It is now December, 2011, and planning is well under way to stage a second Symposium at the Faculty of Education here at the University of Waikato on Culturally Responsive Research and Pedagogy. We are delighted that Luis Moll and Nancy Hornberger have agreed to offering keynote addresses. The last symposium was exactly the kind of event we had hoped it would be: intimate, collegial, high-quality in terms of its keynotes and papers and productive of collaborations both within New Zealand and internationally. One outcome of the 2010 Symposium was a special issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique (which contains print versions of keynotes delivered by Christine Sleeter and Hilary Janks at the Symposium).
The 2012 Symposium will take place from Tuesday November 13 to Thursday November 15 and will once again dovetail seamlessly with a second international conference here on Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines (CEAD).
Once again our vision for the Symposium is a gathering of around 100 people, of whom two will be international keynote speakers. Instead of 24 invited paper presenters, as occurred in the 2010 Symposium, our aim this time is to have papers submitted for review and to select around 33 papers. You could say then that we are looking to a presenter/non-presenter ratio of around 1:2. As in 2010, we will be making a special place for emerging scholars whose doctoral work is focused on the conference theme.
Our aim, then, is for a mix of experience and expertise, from seasoned scholars to fresh and eager doctoral students with an interest in the theme. We are planning for a mix of overseas visitors, and local presenters and symposium members with an interest in and a willingness to present on the way the symposium theme is played out in a range of contexts, including of course, New Zealand/Aotearoa.
By keeping numbers down in the symposium we aim to facilitate a greater degree of ease in interpersonal dialogue among those present than often occurs at large events. Our hope is that this interpersonal dialogue will lead to a number of trans-national collaborations in research and a range of publication outcomes.