Early Start at the University of Wollongong will again welcome practitioners, policy makers and academics to its biennial Early Start Conference at the University of Wollongong on 27-29 September.
Early Start’s inaugural conference in 2015 was a huge success, with over 600 delegates from 11 countries coming together to enhance the ways in which people work with and care for children.
In 2017 Early Start hopes to expand on that success. The 2017 Conference Helping Children Flourish and Realise Their Potential: Translating Research for Policy, Practice and Community, will again bring together academics, policy makers and practitioners from across discipline boundaries to cultivate best practice and innovation and ultimately aim to improve early childhood education and practice.
A range of high profile national and international speakers will contribute to the conference including Andreas Schleicher (Director for the Directorate of Education, OECD), Steven Barnett (Rutgers University), Sally Peters (University of Waikato) and Paul Leseman (Utrecht University) among others. Conference streams include:
• children’s thinking and learning
• healthy lifestyles and physical activity
• growing through relationships
• social inclusion, and
• children’s learning spaces.
The University of Wollongong’s Academic Director of the Early Years program Dr Cathrine Neilsen-Hewett said that “the conference provides great opportunity for early childhood education and care practitioners to enhance their knowledge in an interdisciplinary environment. The conference provides quality professional development for all early childhood educators and may assist early childhood teachers with meeting the newly implemented NESA accreditation requirements”.
For further information about the 2017 Early Start conference, see www.earlystart.uow.edu.au/conference
Early Start looks forward to seeing you in Wollongong in September.