Education: being postcolonial
Professor Penny Enslin, University of Glasgow

Tuesday 21 May
5.30pm to 7pm, room 224, Birmingham University School of Education
(Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain)

 

Navigating the new education landscape

Thursday 23 May
University of Birmingham

The Birmingham Conference is an annual meeting focused on research into the education of healthcare professionals. One of the biggest events of its kind run by a Deanery in the UK, it is hosted jointly by the West Midlands Workforce Deanery and the Centre for Research in Medical and Dental Education (CRMDE), University of Birmingham.

In addition to keynote presentations, the Conference provides an opportunity for delegates to seriously engage in other’s work through paper presentations, poster sessions and workshops.

 

Teaching Sociology (British Sociological Association Teaching Group’s conference) 

15 June
School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University

Themes include digital methods, student transitions from A-level to univeristy, social theory, gender studies, teaching sociology with boxing imagery, criminology and a series of micro-lectures from the next generation of researchers.

 

Critical Pedagogies: Equality and Diversity in a Changing Institution
Interdisciplinary Symposium

6 September
University of Edinburgh

Critical pedagogies challenge the notion that knowledge and teaching methods can be value-neutral. Our relationships within academia reproduce or negotiate those of society as a whole, and the classroom itself works as a microcosm of wider social structures. […] This one-day interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary symposium aims to open up discussions regarding teaching in our changing institutions, investigating how our roles as both teachers and learners are continuously challenged and negotiated. Gathering researchers and educators from across the disciplines, we will engage in critical discussions on issues of equality, diversity and access to resources, as well as examine the role of the University in the community and in public life. The symposium will be vital in the creation of a platform for discussion and strategising around issues of equality and diversity within higher education, in order to share pedagogical approaches and foster a network of scholars who engage critically with teaching and pedagogy, formulating strategies for teaching in a changing institution.

For more information, see here.

 

Higher Education Academy events 

Check out the HEA’s extensive calendar, which you can search by discipline.

 

Past events elsewhere

 

The University, the Scholar and the Student

Friday 7 December
University of Salford (Manchester) and the British Sociological Association

The recent publication in English of Max Weber’s complete writings (and speeches) on universities has thrown new light on his involvement in university politics and his concern with the ‘type of scholar’ that universities were producing. Weber imagines a university system in which researchers are becoming workers ‘separated from their means of production’, and academics ‘people of the trade’. Inspired by Weber’s observations, this seminar-workshop will reflect on the current state of the university and its attendant practices. What is the meaning of scholarly work when the scholar is faced by a series of sometimes contradictory conditions and imperatives (output targets in research, ‘the student experience’ in teaching coupled with compulsory debt-financing (huge fees) for students, the tension between instrumentalism and knowledge for its own sake, between a public and a market-driven university ethos, between a collegial institution and a hierarchical organisation)? What is the meaning of the new regime under which universities are put to work, with its ‘quality’ indicators and debt-incurring devices, in terms of the pedagogy practised, the kinds of reason relied on, as well as the type of human being presupposed by such regime and resulting from its implementation? More generally, what kind of scholar, what kind of student, what type of human being, is being produced by these practices?

 

Critical Pedagogy as Philosophy and Practice: Explorations in Transformative Education

Friday, 14 December
Coventry University (The Welcome Centre)

Interest in critical pedagogy and popular education is proliferating as a means to breathe life back into education, particularly in order to respond to problems of increasing economic inequalities and exclusion, the evisceration of democracy, and cultural and ecological violence. At the same time, there is concern that critical pedagogical practices ‘risk becoming conflated with a set of methods that block creativity rather than enabling it’, and that they may become ‘severed from…political, philosophical and ethical underpinnings and potential’ (to read more, see here). This event, which is organised by the West Midlands Critical Pedagogy Collective, is dedicated to exploring the philosophical underpinnings of our critical traditions of education, considering the implications of practicing them both within and outside of formal educational institutions, and opening up space to discuss critical pedagogical praxis today.

 

The distortions of research ethics
Prof. Martyn Hammersley (Open University) and Dr. Anna Traianou, Goldsmiths

Thursday 17 January
4:00-5:30pm, University of Oxford, Level 2 of Littlegate House in St. Ebbe’s Setreet
Part of the Oxford Learning Institute Hilary Lecture Series

‘This paper will focus on two ways in which the theory and practice of research ethics have come to be distorted in recent times. The first distortion consists in the reduction of judgments about what is and is not ethical to the following of codes or rules. There has long been a tendency in this direction, but it has been greatly exacerbated in the last ten years by the rise of ethical regulation, within universities and elsewhere. In effect, what may be involved here is the abandonment of ethics in favour of conformity to organisational policies. The second distortion of research ethics is focused on the question of whether ethics should be central to social research, in the sense of supplying its guiding principles. That it should play this central role is an increasingly common demand today, especially amongst some qualitative researchers. We will argue that the appropriate response to this demand depends upon what the scope of research ethics is taken to be. Our key point will be that the predominant tendency to define research ethics as primarily or exclusively concerned with how researchers ought to treat the people they study results in the neglect of important ethical issues that are intrinsic to the goal of research, in other words to the pursuit of academic knowledge. We will conclude by outlining some of these issues, which concern epistemic obligations and virtues.’

 

‘Ordinary unhappiness’ and education
Dr Judith Suissa, Institute of Education, University of London

Tuesday 22 January
5.30pm to 7pm, room 224, Birmingham University School of Education

 

Redefining innovation in academic practice by exploring the disruptive effects of social media
Dr Stylianos Hatzipanagos, Kings College London

Thursday 24 January
4:00-5:30pm, University of Oxford, Level 2 of Littlegate House in St. Ebbe’s Setreet
Part of the Oxford Learning Institute Hilary Lecture Series

‘The three important conceptual frameworks influencing higher education (1) lifelong learning (2) technology enhanced learning and (3) open and distance learning have had an impact on how students learn in the 21^st century. However technology has not had a major positive disruptive effect so far on formal learning and where informal learning occurs, outside traditional institutional boundaries.