On-line Conference 2021

One Year in a Pandemic - Challenges to Inclusive Education and Lessons Learnt 

 The conference One Year in a Pandemic - Challenges to Inclusive Education and Lessons Learnt  aims at shedding light on the main challenges that education systems and stakeholders such as the management, education practitioners, parents and students have been facing not only during the past year but even before. We would not only like to present these challenges to education but also discuss them and come to an understanding of how to overcome them. We also would like to provide a space for sharing good practices among scholars and practitioners as we find sharing in this unprecedented global situation essential. We invite papers covering challenges we are facing in education, lessons we have learnt and good practices that could facilitate students' return into schools. We invite research papers as well as applied or practice-oriented papers. We also invite papers not related to the pandemic.

It has already been one year since the global pandemic started to influence people’s everyday lives. In a very short time, people had to significantly adjust their daily routines and practices. One of the areas the global crisis impacted substantially is education. The global developments brought several challenges that, a year later, educators, management, students and parents are still facing. It has also deepened some already existing problems. Students and pupils in Central Europe were required to stay home and attend their classes online without direct interactions with their teachers and peers. Teachers were required to shift from in-person to online teaching which for many of them meant a complete paradigm shift involving swift adoption of different methods, activities and forms of communication. They were often expected to switch between online teaching and instruction in the classroom while maintaining the same quality of education. In a very brief period, parents and caretakers were expected to facilitate learning from home, to provide a quality learning space and technological support to their children. The pandemic uncovered not only the unpreparedness of schools and education systems to adjust to unprecedented demands, but also the deep structural inequalities in our societies.

The conference is organised as part of the project BeIN (TL02000064) funded by the Technological Agency of the Czech Republic within the programme Éta. Information about the project is available at https://bein.ped.muni.cz/.

Conference Themes and Topics

For the conference, we are seeking submissions related to the following conference topics (calls for papers):

• Challenges to education revealed and brought by the global pandemic (in terms of education systems, policies or practices at local, regional, national and global levels).
• Online instruction - good practices and challenges.
• Sharing good practices with other schools and institutions.
• Life of schools in an online space - opportunities and risks.
• Teacher training and education.
• Covid 19 inequalities in access to education (poverty, race, disability, gender, class, digital gap and other).
• Support of students’, teachers' and educators' well-being.
• Facilitation of students' return to school.

Other related topics will also be considered.

Please submit your abstracts in English here.

For more information about the conference, you are welcome to contact us at bein2021@ped.muni.cz.

Important Information and Deadlines:

• Online conference (via ZOOM).
• The conference will be held in English (except for the workshops targeting the Czech practitioners).
• Conference will be organised into thematic panels, round tables and workshops.
• Abstract Submission Deadline: 6 September 2021.
• Registration Deadline: 01 October 2021.
• Conference Dates: 14 October 2021.
• Information about the project and our activities, including this conference, is available at being.ped.muni.cz

We encourage you to invite colleagues to participate in the conference and submit original research (primary or applied) for the conference.