2013 Conference Keynote Speakers
Professor Ronald Barnett
Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of
Education, University of London.
Ronald Barnett is a recognised authority on
the conceptual and theoretical understanding of the university and
higher education, with over 200 papers of various kinds to his
name. His 19 books (nine sole-authored - several of which
have won prizes and have been translated into other languages) -
include The Idea of Higher Education, Higher
Education: A Critical Business, Realizing the University
in an age of super complexity, Beyond All Reason: Living
with Ideology in the University, and A Will to Learn:
Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty (all published by
McGraw-Hill/ Open University Press). His latest books are
Being a University and Imagining the
University (both published by Routledge).
Ronald Barnett has held senior positions at the
Institute of Education (University of London), including that of
Pro-Director for Longer Term Strategy and was also, for seven
years, a Dean, responsible for teaching and learning and quality
matters. He is a past Chair of the Society for Research into
Higher Education, and recently served as a Special Adviser to the
House of Commons Select Committee Inquiry into Universities and
Students. He is a Fellow both of the Higher Education Academy
and the Society for Research into Higher Education and is a Senior
Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and has been a Visiting
Professor at universities in China and Australia.
Ronald Barnett also acts as a consultant, and
has worked with most of the national organizations in the UK and
many individual universities, including the University of the West
Indies and the TATA University Institute of Social Sciences in
India. Recent commitments have included the LSE, the Higher
Education Academy, and the University of Vienna.
He has been awarded a higher doctorate of the
University of London, is an Academician of Social Sciences and was
the recipient of the inaugural ‘Distinguished Researcher’ prize of
the European Association for Institutional Research (EAIR).
He has been an invited speaker in around 35
countries.
Professor Mike
Bottery
Mike gained his first degree at University College,
Oxford, and gained his MEd and PhD at The University of Hull. He
spent the early part of his career teaching in Primary Schools in
England and Australia, before move to a lecturing position at the
University of Hull. He is currently Director of Research in
the Faculty of Education. Mike teaches at all levels in the
Faculty, thogh his main focus is at the doctoral level, as well as
extensive lead supervision of students at both masters and doctoral
levels from most parts of the globe. He has lectured in Gibraltar,
the West Indies, Singapore, Ireland, South Africa, Hong Kong,
Mainland China, Canada and the United States, and has been Visiting
Professor at the University of Saskatchewan, Noted Scholar at the
University of British Columbia, and invited guest speaker at
Seattle Pacific University. He has also been Visiting Scholar and
Advisory Professor at the Institute of Education in Hong Kong. He
was chair of the Standing Conference for Research into Education,
Leadership and Management, and is currently on the Council for the
British Educational Leadership and Management Association.
Mike has written and published extensively in international
peer-refereed journals and written seven books with major
publishing houses. His interests include educational management,
educational policy, and the leadership of an education for
sustainable development. He is particularly concerned with
the values underpinning educational decisions.
Keynote Lecture Title: The
Portrait Methodology: Principals, Personality, and
Policy
I'm intending to use the keynote to talk about the portrait
approach I've developed. I will begin by explaining its
origins and some of its results, but the focus of the talk will be
primarily on the effects the research has had on myself and the
principals and headteachers interviewed. Its effects on me would be
the very clear move from seeing these interviewees as ‘subjects’ of
research to individuals who are my ‘co-workers’ – their advice,
feedback, and friendship has deepened and changed my view of the
possibilities of research. The research’s effects on them
would however be the main focus – the fact that a methodological
approach designed to produce evidence for an examination of the
reality of principals’/headteachers’ lives turned into an exercise
which allowed them to reflect upon their work and life, and in
doing so seems not only to have enhanced their understanding of
themselves, but in many cases to have provided support for them
through such articulation.
The effects on policy and professionalism are implicit in much of
the above: the keynote will argue for a policy approach which
doesn’t just accept the importance of context, but also the
importance of personality, and therefore of the necessary failure
of any attempts to clone the ideal set of leader skills and traits.
It will also argue for a professionalism through a form of research
which allows not only for reflection, but as importantly for a
privacy in that reflection. Not everything then has to be, or
should be, a public record of achievement.
Professor of Educational Research, Faculty of Education &
Theology, York St John University
Jean was a schoolteacher and deputy head
teacher before taking early retirement from schools and going into
business for herself. She qualified at the Universities of London,
Essex, and Bath. She writes books and papers on different aspects
of action research and practice-based research, and also runs a
publishing business. She travels extensively in order to work with
practitioner-researchers in a range of workplaces, and she holds
visiting and honorary professorial positions at the University of
Tromsø, the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Ningxia
Teachers’ University and Beijing Normal University. Her latest
book, published by Routledge, is a 2013 third edition of her
seminal Action Research: Principles and Practice.
Keynote lecture title:
Openness, transformation and ever-widening spirals of
educational influence
In this interactive
presentation I hope to explore ideas about how ethical forms of
life may be understood as openness and transformation towards a
realisation of being: and because we are all in this world
together, this means ‘being’ for us all: ‘I’ change in relation to
‘you’, as ‘you’ do in relation to ‘me’; and ‘we’ change in relation
to ‘them’, and so on …. This same realisation of being may be seen
in the garden outside the window, where a drop becomes a puddle and
a green shoot becomes a flower. In social contexts, our
relationships may become relationships of influence, where
practitioners influence other people’s thinking and, with a bit of
luck, their actions in the world, because people’s thinking
influences their practices. But these relationships are also
mutually reciprocal, which means that we must all be open to one
another to hear properly what is being said. This, of course, has
distinct implications for how we are individually, and in relation
with fellow conference delegates from around the world, and with
the world in which we are guests. So what might the experience of
these relationships feel like? And what might be the relationships
between enhancing practices and influencing policy; and how might
this happen? At the presentation we will work out ideas together
– so come along and be prepared to have some fun!
Professor Julian Stern
Dean, Faculty of Education & Theology, York St John
University
Julian came to York St John in August 2008 as
Dean of the Faculty of Education & Theology. Born and
brought up in Hull, Julian qualified at the Royal Academy of Music,
Oxford University, Leicester University School of Education, and
the Institute of Education, London. He was a school teacher
in the South of England for fourteen years, and worked in
universities for sixteen years prior to coming to York St John
University. Julian has worked at the Institute of Education,
London, the Open University, Brunel University, and the University
of Hull. Julian is also General Secretary of ISREV, the
International Seminar on Religious
Education and Values
His current research is on the Spirit of the
School, including sub-themes of dialogue (e.g. with music),
community (e.g. on John Macmurray and schools as households), and
learning (e.g. spirited assessment feedback), and on Teaching
Religious Education, including seminars bringing researchers
and teachers together.
Keynote Lecture Title:
You Can Call Me 'Al': do We Influence Professionals and
Policy-Makers?
A few years ago, I started a new job.
Whilst doing the introduction to my first teaching session on a
brand new MA in Educational Studies programme, one of the students
interrupted. ‘I thought all studies were educational, aren’t
they?’, she said. Fair enough. Studies – learning,
research – are educational in the sense that if you are learning,
then this is educational. However, there are all kinds of
other reasons for learning or research: personal reasons,
professional reasons, economic and political reasons. So what
exactly does it mean when you say you are doing ‘educational’
studies or ‘educational’ research? I have discussed, in
previous Value and Virtue conferences, the educational value of
research within schools and universities. This year, I want
to discuss the educational value of research to policy-makers and
professionalism. Taking this broader perspective, I am taking
a risk. My specialism is the detailed workings of learning
communities, and I have a long-standing belief that the complexity
and richness of such learning communities are more significant and
powerful than the somewhat ephemeral world of national and
international policy and politics. But I like taking
risks. The centre-piece of this presentation is some work I
have completed trying to provide evidence of the influence of
research on professionals and pupils, and how this work in turn was
used to (try to) influence national policy.
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