Sharing Project Findings Across Educational Conferences

As the project approaches the end, we have observed significant and interesting findings emerging from the activities, throughout the project. This includes, the findings from the Landscape Mapping Study and the findings of the study conducted to explore the change in teacher educators’ Behaviour, Attitude, Skill and Knowledge (BASK), post completion of the South Asian Teacher Educators Fellowship. While the landscape mapping study explored the current status of teacher professional development in Afghanistan, Maldives and Nepal, the BASK study explored the impact of the fellowship, which involved the participation of 15 teacher educators from each country in hybrid training, course work, enrichment sessions and implementation of action research with their respective school teachers. And last year, our project team members had taken part in educational conferences to present these findings and share our experiences to other international audiences. Here is a glimpse into the conferences.

5th Asia-Pacific Conference on Education, Teaching & Technology 2023, 20th-21st July, Bangkok, Thailand

Ms. Mariyam Nihaadh from the Maldives project, attended the conference in person which was held in Bangkok, Thailand. She presented findings from the Landscape Mapping Study of the three countries. One of the key findings include a lack of research culture amongst teachers and teacher educators for their professional development. She described her experience as “a great conference where I met participants who attended the conference from both categories. It was fortunate to network with researchers from across the world.” Later on in December 2023 a conference paper was published in the International Multidisciplinary Research Journal - ISSN 2424-7073 (A Canadian academic journal).

15th Asia Conference on Education 2023, 22th-25th November 2023, Tokyo, Japan

Dr. Aishath Nasheeda, lead researcher of the Maldives team, took part in the 15th Asia Conference on Education 2023, organized by The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) of Japan. She presented her findings at a panel alongside two other IDRC funded projects. Her presentation titled 'Mentoring an agent for change in collaborative action research process', highlighted the role of mentoring in helping teachers to adopt new and innovative teaching approaches.

Psychology of Mathematics Education Regional Conference 2023, 2nd - 4th December 2023, Khon Kaen, Thailand

Dr, Ruchi Kumar, co-principal investigator of the project from Tata Institute of Social Science, India, took part in the Psychology of Mathematics Education Regional Conference 2023. Her presentation was titled ‘Mathematics teacher educators supporting collaborative action research: Two cases from Nepal’ focused on two math educators from Nepal who supported collaborative action research on the topic of fractions and calculus conceptual understanding through hands-on activities and Geogebra activities respectively. The support of community and challenges faced were also elaborated. The conference paper was published by the Thailand Society of Mathematics Education in December 2023.

Participating and presenting in these conferences has been a transformative experience for our project, as we get to share our experiences with other projects and individual researchers and learn from their experiences as well.