Conferences and Events

During the lifetime of the project the research team took part in a wide range of conferences and events to publicise our work and to inform ourselves about aspects we were unfamiliar with. For example, project staff attended a one day "Basic Archiving" course and produced a discussion paper about it. At the time, we did not know much about archiving and the course broke down some of the mystique about archiving. It raised many questions though about the type and purpose of a Changing Faces Archive.

The Changing Faces team carried out workshops and gave papers at a number of national and regional conferences to publicise the project and invite discussion about our findings as they emerged. These include Research and Practice in Adult Literacy (RaPAL); the British Educational Research Association conference; the Learning Skills Research Network annual conference and the North West Research Network (LSDA); the Standing Conference on University Teaching and Research in the Education of Adults (SCUTREA); National Association for Teachers of English and Community Languages to Adults (NATECLA); Adults Learning Maths; Professor Hamilton gave two presentations about the project as part of a lecture tour of Australia in November 2002 (at the University of South Australia and Griffith University, Brisbane) and developed links with historians of the Australian Adult Language and literacy field with a view to developing comparative analyses.

We frequently collected new contacts, information for the timelines and artefacts for our archive from these events.

We developed this website as a means of communicating the progress of the research. This is also a place where people can contribute their experiences of ABE if we are unable to interview them face-to-face.

We were awarded a "capacity-building" grant from the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme and ran a training event on mixed methods research on October 29th, 2004.

Funding was also obtained for an ESRC Seminar Series which ran in parallel with the project. The theme of the series was linking theory, policy and practice in Adult asic Education. These seminars were an opportunity to air some initial findings from the Changing Faces Project and to develop our thinking with representatives from the research, policy and practitioner communities.