Emily Dobrich was awarded best presentation for Alternative Education at the 2024 BERA/WERA conference for her presentation: An Embodied Educational Research Project to Build Solidarity and Awareness of Reconciliation. Dr Dobrich will be presenting findings from her doctoral research which sought to explore and respond to persistent educational inequalities within the Canadian education-migration system.

The research explored how embodied learning to strengthen intercultural sharing and solidarity building between migrant women in an alternative educational space. The objective the project was to develop a strengths-based pedagogical approach for newcomer education that shifts away from colonial and deficit logics using embodied learning practices, to explore the impact of these embodied learning on enhancing immigrant women’s self-determination and situated solidarity building. The study was underpinned by a critical approach to adult education, and a relational understanding of place, to share the histories of Indigenous Peoples missing from mainstream educational.

The insights and implications of this study will be of interest to educational researchers and practitioners working in community-based contexts, feminist scholarship and social justice activism. In the end, the project provides a hopeful example of the positive impacts from employing more diverse, engaged and culturally respectful community-oriented learning opportunities in transnational migration learning contexts.

Re-evaluating the dominant narrative is vital in developing an education system that can support and empower all who participate in it: learners, practitioners and the wider community. Whilst this has been a priority for UK universities for several years, similar endeavours have been more limited in compulsory and further education.

This session aims to spark discussion and foster further research collaborations. It will appeal to colleagues working across Europe and those based in countries whose indigenous histories have not traditionally been celebrated in the mainstream – globally and in the British Isles.

Draft Programme:

15:30pm         Welcome & Introduction; Fadoua Govaerts, University of Bath;
                           Sarah Gillie, University of the West of England; Sharon Smith,
                           University of Chester; Stefania Romano,  University of Leeds

15:40pm         Encouraging Intercultural Sharing and Community Building through 
                          Embodied Learning in an Alternative Education Space; Emily Dobrich, University
                           of Toronto

16:20pm         Q&A

16:50pm          Closing Remarks; Fadoua Govaerts, University of Bath;
                           Sarah Gillie, University of the West of England; Sharon Smith,
                           University of Chester; Stefania Romano,  University of Leeds

17:00pm         Close of Event