UNICEF and the University of Patras, Greece, held a conference on 6 and 7 June on academia’s role in promoting children’s rights. Over 100 representatives from universities and international bodies from 17 countries participated in the event.
Sessions on a variety of topics related to children’s rights took place throughout the conference. These included promoting children’s rights in society and access for all children to quality inclusive education.
EASNIE Director João Costa gave a keynote speech on the role of academic research in inclusive education. He presented EASNIE’s vision for inclusive education systems and key principles for implementing inclusive education, such as collaboration across sectors and using specialists in mainstream schools.
Dr Costa also focused on how academia can help to overcome challenges to implementing inclusive education. He described the importance of ensuring that initial and on-going teacher education prepare all teachers to teach all learners, specifically preparing them for contexts of diversity, differentiated pedagogies and for collaboration with specialists from other areas. He also talked about the need for academic research into areas where information is lacking, such as the role of artificial intelligence in education, multilingualism and quality assurance.
Other keynote speeches came from Roberta Ruggiero, Director of the Children’s Rights Academy at the University of Geneva, Theoni Koufonikolakou, Deputy Ombudswoman for children’s rights in Greece, and Joao Breda, Head of the World Health Organization Office on Quality of Care and Patient Safety in Greece.
The UNICEF website has more information on the conference, including videos of the presentations.
