Due to special requests, the organizing committee are inviting you to submit your abstract before 3 August 2018, for the SAERA 2018 Conference.

The SAERA executive would like to invite you to its 6th annual conference hosted by the Faculty of Education, North-West University.

Conference date
Monday 22 to Wednesday 24 October 2018

Venue
St George Hotel, Pretoria

Conference theme
Education 01? In search of a new operating system: making education more relevant, responsive and authentic.

Conference Theme

There is no denying that we live in a fast-changing world on all levels. How we communicate, how we travel, how we work, how we define social institutions such as the family, how we understand health and wellbeing, how we learn – all these have changed dramatically over recent years and naturally will continue to change going forward. Yet, the way we do education, particularly schooling and higher education, does not seem to have undergone the same rapid transformation. We are still “doing” education and educational research within a system that was developed to supply the nineteenth-century industrialised societies with the human resources to make meaningful contributions to a tightly controlled capitalist economy. We are no longer living in such times, and the challenges we face as a human race have become increasingly complex and ‘wicked’, necessitating us, as educators (in all senses), to think, teach and work differently – but although our research speaks to the need to transform, substantive changes seem difficult to attain.

This begs the question: What is the relevance of education and educational research in times such as these?

Drawing on the computer metaphor of Odora-Hoppers and Richards (2011), we contemplate the need to develop a completely new operating systems for education – a total rethinking of schooling, higher education, research and community-based learning – which will enable multi-paradigmatic, multi-epistemic, place-relevant learning and knowledge generation. Unless we change the operating system and the algorithm, changes to the hardware (schools, universities, funding programmes, etc.) and software (programmes, curricula, textbooks, etc.) will not have much of a positive effect. This means that the whole enterprise of research and education – approaches, traditions, assumptions, and theories – needs to be reviewed, not only for the sake of knowledge democracy and cognitive justice but also to ensure that education retains its practical relevance. As Adam Habib recently

voiced, for higher education to be relevant in today’s world, programmes have to be multidisciplinary in nature, offering modules from various disciplines and paradigms to enable students to be exposed to an ecology of and plurality of knowledges. Former themes in SAERA have been along this line, calling for a reimagining and a decolonisation of education. But how do we turn this rhetoric into reality? How do we operationalise our ideas? One problem is that we tend to talk only to other educational researchers, who are restricted in what they can do to effect change at a systemic level and so, this year, we invite delegates, not only from traditional universities but also from research organisations, nongovernmental and parastatal agencies (e.g. HSRC, DHET, professional councils, teachers’ unions, etc.) to come and present to create a national discursive space for dialogue around what educational research should address, could address and is addressing.

From this vantage point, this conference aims to create a space for collective discourse about our experiences, research and theorising. Although the conference themes speak to particular ideas within the debate on relevance and authenticity, they are also broad enough to encapsulate all areas of education theorising, engagement, research and teaching within all education contexts.

The pertinent question is: How do we make education more relevant, responsive and authentic?

You are thus invited to submit an abstract(s) focusing on what you are currently teaching, researching, engaging in, experiencing, struggling with, questioning, analysing or critically thinking about in your own or the broader educational context(s). We call for papers, posters, panel discussions, workshops, round-table discussions or SIG sessions on one or more of the following sub themes:

• Relevance and authenticity of teaching and learning.
• Relevance and authenticity of research in various educational contexts.
• Relevance of current educational systems and policies.
• Relevant and authentic policies and practice within various educational contexts.
• Epistemology, ontology and methodology of authentic and relevant education.
• Relevant teacher education policy and practice.
• Relevant and authentic experiences of students around access and success.
• Relevant and authentic curriculum and pedagogy.
• Relevant and authentic resistance, renewal and transformation within the educational framework.
• Relevance and authenticity in postgraduate study and thesis supervision.
• Relevance in language, literacy and learning.
• Relevant and authentic view on professional educator identity and professional development.
• Relevant interactions of education and communities.
• Relevance and authenticity of leadership, management and policy implementation.
• Relevant and authentic mathematics, science and technology education.
• Relevant and authentic education systems for social justice.

ReferencesOdora-Hoppers, C. & Richards, H. 2011. Rethinking Thinking: Modernity’s “Other” and the transformation of the University. Pretoria: UNISA Press.