5-7 July, 2007 - Le Meridien Hotel - Brussels, Belgium

 

The International Center on Service-Learning in Teacher Education will bring together teacher educators from around the world to clarify service-learning language, share professional work, and explore possibilities for future collaboration on issues of research, policy, and practice. We encourage K-12 teachers (kindergarten through second level of secondary schooling) and student teachers experienced in service-learning to participate.

 

We will open the conference with the World Café process that seeks to Shape Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter. As Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science, comments,

 

"We humans want to talk together about things that matter to us. In fact, this is what gives satisfaction and meaning to life. Second, as we talk together we are able to access a greater wisdom that is found only in the collective."

Exploring Service-Learning

This conference seeks to provide a variety of settings for conversations that matter about service-learning in teacher education. For example:

• 90-minute Interactive Workshops develop an understanding of major concepts and skills for high quality service-learning implementation. An individual or a team may facilitate.
• 90-minute Panel Discussions present papers on research, coursework/syllabi, and project examples. Each presenter will speak for 20 minutes. These will be combined with the work of others in similar fields with no more than three papers to a session. A facilitator will coordinate the session.



• 45-minute Roundtable Discussions engage a small group of people (about 10) in discussion of research, a case study, or issue. Roundtables provide a focused time for learning from one another. Presenters may provide participants with a complete paper or a brief (1-2 page) written summary. Participants then brainstorm, exchange ideas, or ask and answer questions.

 

 

Because we want to stimulate effective international connections, we encourage you to explore the possibility of collaborating on a proposal with a professor or teacher from a different country. (Should you be interested in locating an international co-presenter, consider using the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse higher education listserv, which you can join by going to their Web site, http://www.servicelearning.org).