research over a period of thirty years, this talk considers the links between teaching, teacher education and professional development. In so doing, I examine the relationships between teachers, teacher educators and researchers and their respective relationships with policymakers.
Comparative research has identified a number of critical themes that must be considered when developing policy and practice in teacher learning. These include not only the processes of learning and the curriculum of teacher education programmes, but also the nature of partnerships between schools and higher education, the control and governance of the key institutions and the approaches taken to educational research. Each of these themes has been impacted upon by the continuing influence of 'neoliberalism' and globalisation, but in each particular setting, local cultural and historical factors have had a significant influence, thus manifesting what has been called 'vernacular globalisation' or 'glocalisation'. Among the global factors to be discussed are the COVID-19 pandemic, migration and diversity, climate change and regional conflicts.
The conclusion reached is that professional learning for educators should be undertaken within communities of enquiry which bring together (at least) university staff, school staff and beginning teachers. It is important that these communities of enquiry are in constant dialogue with policymakers.