ESCalate Conference - April 2011

We were asked by the University to attend the ESCalate conference at Liverpool Hope University on Monday 11^th April to showcase our creativity project. Although the university had asked us to take part in the conference, we still had to apply to ESCalate for a place in the conference. For this we created an A0 poster that gave an outline to our project, as well as the progress and achievements that the students had made. On the Monday before the conference we heard back that we had been accepted and that we would be going to Liverpool to present our poster.

The conference focussed on enterprise within education and embedding employability in teacher education courses. Throughout the day we attended a number of sessions that were led by university lecturing staff, students and other professionals. They provided an interesting insight into their chosen fields and they left us with a number of things to think about such as:

• how different universities approach creativity
• how some teacher training institutions work with the community around them to enhance the courses they offer
• the use of enterprise alongside education, something that our Creativity project tries to tap into.

The main highlight of the day was a key note lecture by Dr Paul Redmond, head of Careers and Employability at Liverpool University, who spoke about ‘crunchonomics’ through a creative and informative platform.

During the lunch break there was time dedicated for the viewing of poster’s in the main atrium. It was interesting to see other professional’s projects and to gain an understanding of how differing creative approaches have had an impact upon education. The feedback we received from lecturing staff and students alike was extremely positive towards our poster and project as a whole. Since then we have received further praise from attendees at the conference who have commented on the blog.

By attending the event we found that it has highlighted that our university course has instilled us with the professionalism required within education. Additionally it has ensured coverage of the broad range of standards as set out by the Teaching Development Agency, putting us in good stead to enter the teaching profession. Producing and presenting at a conference gave us all great experience in the world of Academia. 

Here is a copy of the poster that we submitted to the conference. 

Please click here for a larger copy of our poster.

To find out more information about the Escalate Conference follow this link.  

© Sophia Koiston, Oliver Hughes and Helen Goodall 2010