Professor Stephen G. Parker, President of the History of Education Society (UK), welcomes you to our first virtual conference…
It’s with great pleasure that I welcome you to the first History of Education Society, UK, online conference. In ‘normal times’ our annual conference would have been held in person. However, along with many academic communities and learned societies, we are learning to network and communicate in other ways, making use of technologies which have been available for some time, but now learning to exploit their potential. This is very much something we otherwise might not have done, and driven by the desire to continue to share our research and thinking and remain academically connected, we have adapted. The theme of this year’s conference has been titled in this vein ‘education otherwise’ to enable us to reflect upon occasions in the past when education has continued to take place against the odds, and that it thus may even have been shaped by such contingent spatial and material exigencies. How have challenging times of the past been responded to in novel ways by educationalists?
In reflecting upon the extreme conditions in which education has sometimes taken place in the past, the thought occurs that in fact there is never any ‘normal’, rather only degrees of normality. As human beings we live and work within a range of specific conditions, mostly beyond our control, which we have to respond to. It is only when reality radically shifts for us, for instance in conditions of illness, pandemic, war, accident or disaster, that our normal is radically disrupted and adjustment becomes necessary. ‘What happens to education when there is an extreme level of disturbance?’ is thus the question and theme of this particular conference, and I look forward to hearing the reflections arising from it.
I am very pleased to also announce that in the tradition of publishing a special issue of the journal History of Education based upon papers arising from the conference, this year will be no exception. I shall be writing to conference presenters in due course inviting them to submit a paper for inclusion in this special issue early next year.
Professor Stephen G. Parker