Venue:  Queen Margaret University, Musselburgh 

Dates: Wednesday 22nd November – Friday 24th November, 2023

Key organising strands for this year’s SERA conference will include:

• Social Justice and Inclusion: How might education reach out to all? How might education respond to the challenge of competition, distribution, and access to educational services supporting our communities? Is the gender divide in education increasing? How might education foster awareness that our lives depend on natural environments and that ecology can only be achieved through equity? How might we learn to live peacefully with one another within the limits of the Earth supporting us?
• Professional and Vocational Learning (including teacher education and higher education): What new challenges in workspaces and practices are impacting professional and vocational learning? How is knowledge generated and shared in occupational and professional contexts and across professional boundaries? How might professional education and development be reconceptualised? How are interprofessional work practices shaping new demands for new pedagogical responses? What new possibilities could be explored around leadership “education”?
• Policy and Education: How might policy at global, national, and local levels respond to identified challenges? How might educational actors (regardless of sector) respond to, and inform policy directions? How might new partnerships enhance or inhibit educational initiatives that respond to challenges or offer solutions?
• Curriculum: How might curriculum engage with a constantly changing and evolving world? To what extent might the curriculum support interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning and reflection on key themes of human flourishing?  How might educational practitioners engage with the process of curriculum reform in light of the conference theme?
• Assessment and Evaluation: In what ways could national testing/assessment evolve to foster resilience to challenge and change? How might issues arising from national and international testing/assessment hinder human flourishing? What alternatives could be explored?
• Digital Learning: How might the infusion of new technologies impact learning experiences in/out of formal educational settings? What new spaces are emerging to enable more sustainable forms of pedagogy and learning? How might the open education movement support or inhibit inclusion/exclusion locally and globally? How can the educational community consider ‘humane technologies’?
• Innovative Research Methods: What challenges face educational researchers and how might new research methods respond to the conference theme? What new questions need to be asked and examined? How might different theoretical perspectives and paradigms create openings for new questions, new forms of research, and offer critical insights? How might more innovative research methods contribute to supporting learning and change in challenging times and spaces?

The conference will accept individual papers, short presentations, symposia, poster presentations/rapid thesis presentation, as well as suggestions for roundtable discussions and workshops.