Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 11 Summer 2019 | Page 22

Reflections
on Keele
Learning and
Teaching
Conference
Reflections on Keele Learning and
Teaching Conference
Editorial Welcome
Dear JADE Readers,
It is with great pleasure that we include in our 11th edition of
JADE, a compilation of reflections and a taste of the quality and
sheer quantity of educational excellence that was on display
at this year’s Keele Learning and Teaching Conference. This
huge event was held in the prestigious Keele Hall Ballroom on
the 30th of January 2019, marking not only a celebration of
all things educational at Keele but it also marking the official
launch of the new Keele Institute for Innovation and Teaching
Excellence (KIITE) (https://www.keele.ac.uk/kiite/).
Reflections on
Keele Learning and
Teaching Conference
Videos and abstracts
from the conference
can be accessed at:
bit.ly/2TS4SIq
The theme for the event was “Social Learning” and what that
means in a range of HE contexts. I can share that the uptake
of submissions to present under this theme was a veritable
avalanche of excellent practice, innovative research and
deep reflection. The very first thing that struck me as both
co-organiser and a spectator of this event was that of the 21
presentations that were shortlisted to speak from over 46
submissions (all these fantastic abstracts are included below as
we just had to share them all with you), many of these projects
had been the recipients of in-house innovation funding, which
pump primes educational research and innovation. This shows
clearly that these sorts of small educational grants can lead to
quite significant outputs and quality educational scholarship.
The Keynote presentation “Digital = People = Social = Learning”
was ably delivered by Dr. Simon Thomson from the Centre
for Innovation in Education, University of Liverpool and rather
than offer too many of my own reflections on this and risk
stealing the thunder of our guest authors, I`ll limit myself to
just mentioning that Simon offered a range of both challenging
questions and interesting solutions to building digital spaces in a
social and theoretically-informed way from the ground up.
Following this exciting keynote, once the main diet of
presentations got underway it was clear that the pedagogic
theory and underpinning philosophy of every speaker was front
and center, highlighting the informed stances of the innovative
works on display.
I made the point during my own welcome on the day that
having been part of the organisational team for this event for
22