The importance of ownership of educational changes for their sustainability

I will describe in this lecture the importance of the ownership of reform changes for their relative sustainability, using the example of the educational reform in Slovenia.

1. I will specially highlight the significance of the selection of the appropriate moment for changes and
2. the role of involvement of the narrower professional public (conceptual part of the professional potentials of a particular nation) and the broader professional public (the teaching community in the broader sense) in the processes of the preparation of changes within the educational area.
3. Herein I shall mostly leave aside the importance of the attempts for reaching a high level of consensus for sustainability of changes among the political parties and, therefore
4. the importance of adequate funding and
5. relative political stability for the meaningful completion of the reform of the educational system in a particular society.

I intend to illustrate my reflections by the planning and the implemetation of the two major projects of educational reform in independent Slovenia: the introduction of the state Matura and the curricular reform of elementary education. Both projects were in their essential elements implemented during the ninetieth years of the previous century and they survived successive changes of the political authorities, as well as one of the greatest economic recessions up to now, and, connected with that, seeking for landmarks in contemporary societies.

Short CV

Professor Slavko Gaber, Ph. D. (1958) is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education - University of Ljubljana. His area of professional work involves justice and equality in education, comparative educational research, as well as governance and management and quality assurance in education. In 1992 he received his PhD in sociology at the Faculty of Arts - University of Ljubljana. In addition to his participation in a number of international research and expert projects, he worked as an expert for educational policies in a number of countries in Southeastern Europe (Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina), and he also worked several terms as a Minister of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia. He is member of the editorial board of the journal „Theory and Research in Education“ and „Šolsko polje“ and editor-in-chief of the CEPS-Journal. He is also member of an Expert Consultant Group for Future of VET in Slovenia. He publishes papers in numerous international journals and other scientific publications.

Sense and Sensibility: Is there an emotional side of education?

After three decades of the cognitive approaches dominance, at the end of the last millennium more serious demands for introducing emotions into the research of learning and teaching processes emerged, which led to the recognition of the common role that "sense and sensibiliy" have in education.
Recent studies have shown that within the educational context both students and teachers experience numerous and intense emotions (both pleasant and unpleasant) that significantly affect the processes of learning and teaching, and that emotions are those that represent the key component of their psychological health, subjective well-being and personal development. Understanding the overall emotional experience in the classroom context seems even more important given the increasingly difficult and complex requirements set to teachers and students by the rapid social changes. Precisely because of that, further intensive research is necessary which will help us better understand the emotional experience of all participants in the educational process (students, teachers, parents, principals) because only by taking into account the emotional aspects of learning and teaching shall we be able to respond to the increasingly demanding challenges and expectations that modern education sets before us all.
Considering all of the above said, in this presentation it will be attempted to give an overview of the latest research and theories of emotions in education, with an emphasis on the guidelines for further research of the "emotional side of education".

Short CV

Izabela Sorić is a full professor in tenure at the Department of Psychology of the University of Zadar where she teaches modules from the areas of educational and cognitive psychology within the undergraduate and graduate study programmes of Psychology and Pedagogy. She is also engaged in several postgraduate study programmes at the Universities of Zadar, Zagreb and Rijeka and is actively involved in teacher education programmes at all educational levels.
She has been a principal researcher and a participant in a number of scientific research projects on the national and international level. Her scientific interests are diverse, and in recent years she has intensively researched the process of self-regulation of learning and teaching, especially the emotional and motivational component of this process. Her multi-year research work has resulted in the authorship and co-authorship of sixty scientific and professional papers, several book chapters and the scientific monograph "Self-regulation of learning: Can we learn to learn" (rewarded in 2015 by the Croatian Psychological Association).
She is a member of the Croatian Psychological Association and the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction.

Programme of the conference