The 12th Conference of the European Science Education Research Association, and took place on August 21-25, 2017 in Dublin, Ireland.
UL’s EPI-STEM and CASTeL at Dublin City University (DCU) were co-hosts for the ESERA Conference. This was the biggest ESERA conference to date with over 1500 delegates attending the event from over 75 countries worldwide. The conference enabled audiences to share their research with an international research community and engage in discussion about the pressing issues in science, technology and environmental education research. The organization of the ESERA 2017 conference was led by DCU STEM Education Professors Eilish McLoughlin, Odilla Finlayson and UL’s Sibel Erduran and Peter Childs i.e. the two leading Irish STEM education research centers CASTeL at DCU and EPI-STEM at UL respectively.
The conference theme was Research, practice and collaboration in science education. Underlining these aspects of great relevance in contemporary science education research include, the need to reflect on different approaches to enhancing our knowledge of learning processes and the role of context, designed or circumstantial, formal or non-formal, in learning and instruction.
Due to this conferences’ renowned reputation, it was both a privilege and an honour for EPI-STEM and UL to have such a prominent role in the organisation of the event this year. This collaboration gave EPISTEM and UL international recognition by many distinguished science education researchers in many different education fields.
Several researchers and PhD students from EPI-STEM and the University of Limerick were in attendance and all presented their research at the conference. Among the UL representatives were Dr Peter Childs, Dr John O’ Reilly Dr Grainne Walshe, Dr Regina Kelly, Alison Cullinane, Sila Kaya, Onur Imren, Liam Guilfolye and Dr Sarah Hayes and Laurie Ryan.
Adding to this, Professor Paul Conway from EPI-STEM and the School of Education, UL was one of the keynote speakers at the event. His talk entitled The Good Science Teaching Quest(ion) examined science teacher education both nationally and aboard.
The next ESERA conference will be in Bologna Italy in 2019 from the 26th to the 30th of August. For information on this see the ESERA website. https://www.esera.org/
Link to article in siliconrepublic on the conference: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/dublin-science-conference-dcu