Conference Agenda

This paper reflects on the phenomenon of “brain drain” in Mauritius, a post-colonial country, part of the Global South. After five decades of political independence, the country’s educational systems remain structurally tethered to its colonial history with the British and French. Brain drain is not only a consequence of economic migration but also regarded as a systemic outcome of a Eurocentric curriculum that trains students for Western labour markets rather than local retention.

The author, a Mauritian, shares through her firsthand educational experiences, along with her research methodologies, the concerns on epistemic alienation in Mauritius’s educational system, framing it within the broader context of the Global South. The research focuses on the curriculum and approaches of Mauritians towards Eurocentric education, where the success metrics are almost exclusively Western. The dominance of the Cambridge International Examinations and the private schools' International Baccalaureate (IB) programme created an educational ecosystem where knowledge is only validated when it mirrors European standards. This study argues that the curriculum functions as a form of “epistemic alienation” where students are culturally and intellectually prepared to function in the Global North while becoming estranged from the specific development needs of their home country. As the author relocated to her home country to focus on the fieldwork of her doctoral thesis, she was welcomed with sympathies and regarded as a “failure” among her colleagues and acquaintances for returning to Mauritius after spending years abroad.

As Andreotti, V. (2011) and Smith, L. T. (2012) stated, the need to disrupt these deeply ingrained hierarchies to forge more inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogies is a must. This paper invites European educators and policymakers to reconsider their internationalisation strategies and questions how we improve sustainable education in post-colonial nations. How can we act to transform these predatory relationships into genuine, reciprocal partnerships?

Through an analysis of OECD financial data and international student fee structures, the study then illuminates two types of extractions, namely, financial extraction and epistemic extraction. Financial extraction reflects on Mauritian families transferring significant capital to Europe through non-EU tuition fees, which can be up to 300% higher than domestic rates. At the EDULOG international conference 2025 in Porto, Portugal, this issue was addressed but not resolved. The conference tackled the concept of internationalisation and whether international students were regarded as a profitable industry or a prevalence of academic or socio-cultural values. However, it made the author question, how is Europe aiding the Global South with internationalisation, for the migrations are taking place in search of better economic stability and as an escape from the colonial aftermath?

The epistemic extraction is depleting human capital from Mauritius. The brightest young minds are syphoned into European industries after completing their tertiary education. The average international Mauritian graduate relates to being more accustomed to European or Western work fields rather than their home country. Fanon (1963) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) have emphasised the importance of reclaiming native knowledge systems and challenging Eurocentric narratives that dominate education.

The framework of this study is a synthesis of decolonial theory and academic dependency theory. It argues that colonialism didn’t end when Mauritius got independence; it moved from a political control to a mental control through the educational curriculum. Based on the work of Aníbal Quijano and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the paper explores how students are taught the “real” knowledge that comes from Europe, which will make them “smart” and “successful”. The paper also reflects Paulin Hountondji’s extraversion theory, supported by Immanuel Wallerstein’s concept of world system theory and Ramón Grosfoguel and Walter Mignolo’s approach to decoloniality.

The consideration is whether a workshop can be designed and justified as an independent research instrument for generating credible qualitative data in educational research, rather than being treated as an instructional activity or a component of action research. The aim of the talk is to introduce a concrete workshop protocol designed to study adolescents’ urban affordances (students aged 13–15): the opportunities and constraints that young people experience in the city in relation to learning, participation, and agency, with particular attention to their “third places” beyond school and home. The empirical domain functions as a demonstration case.

My methodological questions for conceptualising the workshop as a research method are:

• Which design components must a research workshop include to function as a standalone instrument?
• Which facilitation strategies support ethical and authentic youth participation?
• How should workshop outputs be documented and analysed?

For the conceptualisation of the research instrument, I draw on workshop-as-methodology literature. I use workshop typologies (including idea-generating workshops and the future workshop) as design references, and I use the Purpose–Outcomes–Process model to clarify the research purpose, expected outcomes, and the workshop process. The protocol also includes participation safeguards (e.g., anonymity options and structured small-group work).

The international dimension lies in the transferability of the method: adolescents’ third places and access to urban opportunities are shaped by comparable challenges across cities and villages under conditions of globalisation. For cross-national use, the protocol keeps a stable core (the same prompts, artefacts, and coding approach), while allowing contextual sensitivity to cultural differences (e.g., forms of expression and communication styles).

My arts-based pedagogical docoral research in the field of visual arts education explores the process of assigning upper secondary school students in art education to deal with issues of social justice by creating socially engaged art (SEA) in which they engage with other people – either each other or people outside the classroom. In this study, the objective is to find out what kind of learning, critical thinking, and experience of empowerment becomes possible when proactively facing societal challenges through contemporary art.

In the era we live in, the world is literally on fire. Crises increase polarization and divisions among people, while it is widely recognized that the wicked problems of our time require cooperation for resolution. Contemporary art can provide tools for the necessary societal change. For instance, SEA directs the attention of viewer-participants to interaction, and social and ethical changes. SEA is understood in this research as art where the artist is in some kind of direct contact with other people at some stage of the artwork process.

My research question is: How can social justice issues important for young people be addressed in visual arts education using SEA as the technique, what is the learning potential of the process, and how can it strengthen students’ agency? Answering this question requires addressing three sub-questions related to the three perspectives of my research:
1) Youth-oriented perspective: How do social justice issues appear to students, and how do they confront them?
2) Art pedagogical perspective: How can SEA be introduced into the art classroom as a technique (rather than merely as a “phenomenon” of contemporary art), what skills do students need to create SEA themselves, and how can the teacher support them?
3) Ethical perspective: What ethical considerations must be taken into account when students create SEA, where artistic work happens in interaction between the student and other people rather than classroom-typical materials?

My theoretical framework consists of the previous research related to the concepts of social justice, critical (art) pedagogy and SEA. The theoretical framework will be supplemented as the research progresses, depending on the themes that emerge from the empirical material. On social justice, my starting point is the reseach by Amartya Sen (2010), who explores justice through the lens of the capability approach, emphasizing what individuals are effectively able to be and do. On critical (art) pedagogy, I rely on classics in the field such as Freire (1971) and hooks (1994), without forgetting the perspective of contemporary researchers (Giroux 2020; Hodgson, Vlieghe & Zamojski 2017) since critical pedagogy is not historical entity but changing in parallel with societal development. About SEA the central theory comes from art history (Kaitavuori 2020; Haapalainen 2018; Bishop 2012; Frieling et al. 2008) as well as research examining its connections with pedagogy (Helguera 2011).

I conduct arts-based pedagogical research (Suominen et al. 2018) in the context of visual arts education by positioning myself as a researcher-teacher. In autumn 2026, I will collect research material from upper secondary school’s contemporary art course, which I teach myself. By combining the material with my theoretical framework I will approach the process of making SEA, its conditions, and possibilities in the everyday school environment. The research will be completed in 2028 and published as a monograph.

The contemporary audiovisual ecosystem is undergoing accelerated transformations that fundamentally impact educational methods across all school levels. While instruction is no longer defined solely by classical cinematic texts, but increasingly includes transmedia formats, podcasts, and AI-generated content, the school environment in the Czech Republic remains strictly bound by the 45-minute lesson unit. Within this temporal framework, the use of audiovisual clips dominates over the viewing of complete films. However, the selection of these clips is currently based on a normative model derived from "expert intuition" rather than empirical data.
This doctoral research proposes a necessary epistemological turn—shifting from a normative to an empirical model of material selection. It addresses the critical conflict between the teacher, often acting as a "digital immigrant" influenced by a preference for linear narratives and slower pacing, and the student, a "digital native" accustomed to the fragmented, vertical, and accelerated content of the current online ecosystem. This disconnect often leads to affective rejection or disengagement in the classroom.
The theoretical framework is anchored in an adapted version of Kathleen McCormick’s theory of repertoires (1994). The study conceptualizes the didactic situation as a dynamic interaction between three distinct repertoires:

• The Textual Repertoire: The formal, narrative, and ideological properties of the clip itself.
• The Student Repertoire: The out-of-school media practice, currently defined by verticality and fragmentation.
• The Teacher Repertoire: Pedagogical goals and personal aesthetics formed by classical cinema and television.

The primary aim is to analyze the tension and "intergenerational disjuncture" between the student and teacher repertoires. By utilizing Affect Theory and Cognitive Film Theory, the research examines both the embodied, non-verbal affective responses of students and their cognitive processing of didactic clips. The goal is to verify criteria for material selection directly with the primary recipients—the students—to ensure that audiovisual clips function not just as illustrative supplements, but as autonomous "didactic objects" that foster media literacy and critical thinking.

As far as we know, there hasn’t been another species that had shaped the systems they live with in a such scale and pace as Homo sapiens. We are not the only species that affect the global futures, but we are the only species that have become aware of the magnitude of our effect (Värri 2018). This creates a moral, ethical and practical question: how should we deal with this knowledge? The present moment resembles “post‑normal times” (Sardar, 2010), marked by tensions between the established and the emergent, and by the hijacking of critical scrutiny to justify dis/misinformation and epistemic relativism (Latour, 2024). In a post‑truth climate, meanings detach from words, and words from material worlds, making “truth” appear a matter of opinion.

Guidance counselling is one societal practice which helps individuals and groups navigate life, futures, and uncertainty. In Finland, all students in basic and secondary education have a legal right to qualified guidance, with professional ethics that emphasise truthfulness—acting honestly and tactfully while providing information that is up‑to‑date, reliable, diverse and conducive to critical evaluation (Suomen opinto-ohjaajat ry, 2021). These epistemic commitments are neither neutral nor fixed. This paper approaches guidance as a world‑making (wor(l)ding) practice in which performances of “truthfulness” both shape—and are shaped by—polarisation, mis/disinformation and ecological crises.

The discussion on guidance for sustainable futures often appears under “green guidance,” which situates career counselling within histories of Western science, individualism, and middle‑class norms, and challenges practitioners and policymakers to move beyond a narrow focus on individuals, Western knowledge, and over‑consuming economic growth (Plant, 2014). Recent work calls for a “relational turn” so that guidance can better respond to the needs of individuals, societies, and the planet (Toiviainen & Bilon‑Piórko, 2025). I extend these debates through relational onto‑epistemology and agential realism (Barad, 2007), treating reality as inseparable, ongoing entanglements produced through material‑discursive intra‑actions (see also Juelskjær, 2023; Murris, 2023). “Truthfulness” is not a static property but a phenomenon that does world‑making work in and through practice.

The study draws on writings from 18 Finnish guidance counsellors and dialogic conversations with 11 of them. The analytic approach is diffractive and relational: rather than coding for discrete themes within pre‑given entities, I read counsellors’ texts and dialogues through/with theoretical apparatuses to trace how human and more‑than‑human relations, truth claims, and ethical commitments are enacted. The analysis follows the phenomenon—truthfulness—as it takes shape across practices of information provision, uncertainty framing, temporal and spatial scaling, and engagements with environments, infrastructures, and technologies.

The talk offers analytical sketches of how human and more‑than‑human are detached and/or entangled within guidance counselling, and what the ethical concept of truthfulness does as part of these entanglements. Empirically, the paper surfaces how truthfulness enacts with/in Finnish guidance counselling amid ecological and epistemic crises. Conceptually, it reframes truthfulness as a relational, more‑than‑human practice rather than a property of statements. Practically, it articulates implications for guidance ethics, professional learning, and policy—expanding “green guidance” and advancing the proposed relational turn (Plant, 2014; Toiviainen & Bilon‑Piórko, 2025; Barad, 2007). In sum, I argue that truthfulness, performed as material‑discursive care, can strengthen guidance as a practice that contributes to democratic and sustainable futures in post‑normal times.

The research literature indicates the existence of a lack of knowledge in relation to the systems used by school leaders to monitor student progress and development in post-primary schools in the European context. This is especially evident in the Irish post-primary context. Here there is a dearth of empirical literature relating to data-informed approaches to the monitoring of student progress and development and what does exist relates to data-informed decision-making broadly, especially related to the enactment of school self-evaluation in primary and post-primary schools in Ireland. This research aims to explore some case study examples of best practice in the use of data collected for the purpose of monitoring students’ progress and development in post-primary schools in Ireland. As such, this research posed three questions to advance knowledge in the field. The first research question sought to explore what systems are in place for monitoring of students’ progress and development in post-primary schools in Ireland. The second research question aimed to identify how school leaders are using the data collected. Finally, the third research question sought to elucidate what sort of processes might be useful to engage stakeholders i.e. students, parents and staff.

To inform answers to these questions, the literature was engaged with to formulate a provisional conceptual understanding, which was strengthened through the application of data-informed decision-making theory (Mandinach and Schildkamp, 2021a). Subsequently, a multi-site case study was designed and carried out with the purpose of providing rich and deep accounts of the practice of monitoring student progress and development in eight Irish post-primary schools. Within-site findings and across-site analysis were undertaken, through which seven overarching themes were identified. These findings are examined in relation to the relevant literature underpinning the study. This analytical process facilitates the synthesis of insights across sites and informs an overall interpretation of the research problem. School leaders today are navigating an increasingly complex datafication of education, where individual practices and institutional processes are represented in digital data to track, profile, and predict student learning (Pangrazio, Selwyn and Cumbo, 2023; Shi, 2025). Datafication describes the transformation of social interactions into measurable digital formats that enable real-time monitoring and analysis. It denotes a complex process in which the increasing prominence of data deeply influences values, practices and experiences turning teachers into data workers, students into data subjects and the classroom into learning and behavioural data markets. This research corroborates previous findings that the widespread harnessing of data shapes the ways actors in the education space, such as teachers, students, parents, school leaders, policy makers and school evaluators, form opinions and make decisions. The findings lend support to the argument that data has become an integral aspect to guide school improvement and evaluate students and teachers (Shi, 2025). This study builds on existing research by demonstrating that while education systems globally are investing significant capital in robust data systems to provide real-time performance information, the actual implementation within Irish post-primary schools is a multifaceted negotiation between standardised and non-standardised metrics and holistic professional judgement (Drake, 2021). The findings also suggest that monitoring is no longer a simple administrative task, but a strategic tool used to promote equity and student achievement.