Innovative Global Education comprises of Andrea Muller and Tania Lattanzio. Innovative Global Education is dedicated to meeting the individual needs of educational organizations through flexible, diverse and personalized services.

In order to continue to diversify our services we are offering a Conference which constitutes a critical keynote address followed by a series of dynamic workshops in Singapore at the Australia International School of Singapore, in Singapore 14 to 15 of September, 2013.

Innovative Global Education Welcomes:

Key Note Speaker - Dr. Jennifer Pei-Ling Tan

Dr. Jennifer Pei-Ling Tan is a Research Scientist at NIE's Office of Educational Research. Immediately prior to her current NIE role, Dr. Tan was Vice President Academics (Head of Education Sciences) at Richard Chandler Corporation, a multi-billion dollar private investment group with a mission to bring transformational education and healthcare initiatives to the critical masses in low-income countries. She was responsible for leading a team of experienced educationists to design, implement, and evaluate the impact of a suite of K-12 and workplace learning innovations—in curriculum, pedagogy and assessment—aimed at promoting creativity and wellbeing, alongside conventional domain knowledge. 

From 2010 to 2011, Dr. Tan held the position of Global Research Manager (Programme Impact) at the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IB), a not-for-profit education foundation and recognised leader in the field of international education. The IB Diploma Programme is adopted in several Integrated Programme and specialised schools in Singapore. Based in the IB’s Asia Pacific Global Centre in Singapore, Dr. Tan was responsible for developing and managing the IB’s global research agenda, partners and projects. Her research management portfolio focused on evaluating the impact of IB’s holistic K-12 educational programmes on diverse learners, teachers and schools worldwide.

Dr. Tan has university teaching and research experience in both Singapore and Australia. During her employment with Queensland University of Technology in Australia from 2004 to early 2010, Dr. Tan made unique contributions to the research and international development activities of her university-based research centres, resulting in two service awards from the Dean. In that period, she supported and managed several government and industry funded research projects. These focused on the development, implementation and evaluation of learning innovations aimed at fostering 21st century skills in young people. She remains an international research affiliate of the Creative Workforce Program within the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia.

Dr. Tan’s expertise across a range of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies has led to a number of invited guest lectures and consultancies, in both university and industry settings, on mixed methods research design and techniques.

Keynote Presentation Title:

Education Innovation for 21st Century Learning Outcomes: Enablers and Constraints

Synopsis 

There is mounting critique that our formal schooling systems are failing to prepare our students  for  real-world learning, living and earning. So what counts as 21C learning outcomes, can these be cultivated in students, and if so, how? These arguably constitute three of the most imperative questions beleaguering educators in the new millennium. While we may be seeing many instances of incremental innovation in both curriculum and pedagogy worldwide, these ‘tinkerings’ have yet to engender a transformational tipping point that is both systemic and sustainable.

To date, explanatory accounts of this global educational challenge tend to paint a deficit view of schools and teachers, blaming the lack of resources and teacher resistance as key barriers to change. Paradoxically, interventions over the past two decades that have focused on increasing funding and up-skilling teachers have not yielded significant changes in policy, pedagogy and practice. As a profession and global knowledge community, it is high time we pushed beyond naïve deficit discourses to examine the cultural and pedagogical complexities of education innovation within long-established conventions of mainstream schooling.

This serves as the central tenet of Dr Tan’s keynote address. In her talk, Dr Tan will first provide an overview of three well-known international 21C curriculum frameworks that converge on a suite of cognitive, digital, social and life skills essential to our new knowledge economy, and the pedagogical innovations that evidently foster 21C learning outcomes. She will then use empirical findings from a comparative case study to tease out and foreground the deeply-entrenched mindsets and sociocultural identities governing students’ and teachers’ choices and behaviours in daily schooling that militate – often unsuspectingly- against the most well-intentioned of pedagogical innovations. The hope is that this presentation will generate more nuanced insights and productive pathways as we press on in our collective quest to better meet the learning needs and social future imperatives of our young people.

Workshops

Participants Information