The Centre for Learner Identity Studies (CLIS), Edge Hill University’s Faculty of Education Research Centre, is hosting their fourth annual conference themed around ‘Identity – State – Education’ and invite practitioners, researchers, and policymakers interested in these issues nationally and internationally to attend and to engage with and share research focused around questions of learner identity.

The conference theme is intentionally broad so as to include a wide variety of papers and perspectives. The role of the state in the provision of mass education is changing in many countries around the world, in response to a wide range of pressures - including, for example,
marketization, neo-liberalism and globalisation - which are having dramatic impacts on structures of educational provision, delivery and governance. The frame of reference within which educational
outcomes are considered is also changing -with the rise, for example, of PISA assessments and international educational ‘league tables’ - and educational systems face new modes of pressure for performance and reform.

In many states also curriculum is under scrutiny: in some cases, for example, the role that the school curriculum has conventionally been understood as serving in identity formation is being problematicised and challenged, in the name, for example, of the politics of multiculturalism and recognition, and in other contexts the reverse appears to be happening, with the conventional ‘identity management’ role of curriculum subjects like history, social studies or civics being reasserted. Similarly, school curricula are under scrutiny from economic and ‘knowledge economy’ perspectives and ‘conventional’ subjects and modes of delivery are in question.

All of these developments have profound consequences for the identity of state education systems and for the ways in which the identities of institutions, curricula, learners and educational professionals are constructed across the whole range of compulsory and post-compulsory education.The conference represents an opportunity
for these complex issues to be considered and debated from a wide range of disciplinary, institutional and national perspectives.

Keynote Addresses

The conference will include keynote addresses by:

• Professor Audrey Osler, Leeds University - ‘Patriotism, the state and learner identities:
contrasting narratives from Cyprus and the UK’

• Professor Lisbeth Lundahl, Umeå University - School markets and pedagogic identities.
The Swedish example

• Professor Melanie Nind, University of Southampton - Inclusion, evidence and voice: global concerns and everyday matters

• Professor Ken Jones, Goldsmiths, University of London - Schooling and Social unrest: a productive relationship?

Conference timings

The conference will open at mid-day on the 11th July, run all day on the 12th July and close at 1pm on the 13th July.