Seminar 4: Ethical challenges

21 September 2010, by Richard

The fourth seminar in the series will be held on November 19th, 2010 at
the London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, London WC1N 3QS, UK (directions).

This seminar will examine the ethical challenges of attempting to study and intervene in ‘the future’ in education, and the role of futures research in empowering individuals and societies to make change. The day will be divided into speaker sessions and workshop sessions.

To register for this seminar please contact Barbara Ashcroft. The programme for the day is as follows:

10.00	Registration and tea/coffee
10.15	Welcome
10.30	The Virtual Society in the Big Society: Building an ethical future for education in Digital Britain Professor Andy Miah, University of the West of Scotland Over the next five years, educational opportunities will continue to expand beyond formal pedagogic institutions, with more cross-sector partnerships delivering co-curated, community based educative experiences. In part, this will be made possible by the creative use of digital technologies, which will streamline information systems, engage people on new learning practices and forge a new context within which education is remade. However, these trends will also pose difficult ethical challenges about how education should take place, in a distributed, networked environment. This talk will discuss what ethical issues arise from the increased utilization of digital environments within educative practices.
11.45	Break
12.00	Alternative futures Professor Michael Fielding and Professor Peter Moss, Institute of Education What is education, what is it for and what are its fundamental values? How do we understand knowledge and learning? What is our image of the child and the school? How does the ever more pressing need to develop a more just, creative and sustainable democratic society affect our responses to these questions? Addressing these fundamental issues, Fielding and Moss contest the current mainstream dominated by markets and competition, instrumentality and standardisation, managerialism and technical practice. They argue instead for a radical education with democracy as a fundamental value, care as a central ethic, a person-centred education that is education in the broadest sense, and an image of a child rich in potential.
13.00	Lunch
13.45	Bioscience, bioethics and hybrid educational futures Dr Alexandra Plows, University of Bangor This presentation will give an overview of emerging technologies, research directions and applications in bioscience such as hybrid embryos, genetic testing, pharmacogenomics, Converging Technologies (nanobio, synthetic biology), summarising some associated bioethical issues. In providing a narrative of key examples drawn from recent sociological research, the talk will address how a new discipline emerges and dominates the education agenda so that it not only drives research and education, but becomes a new imperative, paradigm, and unavoidable tool for thinking. Developments in bioscience and its funding pathways are catalysing new areas of study, through the hybridisation of previously separate disciplines (such as physics, biology, computing). This has lead to the creation and/or development of new sub-disciplines (bio infomatics, science communication, bioethics) and is casting new light on established ones (for example, the significance of developments in reproductive technologies for women, and hence for feminism). Interdisciplinarity is thus key to an understanding of how bioscience has and will impact on education. The innovation imperative and the ‘bio-economy’ are also catalysing change in educational practice, for example via the melding of public/private research in what Glasner and Rothman (2004) term ‘co-laboratories’; assemblages of ‘big pharma’, UK funding councils and university labs.
14.45	Workshop: Ethics and futures Nagat Betar, Sarah Dyke, Margo Greenwood and Rupert Higham This workshop will provide an opportunity to engage with key issues for futures and ethics including gender and ethnicity, notions of ‘time’, the problematic of advocacy and ethics, of assessment and grading, values and skills.
16.00	Discussion: Towards an Educational Futures Manifesto Professor Keri Facer, Manchester Metropolitan University
16.30	Close

The ESRC funded ‘Educational Futures Seminar Series’ is run jointly by the Education and Social Research Institute, MMU; Graduate School of Education, Exeter University; London Knowledge Lab; LSRI, Nottingham University; NIACE; Futurelab.

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