Keynotes

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is a Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education at Western University in Ontario, Canada. Her writing and research contributes to the Common Worlds Research Collective (tracing children’s relations with places, materials, and other species), and the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory (experimenting with the contours, conditions, and complexities of 21st century pedagogies). She is currently the principal investigator of the SSHRC Insight Grant Transforming Waste Pedagogies in Early Childhood Education, and directs the SSHRC Partnership Development Grant Exploring Climate Change Pedagogies with Children.

Abstract of presentation: Childhood and Temporalities in Common World Pedagogies

John Potter is Professor in Media Education at the University College London Institute of Education, based in the UCL Knowledge Lab. His research, teaching and publications are in the fields of: media education, new literacies, creative activity and learner agency; theories of curation and agency in social media; the changing nature of teaching and learning in response to the pervasive use in wider culture of media technologies in formal and informal settings. He has worked in literacy and media in education throughout his working life, as: a primary school teacher in East London; a local authority education advisor; a teacher educator and, most recently, as an academic and researcher, teaching on MA programmes and supervising doctoral students. In his work, he argues for a wider definition of literacy which encompasses the culture, interests and agency of learners, and proposes pedagogies which value the cultural capital which all social actors in formal and informal settings bring with them.

Abstract of presentation: Play, performance and palimpsest in children’s lived experience in the digital age, including in the time of a global pandemic

Kaisa Vehkalahti is Senior Research Fellow, and Adjunct Professor of Cultural and Social History at the University of Oulu. Vehkalahti specializes in the history of childhood, youth and education. In spring 2019 Vehkalahti received a 5-year Academy Research Fellowship with her project Rural Generations on the Move. Cultural History of Rural Youth, 1950-2020. The project begins in September 2019. Vehkalahti lectures in history of childhood, youth and education, research ethics and digital humanities. She supervises theses related to her research. She leads the multidisciplinary research team focusing on History of Childhood and Education ‘Lapanen’. She is PI for Eudaimonia-funded emerging project Northern Rural Youth in Flux (NorFlux), and EU-funded Horizon2020 project PROMISE (2016–2019). Her current research interests focus on the history of longitudinal studies and changing rural youth in Finland.

Abstract of presentation: Looking for the child in history. Voice and agency in the history of childhood.