The 2nd IAFOR Conference on Educational Research & Innovation (ERI2022)
May 05–07, 2022 | Virginia Tech, Arlington, Virginia (Washington DC Metropolitan Area)
Welcome to The 2nd IAFOR Conference on Education, Research & Innovation (ERI2022), held in partnership with Virginia Tech, and sponsored by the School of Education, and held on the wonderful Virginia Tech Washington DC Arlington Campus.
ERI2022 encourages academics and scholars to meet and exchange ideas and views in an international forum stimulating respectful dialogue. This event will afford an exceptional opportunity for renewing old acquaintances, making new contacts, networking, and facilitating partnerships across national and disciplinary borders.
"Learning Beyond Boundaries"
The United States of America with its democratic principles and individual freedoms has historically attracted and provided refuge for individuals and their ideals. A diverse country with a population of more than 350 million people, the U.S. has long served as a symbol of power, resilience, and prestige. Symbols of America’s prominence and independence are proudly on display in its capital of Washington DC: The White House, Capitol Building, the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. But these iconic symbols are not beyond scrutiny, and the city’s museums, like the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian, offer a more nuanced understanding of the United States. These complex symbols represent the nation’s histories and also the ways people have come to understand modern challenges related to social inequities.
One of these enduring challenges is American schooling. The U.S. is home to top-tier universities–some are household names known around the world as cultural and intellectual powerhouses. And, yet, there are deep, intransigent challenges related to public school funding where young people lack equitable access and opportunities too often rely on wealth and geography and not necessarily on academic merit. It is in this context, with an eye toward equity and equality, that we hold our conference on Education, Research and Innovation, and look at how cutting-edge technologies and innovative practices both ameliorate and exacerbate these challenges, both within the United States and globally.
How can we resist boundaries to allow for greater access to educational systems and opportunities? How can educational innovation, research, and resilience serve as the new symbols for social equity? With the additional lens of the coronavirus pandemic, this international conference will offer an extraordinary opportunity for the exchange of ideas and presentation of research, as well as the comparative and contrastive discussions across borders of nation and discipline.
In conjunction with IAFOR's Global Partners, we look forward to welcoming you to Virginia Tech!
– The ERI2022 Organising Committee
Amy Azano, Virginia Tech, United States
Joseph Haldane, The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan
Steve Harmon, Georgia Tech, United States
Barbara Lockee, Virginia Tech, United States
Kiyoshi Mana, Virginia Tech, United States
Bryce Platt Kayanuma, Virginia Tech, United States
IAFOR Journal of Education (Scopus Indexed Journal)
This conference is associated with the Scopus and DOAJ listed IAFOR Journal of Education.
Key Information
- Location & Venue: Virginia Tech, Arlington, Virginia (Washington DC Metropolitan Area), USA
- Dates: Thursday, May 05, 2022 to Saturday, May 07, 2022
- Early Bird Abstract Submission Deadline: January 07, 2022*
- Final Abstract Submission Deadline: March 01, 2022
- Registration Deadline for Presenters: April 01, 2022
*Submit early to take advantage of the discounted registration rates. Learn more about our registration options.
About Virginia Tech
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) is a public land-grant university serving the Commonwealth of Virginia, the nation, and the world community. The discovery and dissemination of new knowledge are central to its mission. Through its focus on teaching and learning, research and discovery, and outreach and engagement, the university creates, conveys, and applies knowledge to expand personal growth and opportunity, advance social and community development, foster economic competitiveness, and improve the quality of life.
Our Response to the Ongoing Coronavirus (COVID-19) Global Pandemic
Present, Publish, Participate On-site or Online
Continued excellence in service, wherever you are
Our commitment to you; academics, scholars and educators around the world, is to continue to run conferences where and how possible, but in the full knowledge that in these unprecedented and changing times, we must engage as much as is possible online, allowing those who choose not to travel, or who cannot travel, opportunities to present, publish and participate online.
Flexibility
Given the uncertainties surrounding travel restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic, and related and evolving government responses, we understand that potential delegates’ plans may be subject to change beyond their control, and indeed many people may not be able to travel to our conferences. We will be as flexible as we can our side to allow delegates to switch registration types between “on-site” and “online” depending on their circumstances, up until one month before the conference, so that you can be assured that whatever your situation, you can still present, publish and participate.
About IAFOR’s Education Conferences
IAFOR promotes and facilitates new multifaceted approaches to one of the core issues of our time, namely globalisation and its many forms of growth and expansion. Awareness of how it cuts across the world of education, and its subsequent impact on societies, institutions and individuals, is a driving force in educational policies and practices across the globe. IAFOR’s conferences on education have these issues at their core. The conferences present those taking part with three unique dimensions of experience, encouraging interdisciplinary discussion, facilitating heightened intercultural awareness and promoting international exchange. In short, IAFOR’s conferences on education are about change, transformation and social justice. As IAFOR’s previous conferences on education have shown, education has the power to transform and change whilst it is also continuously transformed and changed.
Globalised education systems are becoming increasingly socially, ethnically and culturally diverse. However, education is often defined through discourses embedded in Western paradigms as globalised education systems become increasingly determined by dominant knowledge economies. Policies, practices and ideologies of education help define and determine ways in which social justice is perceived and acted out. What counts as "education" and as "knowledge" can appear uncontestable but is in fact both contestable and partial. Discourses of learning and teaching regulate and normalise gendered and classed, racialised and ethnicised understandings of what learning is and who counts as a learner.
In many educational settings and contexts throughout the world, there remains an assumption that teachers are the possessors of knowledge which is to be imparted to students, and that this happens in neutral, impartial and objective ways. However, learning is about making meaning, and learners can experience the same teaching in very different ways. Students (as well as teachers) are part of complex social, cultural, political, ideological and personal circumstances, and current experiences of learning will depend in part on previous ones, as well as on age, gender, social class, culture, ethnicity, varying abilities and more.
IAFOR has several annual conferences on education across the world, exploring common themes in different ways to develop a shared research agenda which develops interdisciplinary discussion, heightens intercultural awareness and promotes international exchange.
Special Themes and Areas of Focus
Authors have the optional opportunity of identifying whether their paper addresses either the 2021–2022 IAFOR Special Theme and/or one of the ongoing IAFOR Special Areas of Focus.
IAFOR 2021–2022 Special Theme: “Resilience”
Resilience is the ability to resist being affected, or to recover readily from setback and adversity, and the past year has been one of enormous turbulence and upheaval. Nobody has been left untouched by the impact of the global pandemic, and great change has been forced upon us all.
COVID-19 has underlined the extent to which we suffer together as one, but also how the experience of a global pandemic has been very different and unequal. This has had a woeful impact on the already marginalised and dispossessed, further evidencing that countries are not equal in their ability to provide for and protect their people. The pandemic has also created questionable narratives and false dichotomies in approaches to finding solutions to the myriad problems that COVID-19 has either caused or exacerbated.
Humans can be by turn extraordinarily delicate, and remarkably resilient and we are now living through and witnessing an extraordinary period of history. However, as with any period of great change, there is a window of opportunity that follows where one has the chance to enact and bring about change for the better. The pandemic has also allowed many of us the space to rethink our relationship with both ourselves and those immediately around us, but also with the wider world. This is a crisis both global and local, both shared and individual.
That time to rethink and reimagine is now as we attempt to regroup and rebuild. We need to build back, but do so in a way that is better, stronger and fairer. Forged by adversity, we have the opportunity to follow divergent paths towards a future that we help create, and where, to borrow Heaney, hope and history may rhyme.
IAFOR Special Areas of Focus
In line with its organisational mission, IAFOR encourages, facilitates and nurtures interdisciplinary research, with an emphasis on international and intercultural perspectives. Current areas of focus of the organisation include the following ongoing collaborative programmes and initiatives.