NACE 2014 - The IAFOR North American Conference on Education 2014 NACE2014

As IAFOR’s previous education conferences have shown, education has the power to transform and change whilst it can also be transformed and changed. This theme continues into 2014 in the European, North American and Asian Conferences on Education.
Globalized education systems are becoming increasing socially, ethnically and culturally diverse. However, education is often defined through discourses embedded in Western paradigms as globalised education systems become increasingly determined by dominant knowledge economies. Policies, practices and ideologies of education help define and determine ways in which social justice is perceived and acted out. What counts as ‘education’ and as ‘knowledge’ can appear uncontestable but it is contestable and partial, disempowering all but dominant groups. Discourses of learning and teaching regulate and normalise gendered and classed, racialised and ethnicised understandings of what learning is and who counts as a learner.
In many educational settings and contexts throughout the world, there remains an assumption that teachers are the possessors of knowledge which is to be imparted to students, and that this happens in neutral, impartial and objective ways. However, learning is about making meaning, and learners can experience the same teaching in very different ways. Students (as well as teachers) are part of complex social, cultural, political, ideological and personal circumstances, and current experiences of learning will depend in part on previous ones, as well as on age, gender, social class, culture, ethnicity, varying abilities and more.
In this conference ? one of a series of three held in 2014 on transforming and changing education ? participants are invited to explore the educational borderlands of becoming and belonging, including borderlands of geography, ‘difference’, culture, educational discourses, policies and practices, and so on.