The Bera Annual Conference 2009, 2nd - 5th September 2009.

Speakers

Wednesday 2 September 17.00–18.00

Title: Presidential Address
John Gardner is Professor of Education in the School of Education at Queen's University, Belfast. He has been engaged in educational research and teacher education at Queen's for over 20 years, having begun his career as a teacher in a Belfast grammar school. His teaching areas and research interests include assessment, ICT in education and research methods. He has been a head of the Graduate School of Education (1993-02) and Dean of the faculty of Legal, Social and Educational Sciences (2002-06). Since 1990, he has been principal investigator in over 20 large and small-scale projects including the Nuffield-funded project: Analysis and Review of Innovations in Assessment (ARIA). As a member of the BERA Council, he chaired the development of the Association's Revised Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (2004). He has been a member of the Assessment Reform Group since 1994 and is an elected academician of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences, a fellow of the British Computer Society, a member of the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme Steering Committee, a member of the Research Assessment Exercise panel for Education, a founding member of UCET-NI and a former member of the General Teaching Council for Northern Ireland. He is the author or co-author of five books and 100+ journal articles and his recent keynote presentations include the Georgia Board of Regents (Atlanta 2006), the Chinese Ministry of Education (Beijing 2007) and the Manitoba Association of Superintendents (Winnipeg 2008).


Thursday 3 September 11.15-12.30

Title: Research, Policy and Practice: What we know, what we need to learn and what we need to do.

Professor Ben Levin who will speak in the Routledge Lecture, is Canada Research Chair in the Department of Theory and Policy Studies at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. Ben's career has been in academia and in government. He is a native of Winnipeg who holds a B.A. (Honours) from the University of Manitoba, an Ed.M from Harvard University and a Ph.D from OISE/UT. He has worked with private research organizations, school divisions, provincial governments, and national and international agencies, as well as building an academic and research career in education. From late 2004 until early 2007 he was Deputy Minister of Education for the Province of Ontario. From 1999 through 2002, he was Deputy Minister of Advanced Education and Deputy Minister of Education, Training and Youth for Manitoba. He is widely known for his work in educational reform, educational change, educational policy and politics. His work has been international in scope, including projects in a dozen countries and with several international agencies.


Friday 4 September 11.00-12.00

The Philosophy Panel
Title: 'The voice(s) of philosophy in the conversation of the Educational community'

David Bridges (Professorial Fellow at the University of East Anglia, where he was previously Pro Vice Chancellor, and Chair of the Von Hugel Institute and Fellow at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. He is Honorary Vice President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain).

Morwenna Griffiths (Professor of Classroom Learning at Moray House, Edinburgh University. She has taught in primary schools in Bristol before working in a number of Universities. Her research includes philosophical theorising and empirical investigation related to epistemology of auto/biography, social justice, public spaces, the nature of practice, feminisation and creativity).

Janet Orchard (who worked as a teacher in London before accepting a Teacher Education Research Fellowship in the Department of Education, University of Oxford. Her philosophical interests within Teacher Education include the value of conceptual clarity to professional practice and the ability of early career teachers to identify and articulate their educational values).

Alis Oancea (Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her recent work includes: a study of quality in applied and practice-based educational research; a review of UK education research expertise post; a critical assessment of the "what works" discourse in research policy; and a scrutiny of the UK research assessment reform, based on the analysis of peer review, bibliometrics, and econometrics in an international context.).


Saturday 5 September 11.00-12.00

Title: The Development of Teacher Knowledge: Learning from research and practice

Ann Lieberman is an emeritus Professor from Teachers College, Columbia University and Senior Scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She is a past president of the American Educational Research Association. She is widely known for her work in the areas of teacher leadership and development, collaborative research, networks and school-university partnerships, and the problems and prospects for understanding educational change. Her many books and articles have been used by schools and universities alike. She has worked with teacher unions, state and federal departments, reform groups and at all levels of schooling. In addition she has run two school university partnerships and created the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching (NCREST) with Linda Darling-Hammond at Teachers College. She is able to embrace the dualities of theory/practice process/content; intellectual/social-emotional learning; policy/practice to deepening the work of teachers and schools. To do this she has fashioned a way to be both a scholar and an activist, a practitioner and a theoretician.

Conference organisers: In Conference Ltd. www.in-conference.org.uk - Site by Source