45th Congress of the Nordic Educational Research Association

The NERA 2017 Congress will be held 23-25 March 2017 at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark. The theme of the congress is "Learning and education - material conditions and consequences".

The material conditions for education, pedagogy and learning are undergoing considerable changes. New technologies, materials and methodologies emerge and have many consequences for pedagogy, teaching and learning.

Pedagogical situations are increasingly mediated by technology, and the interface between formal and informal learning is becoming more and more blurred. Specialized educational technologies (such as MOOCS) promise to make learning and education much more widely available, and mainstream technologies such as computer-games, smartphones, and social media are increasingly present in education, both as everyday conditions of educational work and as deliberate means for improving educational situations. But this development is uneven and technological divides reappear in many contexts worldwide.

New understandings of material conditions are also informing the theory and practice of education. New methods (like neuroimagining and tracing of biological markers) are used to studying processes of learning, and the material elements of educational settings are increasingly recognized. As part of this, there is an increased focus on the body as a resource and arena for learning and socializing practices. This makes it possible to tailor education and pedagogy much more closely to different learners and situations. The harvesting, aggregating and application of data contributes to such personalized learning environments, but it also worms at other levels, such as monitoring the performance of educational institutions and the efficiency of policies. This often implies an uneasy mix of support and control.

The conference will explore these trends in the material conditions for educational practice and research and explore their consequences for education and learning in the