The Optentia Research Focus Area on the Vaal Triangle Campus, and the Faculty of Education Sciences, on the Potchefstroom Campus of North-West University (NWU), in collaboration with the Flemish Association for Development, Cooperation and Technical Assistance are pleased to announce that they will be hosting the 2nd Bi-annual Symposium on Teacher Education for Inclusion: Linking Research to Practice from 7-8 June 2017 Vanderbijlpark, South Africa.
This Symposium is part of an EU-funded initiative to support the Government of South Africa to address the strategic priorities of providing quality education for all. Skills, knowledge and attitudes of student teachers, newly qualified teachers and existing teachers need to be developed to teach more inclusively and address the challenge of building an inclusive system of education and training. To this end, Higher Education Institutions, the Departments of Basic and Higher Education, as well as practitioners will join hands.
A key strategy for this will be to bring teacher educators, researchers, practitioners and policy makers together in the 2nd symposium to share knowledge and experience in order to ascertain a constructive way forward in classrooms and lecture halls.
Linking Research to Practice: Joining Hands for Inclusive Education
This symposium will therefore provide opportunities for practitioners to share good inclusive practices, researchers and teacher educators to report recent findings and policy makers to disseminate the latest conceptual thinking and policy developments. There will be keynote presentations from experts, informing us about national and international research, policy movements, as well as best practices. Paper presentations are invited, but a key feature of this symposium will be round table discussions in small groups to discuss a way forward.
The round table discussions will focus on themes that will derive from the keynote and paper presentations. A projected result of this symposium will be to establish working groups, representing all stakeholders, ensuring that the teacher education for inclusion movement is taken forward.
Invitations to submit abstracts
Invitations are hereby extended to teacher educators, researchers and practitioners to submit abstracts for paper presentations on new research findings and importantly on best practices in inclusion.
Please submit abstracts with obvious reference to the theme of the symposium. Abstracts can be submitted here .
More information can be found here.
