Education Matters | NCEL hosts first international confab seminar this month

The National College for Educational Leadership [NCEL] will be hosting its first international conference, February 21-22, 2017, at The Pegasus hotel in Kingston.

The conference will provide a forum for recognising and sharing some of the educational leadership practices that are features of the Jamaican landscape. Delegates will also hear from Jamaicans in the diaspora about efforts to transform education systems across the world.

Through presentations in a variety of media, including panels and table discussions, delegates will engage in dialogue on those issues that matter, focusing on the role that education plays in transforming societies.

The key strands running through the two-day event will include:

- A focus on educational leaders who are disrupting the negative narratives about the communities they serve.

- The visionary way in which Jamaica has extracted the politics from their policies on education.

- What 21st-century citizenship should mean for the average Caribbean national.

- How we empower leaders to lead from the heart.

- How leadership preparation should release the genius of educators to innovate and create.

- How places of learning can become havens of belonging and reservoirs of hope for students, educators, and parents.

The conference, under the theme Transforming Educational Leadership: Disrupting Narratives, is intended to engage educational leaders in discourse about educational purpose and the role of school leadership in nation building at this critical time.

The central aim of the conference is to shift the narrative about education beyond a utilitarian role in economic development to the deeper questions about the kind of societies that we are trying to build in Jamaica and elsewhere. By re-imagining educational purpose, we can make explicit the transformational role that educational leadership can play in achieving the aspirations of nation building and citizenship as articulated in Vision 2030 for Jamaica.

This conference aims to highlight transformational leadership as practised across Jamaica and the diaspora.

This is a conference for practitioners and academics who are engaged in education throughout the system. The conference is aimed at an international audience of principals, vice-principals, and those aspiring to such positions across the educational landscape from early childhood through to tertiary. The conference is also open to system leaders, teacher training institutions, policymakers, advisers, leadership trainers, and all key stakeholders within the public and private sector.

To register for the conference, Transforming Educational Leadership: Disrupting Narratives, go to www.ncel.gov.jm.