International Conference 2024
December 22, 2023
2024 International Conference
14-16 November 2024
Here be Dragons – I am not a Robot…
We are delighted to welcome colleagues to join us for the IPDA Conference, which takes place as a face-to-face event, at Aston University Conference Centre from 14-16 November 2024.
Please save the date for our 2024 conference with the theme ‘Here be Dragons – I am not a Robot’. With an evening online Early Career Researcher forum that is open to all, followed by two days of in-person event, your full conference ticket will include an overnight stay on Friday 15th November.
Thursday 14th November: Online Early Career Researcher forum.
Friday 15th November: Conference Day 1 at Aston University.
Saturday 16th November: Conference Day 2 at Aston University.
About the theme: Here be Dragons – I am not a Robot…
Conference strands
- Challenges and opportunities for professional learning
- Bespoke innovative approaches to professional learning
- Inclusive practices in professional learning
- Experiences of Early Careers professional learners
- The complexity of professional learning
In our 2023 conference we explored the different interests and views of delegates, who also contributed to the shaping of our 2024 conference theme.
The changes in the professional learning landscape have led to many opportunities and challenges. ‘Here Be Dragons’, means dangerous and unchartered contexts, and stems from the medieval practice where illustrations of sea monsters or other mythological creatures were placed on maps to signpost unexplored territory and the areas where potential dangers might exist.
For the 2024 conference, this metaphor is used to enable the IPDA community to reflect on those unchartered waters, where dangers are, but exciting opportunities might exist. We are keen to engage with colleagues to explore what these dangers are, what they might look like, and how we can overcome these challenges, and move forward to embrace them as opportunities.
In addition, professional learning is bespoke to each individual, and with the changing landscape of professional learning and development, the bespoke nature of professional learning is often overlooked. How can we consider the importance of meeting the needs of others, opposed to it becoming a robotic technicist approach?
Tickets and registration
Please click the buttons below for your required ticket type. On each page there are also further options that you may need so please read all information carefully.
If you are an administrator or booking for a group please visit this page.
Full Conference Tickets
Includes both days with Friday overnight stay. Breakfast and the conference Gala dinner are included.
Members: £425
Non-members: £465
Retired/Student: £340
Day Delegate - Friday
Includes conference access for the selected day with lunch.
Members: £180
Non-members: £205
Retired: £180
Day Delegate - Saturday
Includes conference access for the selected day with lunch.
Members: £150
Non-members: £180
Retired: £100
Day Delegate - Both days
Includes conference access for the selected days with lunch.
Members: £320
Non-members: £355
Retired: £240
COnference POET
Back by popular demand, Dave Pitt will be attending the IPDA Conference and creating some poetry around our theme. Dave attended two online IPDA conferences during the pandemic and was a hit with delegates. We are looking forward to what he can create in-person.
Dave Pitt is a Black Country based performance poet, storyteller and playwright. His work is a mix of humour, poignancy, and anger and leads audiences on a ride of emotional highs and lows.
Keynote speakers
Professor Carmen Montecinos, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile
Professional learning for Interprofessional collaboration in schools
The problems vulnerable students present are complex, and to support their educational trajectories, these are to be identified at the diagnostic stage when envisioning possible solutions. Classroom teachers will be more likely to address this complexity if they can collaborate with other professionals. Interprofessional collaboration frequently requires shifts in established practices to recognize and work with the resources different professions bring to reconfigure students’ trajectories away from vulnerability (Edwards, 2010). In this presentation, I illustrate professional learning that enables interprofessional collaboration by drawing from the work of Anne Edwards and data from a research study I conducted in Chile to examine how teachers, social workers, and psychologists used their specialized knowledge to work with students facing challenges.
Edwards, A. (2010). Being an expert professional practitioner: The relational turn in expertise. Dordrecht: Springer
Carmen Montecinos is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Educational Leadership Center at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile, and is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Advanced Research in Education (CIAE-Universidad de Chile). Her research focuses on preservice and in-service teacher learning, development, and leadership in schools facing challenging circumstances. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters. Her most recent co-authored publications have appeared in the journals Teaching and Teacher, Educational Management Administration and Leadership, Leadership, and Policy in Schools, Revista Colombiana de Educación, and the European Journal of Education. Carmen serves on the ICSEI Board and co-coordinated the Standards for the Teaching Profession development and contributed to developing the Standards for School Leadership in Chile.
Professor Matt O’Leary, Birmingham City University
What makes professional learning meaningful, impactful and sustainable? Identifying the golden threads of professional learning
Professional learning is central to the quality of teaching and education. From the beginning to the end of an educators’ career, professional learning can often be the lifeblood that fuels and sustains their work, their continuing commitment and even reignites their passion and enthusiasm for the profession. Yet, experiences and practices of professional learning can differ markedly from one context to another, often subject to competing agendas, institutional policies and priorities as to how it is implemented and experienced. So, what is it that makes certain types of professional learning more meaningful, impactful and sustainable than others for educators? And is it possible to identify core principles and parameters that can be used to inform future approaches to professional learning?
In this talk, I will draw on a range of research projects conducted in different further and higher education settings over the last two decades to explore educators’ experiences of professional learning. Despite the differing contexts, cultures and organisations involved, there are golden threads running through each of these projects that help to illuminate some of the core principles and parameters involved, which will be revealed during the course of my talk. I will argue that meaningful and sustainable improvements in educators’ professional learning that subsequently lead to tangible improvements in the quality of the teaching and learning experience ultimately thrive in organisational cultures where educators are afforded the space, time and professional autonomy to build social capital, develop relationships of collegial trust, collaboration and engage in reflexive dialogue with their peers.
Professor Matt O’Leary is Professor of Education at Birmingham City University. His main research interests focus on education policy and practice in further and higher education, particularly in the context of the professional learning of educators and the development of pedagogic practice. He has published over 50 academic articles, research reports and book chapters.
Professor O’Leary is one of the world’s leading experts on the topic of classroom observation. He is internationally renowned for his extensive body of work on the use of classroom/lesson observation in understanding and improving teaching and learning across colleges, schools and universities. His research has had significant impact in the UK and internationally on education policy and the thinking and practice of education leaders, practitioners and researchers working in all education sectors over the last two decades.
Dr Anne Pirrie, University of the West of Scotland
The ‘cruel optimism’ of professional development
My starting point for this presentation is a critical reading of The Great Wave, the iconic woodblock print by the Japanese artist Katushika Hokusai. To the Western eye, accustomed to reading from left to right, the first thing that strikes the observer is the sheer scale of The Great Wave. The surging breakers seem to possess a demonic energy. They even threaten to engulf an active volcano, Mount Fiji. To the Japanese eye, which is accustomed to reading from right to left, the first thing the viewer notices, and the image that lingers in the imagination, is of the eighteen (or so) desperate individuals being tossed around in their slim boats and about to be engulfed by the gaping jaws of the great wave. These are not uncharted waters, but a clear and present danger.
How might ‘seeing double’ help us to think about professional development? Might it be the sea that is the problem rather than the monsters lurking in uncharted waters? Perhaps the danger lurks in familiar territory, that is to say in accepted notions of professional development, and in standard Western ideas of what it means to be an education professional. Perhaps uncharted waters occupied by sea monsters or other mythological creatures provide the solution rather than the challenge. I shall draw on the notion of ‘cruel optimism’ to navigate between the Scylla of accepted notions of professional learning and the Charybdis of personal responsibility for learning. ‘Cruel optimism’ is the term used by the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant to describe ‘the conditions under which certain attachments to what counts as life [or education] come to make sense or no longer make sense, yet remain powerful as they work against the flourishing of particular and collective beings.’ (Berlant, 2011: 13). The presentation is intended to stimulate discussion around policy and practice in the area of professional development; and to champion hope over cruel or facile optimism.
Reference
Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham NC and London, Duke University Press.
Anne Pirrie is a Reader in Education at the University of the West of Scotland. Formerly a contract researcher, Anne is a generalist with an eye for the particular. Her monograph Virtue and the Quiet Art of Scholarship: reclaiming the university (2019) explores the conditions for human flourishing in an environment blighted by managerialism. Dancing in the Dark. A Survivor’s Guide to the University invites its readers to embrace uncertainty, and to regard that as a virtue rather than a failure to ‘measure up’. Anne considers her role as a teacher in the same terms as the writer and educationalist Nan Shepherd (1893-1981), author of The Living Mountain. That is to say, she tries to prevent at least a few of the students who pass through the institution from conforming altogether to the approved pattern.
Dr Paul Vare, University of Gloucestershire
Crises, conflict and connection: Professional development and the banality of ecocide
Our children are the first generation living with the knowledge that their world is likely to become less habitable as they grow up. The implications of this for young people, for educators and for education itself demand careful consideration.
This is the backdrop to a keynote address that will explore the question of how teacher educators might respond to the current epoch, which has been labelled the Anthropocene. It will draw on Paul’s research on educator competences across Europe and his role as a teacher educator. While rooted in the policy context of England, the talk will highlight issues that are likely to arise for educators everywhere.
If this all sounds rather ominous, rest assured, Paul is not a depressive type. He has always sought pragmatic ways of working with systemic or ‘wicked’ problems and recognises the human need for meaningful sources of hope (with the emphasis on being human).
Paul is Chair of the National Association for Environmental Education, a member of the Adult Advisory Board of the youth campaign Teach the Future and academic advisor to the UN Economic Commission for Europe’s (UNECE) Steering Committee on education for sustainable Development (ESD) having co-authored the UNECE Strategy on ESD that was launched in 2005 and to which the UK is a signatory.
Currently Paul leads the Doctor of Education programme at the University of Gloucestershire as well as various MA and BEd modules. His research focuses on ESD and he was principle investigator of A Rounder Sense of Purpose, a six-year programme that developed a competence framework for sustainability educators. In the past, Paul was executive director of an international charity, ran a regional coalition of sustainability-focused organisations in South-west England, worked on community-based projects in sub-Saharan Africa and the UK and was once a secondary school teacher.
Dr Eamon Costello, Dublin City University
You are a good and kind and loveable person: A postdigital proof.
You are a good and kind and loveable person. In this talk, I will examine evidence for this claim and offer a proof of its veracity. My argument will unfold around the nature of what we take ourselves to be. What we are aught to be easy to determine, after all, we have as individuals access to a treasure trove of the evidence of ourselves. Moreover, you alone have the greatest onus and desire to know yourself – it would not make much sense to offload this task to anyone else for example (and ChatGPT was not, nor never will be, trained on the full data of you). Yet despite opportunity and impetus, self-knowledge is hard to come by. It remains veiled from us. Several delusions conspire to cloud, hinder and obscure our experience of ourselves which leave us confused and dissatisfied with life. Reducing this confusion and dissatisfaction is vitally important because how we feel subtly alters our overall experience and permeates the fabric of our professional learning environments. As Nel Noddings (2023) put it, “people learn best when they are happy” and “happy individuals are rarely violent or intentionally cruel.” Educators it would seem then have an obligation to not just know but feel the most affirming aspects of our experiential nature.
In this talk, I will illustrate my argument to the IPDA Conference delegate using narrative accounts of contemporary professional practice drawing on situated examples of recent issues posed by GenAI to teaching and research. The character of GenAI in this tale will not be given any extra special credence or attention beyond recognising it as one more protagonist of our postdigital condition, i.e. something digital and analogue; comprised of love and labour; not ahistorical; and something that can perpetuate epistemologies of distraction and pedagogies of panic (Costello, 2023).
I will use a form of narrative exposition to help make my case because we urgently need capable forms of storytelling. As we sail into the uncertain, unmapped and unscripted futures evoked in this year’s conference theme, there is one thing we do know: “The facts alone will not save us” (Benjamin, 2024). Instead, a recent speculative turn (Bozkurt et al 2023; Ross, 2022; Houlden & Veletsianos, 2022) has called for more radically imaginal approaches to education and argues that we need “novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of society to expand our own visions of what is possible” (Benjamin, 2016). Whilst the story in this talk will draw on familiar faces of professional learning practice, it will also attempt to say stranger things, so that we can think together, not just more expansively, but in ultimately wilder ways (Costello, 2023). Although some of the arguments offered will be non-conceptual, which can feel disorientating or frightening, there is no need to be afraid. The ending will be spoiled from the outset. You already know, that you are not just good and kind, but a loveable person.
References
Benjamin, R. (2016). Racial fictions, biological facts: Expanding the sociological imagination through speculative methods. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2(2), 1-28. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v2i2.28798
Benjamin, R. (2024). Imagination: A Manifesto. WW Norton & Company.
Bozkurt, A. et al (2023). Speculative Futures on ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): A collective reflection from the educational landscape. Asian Journal of Distance Education, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7636568
Costello, E. (2022). Rewild my heart: With pedagogies of love, kindness and the sun and moon.
Postdigital Science and Education, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00318-z
Costello, E. (2023). ChatGPT and the educational AI chatter: Full of bullshit or trying to tell us something?. Postdigital Science and Education, 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00398-5
Houlden, S., & Veletsianos, G. (2023). Impossible dreaming: On speculative education fiction and hopeful learning futures. Postdigital Science and Education, 5(3), 605-622. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00348-7.
Noddings, N. (2003) Happiness and Education. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ross, J. (2022). Digital futures for learning: Speculative methods and pedagogies. Routledge.
Dr Eamon Costello is an Associate Professor of Digital Learning in Dublin City University. He has degrees in English and History, Computer Science and a Doctorate in Education. He is deeply curious about how and why we learn in particular environments, offline, online and everywhere in between. He is also concerned with how we actively shape our world so that we can have better and more humane places in which to think, work, live and learn. Ultimately this has become an increasing focus of his work: to determine how students and teachers can work together and hold each other accountable for building mutually shared worlds. This work has been widely published in journals relating to critical education, ethics of educational technology, open education, digital learning pedagogies, learning design, speculative methods and AI in education. He is an accomplished public speaker and is known for his creative approaches to teaching and multimodal research and outreach. He was formerly Head of Open Education in Dubin City University and is currently a national ambassador for the DigiEduHack European Digital Education initiative. He is an advocate of using the right tool for the right job – or sometimes none at all, for not everything can be fixed nor should be built. You can read more on his university profile and connect with him on LinkedIn.
Professor Caroline Daly
Uncharted territory for professional learning. What dragons do we need to focus on?
Expectations made of teachers are numerous, complex and inter-related. We need professional learning that can help a teaching profession to secure the education that all young people deserve. There is concern about rates of pupil unhappiness in school, the numbers of young people absent from school and the challenges they face in navigating social media, misogyny and racism. Related issues around the mental health of young people reinforce the need for teachers, including Early Career Teachers, to understand the complex impacts of school experience on pupils, in relation to wider societal issues. At the same time, the challenge of retaining teachers is well-evidenced. This talk will explore the priorities for steering professional learning at a time when, more than ever, we need to help teachers to optimise educational opportunities for all and make school the place where both pupils and teachers can thrive.
Caroline Daly is Professor of Teacher Education at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, where she is Director of the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research. Prior to joining the IOE, she taught in schools for ten years. Her research with school leaders, teachers and mentors investigates how school cultures shape the beliefs and practices of new teachers. Caroline has worked extensively with teacher educators in England, Wales and New Zealand. She is co-editor of Learning to Teach English in the Secondary School(2021) and Reflective Teaching (2023), exploring teachers’ evidence-informed professional learning. Caroline is a Fellow of the International Professional Development Association.
THE VENUE: ASTON UNIVERSITY
Aston University has been the home of the IPDA conference on many occasions, providing excellent service and spaces for our sessions and social spaces. The conference will take place within Conference Aston, which is based on the city centre campus. All of the conference sessions, meals and guest rooms are based within the building.
Some great features included in your stay are the fantastic restaurant, bar and leisure facilities, including Birmingham’s oldest swimming pool with sauna and steam room, great for relaxing after the conference.
- Download travel information/campus map
- Book your parking
- Recommended car park if Aston University is fully booked: Millennium Point.
Please note: The venue is within the Birmingham clean air zone. Therefore depending on your vehicle you may need to pay the fee for this.
A FLAVOUR OF THE EVENT
The IPDA conference is known as a welcoming event that brings together researchers and practitioners from varied professions. The videos below show the experiences and perspectives of both new and longstanding IPDA members.
