The Teaching, Learning and Employability Exchange looks forward to welcoming you to this year 's UAL staff Education Conference. Our focus this year is to promote communication across the institution by programming presenters from within UAL.
This year has been an extraordinary challenge. We have collaborated more than ever before across role boundaries and hierarchies. There is renewed awareness of structural and systemic inequality. The lived experiences of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) staff and students, environmental thresholds, and not least, the COVID pandemic has led to many of us taking more individual, and collaborative, institutional, responsibility.
For ExEd21 we invited staff to contribute their own educational perspectives in an unthemed Open Call. Last year's theme: the 'Interplay between Teaching, Research and Knowledge Exchange ' will become one strand of this year's conference. Teaching, non-teaching and support staff are encouraged to send proposals to share their educational insights, lessons learnt, current or future projects. We have included an option of support with proposals and created an opportunity for you to inform us of your access requirements for full participation.
The conference is online and has been extended to two (shorter) days to make the experience more manageable for more staff. To encourage wider educational and transformational debate, the title and focus of the Conference has changed from 'Learning and Teaching' to 'Education'.
There will now be an annual appearance from Arts' Students Union who will have a strand of workshops/talks looking at the student experience from the student perspective of academic representation, campaigns, and services they provide for their members.
With your support we would like to create an expanded opportunity for: depth of engagement, sharing of experience across Colleges and developing new networks of critical friendship and collaboration, renewing our hopes and plans for the coming year.