Themes

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: Learning How to Communicate, Represent and Mean

  • 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: learning through and about technology
  • Mathematics, science and technology learning
  • Learning in and about the natural environment: learning about science, nature and the human presence
  • Apprenticeship and other models of technical and further education

Theme 4: Sites of Learning

  • Learning environments: the changing shape of educational institutions, and changing sites of learning
  • Curriculum and pedagogy revisited
  • Ubiquitous learning: using the affordances of the new media
  • 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