Event: International Parenting Programme (IPP) Conference 2022
Date: 26-28 April 2022
Venue: University of Malta Valletta Campus
The Faculty of Education, University of Malta, through the Department of Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education, is delighted to host its International Parenting Programme (IPP) partner universities for a celebratory conference that looks back as much as it dreams forward. The event will bring academics, professionals, parents and students together to reflect on parent-focused issues.
A fundamental belief of the IPP consortium is that parent-professional partnership, to be read as a genuine act of communion, is based on the notion that human beings are in a continuous process of becoming, and that this process is communitarian, collective, and organic. Within this framework, critically engaging the world and searching for multi-layered, possibilitarian encounters constitute two core activities in the process of becoming more human; a process that is transformative for parents and for professional institutions that engage in such processes because it welds collective reading of the world with ongoing communal action for personal and social change.
Critical engagement with the immediate ecology of parents as a fundamental process of communal emancipation is key to challenging the ‘culture of silence’ that characterises traditional professional-parent relationships; a culture reproduced through hierarchical pedagogical engagements and fuelled by the privileging and foregrounding of professional esoteric knowledge.
This conference will reaffirm IPP’s primary intention to promoting meaningful and genuinely productive professional-parent encounters. The curricular experience of genuine communities of learning, where professionals and parents are concerned with mutuality and collective transformation as much as professionals addressing the individual needs of parents, provides ample opportunities for reflection, peer-tutoring, cooperative learning, and action. Within such contexts, professionals and parents experience democracy and rediscover life beyond deficiency, consumption, performativity, competition, capital, and the marketplace.
The conference site may be accessed online.
Enquiries should be addressed to Professor Carmel Borg, Head, Department of Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education, and convenor of the conference, by sending him an email.
