Upcoming Congress

This call is an invitation to the NERA research community to explore the vibrant, diverse, and unexpected adventures that education offers students, teachers, and teacher educators as well as researchers. The notion of adventures and imagination may be generative in times of global crisis and despair. This call urges us not to forget that thinking beyond the already known brings hope to individuals, communities, and societies.

Next year’s conference theme, Adventures of Education: Desires, Encounters and Differences speaks to evolving ideas that seek to challenge prescribed ways of learning and homogenised educational practices. Today’s public educational debate, and challenging global relations, ask us to improve our ways of channelling research discussions into productive dialogue. We encourage educational researchers to reach beyond quick and easy solutions to educational challenges. We invite the NERA community to come together in Malmö and open up conversations to enhance fruitful and complex analyses, which can hopefully continue beyond NERA24.

The adventures of education are propelled by desires that affirm relational encounters and states of wonder about learning. These adventures range from strives for knowledge to imaginative and creative thinking. Within education lies a tension between the known and the not-yet-known, the habits and frameworks for learning. The intensity of encounters forces thinking, teaching and living further. Desire can be an affirmative, creative and producing force that has the potential to open up gateways for encounters with the not-(yet)-known. Desires may also have the capacity to control and regulate. Desire encompasses difference and sameness, hope and despair.

During the conference we look forward to exploring questions such as:

o   How can we as researchers and teachers bring about learning and teaching adventures?

o   How can policy bring educational adventures to life?

o   How can we sensitize ourselves to embrace learning and researching adventures that already are in front of us?

o   How can we as researchers in education reconfigure frameworks and desires for the already known?

o   What are the implications for pedagogic strategies if learning is relational?

o   How is teaching possible if what we think we know becomes uncertain?

It is time to acknowledge the pluriverse desires of children, youth, teachers, teacher educators and educational researchers to embrace the wonders of education. This is how we can reconfigure simplistic frameworks that only reach for the already known. Thereby adventures of education can commence.

For more information see the conference website here.