Spotlight on learner identity through series of seminars

Educational practitioners and researchers can debate questions around learner identities through a series of seminars and symposia at Edge Hill University.

The Centre for Learner Identity Studies (CLIS) has put together a programme of events to encourage professionals in the field to share research and practice and explore the impact of learners' educational experiences, processes and outcomes.

Any individual's motivation to learn, achieve and aspire to self-development is a fundamental product of who they believe themselves to be and how they feel about that belief.

The CLIS seminars aims to bring together new and continuing researchers and scholars from education and other disciplines interested in matters surrounding learner identity.

Topics cover issues such as masculinity in higher education, stories of the self, attachment behavior and expression and illusionary inclusion.

Dr Arthur Chapman, Reader in Education, said: "Our core mission is to understand learners better and to focus upon individual lives because this helps us to listen to what they can tell us about improving education. The series of seminars and symposia we have put together reflects the diversity of the research and practice that is happening in this field and will allow us to explore and critique the contexts that give rise to who, or what, learners conceive themselves to be, and the teaching and learning conditions that can affect identity formation and transformation."

The programme runs until July 2012. Sessions running until the end of the autumn academic term includes:

• Problematicising phenomenography as an educational research methodology, Dr Fiona Hallet, 21^st October, 12.45pm to 2pm.
• Applying theory to educational research - symposium and book launch, Professor Jeff Adams, 18^th November, 12.45pm to 3.30pm.
• Masculinity in higher education: male students' engagement in academic and pastoral services, Professor Liz Thomas, 16^th December, 12.45pm to 3.30pm.

For more information about the full programme or to book a place, email indentitystudies@edgehill.ac.uk.