FUTURE EDUCATION Conference 2024
A look back: This was the 1st FUTURE EDUCATION Conference 2024
The 1st FUTURE EDUCATION Conference for academics, teachers and students took place at the University of Graz from 3 September - 5 September 2024. More than 300 participants met to discuss educational concepts of the future. Networking was also an important part of the event. We are delighted with the positive feedback and the successful start to the conference series!
1st Future Education Award was presented
The first Future Education Award was presented on 4 September 2024 as part of the Future Education Conference 2024. The award went to Salome Flegr and Stefan Huber for their outstanding research achievements. Congratulations to them!
The conference program
We have compiled a program for the 1st Future Education Conference 2024 from more than 180 submissions. Click your way through! Registration for the conference starts on May 30, 2024.
Interdisciplinary symposium
Symposia offer the opportunity to present research work on a topic from different perspectives and disciplines and consist of three to four speakers, a chairperson and a discussant. The speakers must come from at least two different countries and different disciplines. The symposium is scheduled to last 90 minutes.
Research lecture
Research lectures enable the presentation and discussion of current research results. They are scheduled for 15 minutes plus 5 minutes for discussion. Individual presentations are grouped into sessions. For invited talks, a presentation time of 30 minutes is planned, followed by 10-15 minutes of discussion.
Didactic workshops
The didactic workshops serve to present teaching materials that have been developed on the basis of research, tested in practice or evaluated in empirical studies. These will be offered as part of a "market" at the conference and made available to interested parties for 90 minutes in supervised form.
Opening keynote - Andreas Schleicher (OECD Director of Education): "Educating learners for their future - not our past" (online)
In a world in which the kinds of things that are easy to teach and test have also become easy to digitize and automate, education is no longer just about teaching students something, but about helping them develop a reliable compass and the tools to navigate with confidence through an increasingly complex, volatile and uncertain world. Success in education today is about building curiosity - opening minds, it is about compassion - opening hearts, and it is about courage, mobilizing our cognitive, social and emotional resources to take action. And those are also our best weapons against the biggest threats of our times - ignorance - the closed mind, hate - the closed heart, and fear - the enemy of agency. But how do we build the learning environments to enable those knowledge, skills, attitudes and values? What kind of educators and other people are needed to enact those learning environments? And what can public policy to do support those people best? The presentation will try to answer these questions.
As coordinator of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) , Andreas Schleicher has become known to a broad public. The statistician is currently OECD Director of the Directorate for Education.
Keynote speakers from the research clusters
"Language proficiency" is a key to educational success and social participation. (At least) Two questions, however, are controversial: (1) What does "language proficiency" mean? And (2) Who is responsible for promoting "language proficiency" in the respective sense? Both questions will be addressed.
Question (1) requires answers that arise from assumptions about linguistic challenges that learners have to master. It is highly likely that these include linguistic diversity: the presence of more than one language ("multilingualism") as well as multiple language varieties ("multilectalism"), and communication through different modalities (e.g. spoken, signed, written, or technology-mediated; "multimodality"). Against this backdrop, language proficiency means: ability to master the challenges of linguistic diversity approproately, autonomously and fairly.
Question (2) refers to traditional concepts of task sharing between families and educational institutions. The latter continue to be deeply entrenched in traditions of monolingualism and the privileging of a narrow set of languages as subjects of formal education. Schools (and considerable parts of the general public) expect that families "deliver" children who can function appropriately in a monolingual & standard mode (Piller 2016). Hardly any education system has taken on the responsibility for promoting language proficiency in the sense mentioned above.
I will present research research that underpins: addressing the challenges associated with linguistic diversity has no negative impact on mainstream education. Furthermore, I will present an overarching approach to general language education that allows students to reach their full linguistic potential - regardless of their families' resources to support their language development (Gogolin 2020).
The 21st century comes with a number of global challenges for mankind. These challenges include a changing climate, feeding an ever-growing population and a more sustainable production and use of energy. While students grow increasingly concerned about these challenges that will shape their future lives, STEM education however is still mostly focused on teaching students scientific principles and practices with little to no connection to these challenges. In order to provide students with the competence to mitigate the global challenges they will be facing, a new vision of STEM education is needed. The presentation will discuss what students really need to be prepared for the global challenges, develop a vision of a 21st STEM education that will not only prepare students to mitigate the challenges, but will also support them in developing the belief(s) that they are a crucial element of the solution. The presentation will conclude outlining a road map towards this vision.
Technology-enhanced learning has been studied for decades. During that time, thousands of experiments and quasi-experiments investigated different design features and support measures of digital technologies and their interactions with learners' individual differences. Despite this wealth of studies, they often focus on effects of specific digital technologies and their technology-specific features on learning outcomes. Thus, a general analysis targeting the impact of digital technology on learning across different technologies is apparently difficult. Furthermore, when digital technologies are put into practice, studies sometimes reveal results that are not in line with those from controlled experiments. Therefore, considering research in technology-enhanced teaching might be helpful. Such studies consider teachers' digital skills, identify effective contextual conditions at an institutional level, and delve into the orchestration of digital technologies within classrooms.
In this keynote, I will offer an evidence-based and meta-level perspective that focuses on learning activities during technology-enhanced learning, thus, highlighting the relevance of how digital technology is used during learning in higher education and beyond. Specifically, I will elaborate on how adopting a perspective centered on learning activities helps us to better understand mechanisms of technology-enhanced learning and conditions for effective learning and teaching with digital technologies. In addition, as recent advances in digital technologies and artificial intelligence confront teachers, learners, and researchers with new possibilities albeit also challenges, I will complement the perspective on learning activities with a perspective on learning analytics. I aim to elaborate on how to shape recent advances in digital technologies and related research positively.
Growing inequalities affect children's chances of success in our increasingly digital society, creating diverse and growing learning support needs in education and training worldwide. This calls for developing innovative and inclusive pedagogical solutions to enrich educational traditions. Creative technology education, which aims to provide all children with a high-quality and safe environment to grow and learn using technological tools, is one possible solution.
My research shows that creative technology education plays a vital role in today's quality pedagogy. In particular, the cross-curricular pedagogy of technology education (invention pedagogy) can contribute to quality growth, teaching and mentoring in integrated learning contexts. Invention teaches both cross-curricular skills and different learning domains, such as science and technology content, creative learning domains and mathematics (STEAM subjects) through collaborative work. The perspectives I will explore in my keynote highlight aspects of digital inclusion, digitally supported learning, and creative technology education.