We are delighted to announce that the Oxford Brookes University International Learning and Teaching Conference, will be held online on Wednesday 14 June 2023.
‘Education is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness’ (hooks, 2003, p XIV).
By challenging past orthodoxies and opening our critical imaginations to the promise of progress higher education can:
- create more democratic and ethical ways of knowing, being and doing in the world;
- find solutions to the social, economic and environmental challenges we face;
- and transform the lives of those in our learning communities and regions in which our institutions reside.
These pedagogies of possibility tap into our transformative powers. It is here that ‘educational gain’ might truly lie – where students come to understand and embrace their graduate potential to become agents of change and ‘remake the world’ (Freire, 2017, pg185).
Oxford Brookes’ inaugural international teaching, learning and assessment conference will explore the promise of transformation that the socially responsible and connected university represents. It will be an opportunity to remind ourselves of the important roles educators and students play in the co-creation of our hopeful future. By celebrating transformation we have the opportunity to re-connect with the joy, love and passion that brought us to HE, and that might sustain us as we proceed.
Together we can ‘recognise reality…recognise the obstacles, but … refuse to resign in silence.’ (Freire, 2021, p. 23). We invite staff, students and stakeholders involved in higher education to write with ‘rage and love’ (Freire, 2017, p5), to offer impassioned reflections on the pursuit of thoughtful, compassionate, critical HE pedagogies.
Tell us how and why you have created a ‘classroom that is life-sustaining and mind expanding, a place of liberating mutuality where teacher and student work together‘ (hooks, 2003, XV) to make the world a better, fairer place.