The School of Education – University of Iceland, which hosts the first GELYDA conference, conducts important research and education for key professionals in school, leisure and extended education activities. The main theme of the conference, Education, Youth Work, and the Well-being og Children and Young People, aligns perfectly with recent Icelandic legislation on integrated services for children. This legislation mandates coordination and dialogue between community sectors, institutions, professions, and staff to address urgent challenges in the lives of children and youth.
Andreas Schleicher
From school as the world to the world as the school
In today’s world, education is no longer just about teaching students something, but about helping them develop a reliable compass and the tools to navigate with confidence through an increasingly complex, volatile and uncertain world. Success in education today is about building curiosity – opening minds, it is about compassion –opening hearts, and it is about courage, mobilising our cognitive, social and emotional resources to take action. And those are also our best weapon against the biggest threats of our times – ignorance – the closed mind, hate – the closed heart, and fear – the enemy of agency.
The kind of things that are easy to teach and test have become easy to digitize and automate. We know how to educate second-class robots, people who are good at repeating what we tell them. In this age of accelerations and artificial intelligence, we need to think harder about what makes us human. The future is about pairing the artificial intelligence of computers with the cognitive, social and emotional skills and values of human beings.
The conventional approach in school is often to break problems down into manageable bits and pieces and then to teach students how to solve these bits and pieces. But modern societies create value by synthesising different fields of knowledge, making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated, connecting the dots where the next innovation will come from.
In the past, schools were technological islands, with technology often limited to supporting and conserving existing practices, and students outpacing schools in their adoption of technology. Now schools need to use the potential of technologies to liberate learning from past conventions and connect learners in new and powerful ways, with sources of knowledge, with innovative applications and with one another.
The past was also divided – with teachers and content divided by subjects and students separated by expectations of their future career prospects; with schools designed to keep students inside, and the rest of the world outside; with a lack of engagement with families and a reluctance to partner with other schools. The future needs to be integrated – with an emphasis on the inter-relation of subjects and the integration of students.
In today’s schools, students typically learn individually and at the end of the school year, we certify their individual achievements. But the more interdependent the world becomes, the more we need great collaborators and orchestrators. We can see during this pandemic how the well-being of countries depends increasingly on people’s capacity to take collective action. Schools need to help students learn to be autonomous in their thinking and develop an identity that is aware of the pluralism of modern living. This is important. At work, at home and in the community, people will need a broad understanding of how others live, in different cultures and traditions, and how others think, whether as scientists or as artists.
The presentation will look at how teachers, schools and school systems can rise to this challenge.
Jakob Þorsteinsson
Outdoor Education: What kind of extended education happens outside the door?
The aim is to offer insights into how outdoor environments can afford unique opportunities for learning, development, and well-being. Based on the research project “Affordances of Outdoor Education in Iceland: How nature contributes to place-based experience, reflection and friendship.” The project sheds light on a range of outdoor education activities that can be found as vital components in leisure and schools and tourism. The research aims to explore different aspects of outdoor activities in Iceland and highlight some key factors that have educational value and simultaneously place it in the context of children’s outdoor life. Nature itself takes precedence, but social interaction, personal experiences, place, and reflection are all key components that ensure that the outdoor activities become significant as outdoor education. In his presentation the focus will be on the value of outdoor experiential education in Iceland and how it relates to place, reflection and friendship in the context of nature. Emphasis will be placed on the practical significance of this research and the value of being active, relationships with yourself, others and nature, and the importance of collaboration between those working in education in both traditional and non-traditional sense will be discussed.
Ragný Guðjohnsen
How can we empower children and youth to ignite their passion and discover their true selves as individuals and active members of society.
In the present day, as has often been the case throughout history, the world faces urgent challenges related to freedom, equality, and the pursuit of peace within the global community. This presentation explores the vital role of young people in shaping a prosperous and just society—not only as future citizens but as active participants in the present. It emphasizes the importance of youth engagement in public life and their capacity to be agents of change in both local and global contexts. My discussion begins with the recognition that individuals and society are fundamentally interconnected. As articulated by classical philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, human flourishing depends on the structures, values, and norms embedded within the society we inhabit. Though they approached this interdependence differently, both saw the individual’s development as inseparable from the collective good. In this presentation, I will examine the concepts of freedom, engagement, and responsibility in young people’s lives through the lens of developmental civic agency framework.
The Global Extended Learning and Youth Development Association
(GELYDA)
Scholarship, Evidence Based Practice and Policy of Development, Learning and Well-Being.
https://www.gelyda.org/
Also available here: https://virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/#/event/73946/program