European Regional Conference
Speakers
Breaking News - Friday speaker added
 Brynhildur Anna Ragnarsdóttir, leads the Language Clinic, a multilingual, multicultural development project which seeks to coordinate the development of web-based learning and distance teaching of foreign langages within the system of compulsory education in Iceland.
She has an MA-degree in education and her teaching experience includes lower and upper secondary schools, teacher education and in-service education for practicing teachers of languages.
Brynhildur is one of several developers of the Language Plaza, a a web-based meeting place centred around the learning and teaching of languages and multi-cultural school activities. The goal is that the expertise and services offered by the Language Plaza will be useful and accessible to as many as possible: a variety of groups of language instructors, school directors, parents and students.
The purposes of the Language Plaza are to ensure that students enjoy the equal opportunities which they have a right to according to law; encourage the cooperation of teachers working together without regard to their physical location; support in-service teachers with mutual communication and practical supplementary materials; share materials and harness the collective knowledge and experience of the users in a way that benefits all; respect the differing interests of widely dispersed centres of population, ensure that they flourish as a result of their own efforts and compare favorably to the capital city area.
The presentation will be an overview of the different functions of the Language Plaza, what role it plays in enabling each area of the country in the teaching of both foreign languages and the mother tongue and culture, how the users‘ pooled experience, be it from teachers, schools or local authorities, affects its progress and development and highlights good practices in various schools.
 Carl Parsons, visiting professor in Social Inclusion Studies at the University of Greenwich, London, will be the featured speaker for the Europe Regional Conference.
Credited with a degree in Sociology and a PhD in the sociology of curriculum change in schools, Professor Parsons has published numerous articles and books about school exclusions, evaluation, the the health-promoting school, inter-agency working, critiques of education policy initiatives and the relationship of ethnicity and poverty to school exclusion. His teaching experience includes primary, secondary and young offender institutions.
Writing in The Times, he argued that school exclusion is a punitive device, seldom operating to help the young person develop constructive and sociable behaviors. The Community School…is open for long hours, draws in the community to use its resources and has accommodated within it a range of professionals to help meet the needs of troubled and troublesome young people. He states, “The Community School is a global concept, interpreted locally, and promises a quiet revolution in the acceptance and inclusion of young people, their families and communities.”
 Prof. Dr. Christian Pfeiffer
Media Use and School Achievement
In 1985 Pfeiffer was appointed associate professor of Criminology, Juvenile Penal Law and the Penal System, in the Faculty of Law, University of Hannover; simultaneously granted leave of absence to work full-time at Criminological Research Institute, Lower Saxony (KFN), of which he is the director.
KFN is an independent, interdisciplinary research institute located in Hannover, Germany. Research teams have investigated various aspects of media use and their effects on recipients. One of these projects is ‘Media Use and School Achievment’.
The aim of this interdisciplinary research project is to investigate the consequences of intensive and increasingly uncontrolled television, computer and video games used by children and adolescents. A representative survey was designed to broadly examine how media usage can affect children and adolescents in their leisure time behavior, their social behavior and their school performance.
 Barbara Schindelhauer leads the Institute for Preschool Learning, founded in 2004 by Schindelhauer and Gerhard Friedrich, as advisor, and its nationwide advisory team in Germany. They have devised hands-on seminar concepts to develop and teach didactic concepts especially designed for early childhood needs. Schindelhauer is co-author of various publications, notably Numberland.
She studied business management and psychology in Mannheim. After graduating with a degree in business studies, she completed a postgraduate course in Scotland, and obtained an MSc in Communication. For several years she worked in marketing / sales with management responsibility for an international corporate group and spent a year in the United States.
The aim of the open concept program, Numberland is to help children acquire a profound, well-structured understanding of the basic numbers 1 to 10 and the numerals up to 20. They additionally acquire language competence and transferable skills such as concentration, cognition, social and motor skills, creative and music skills. Children and educators alike are encouraged to contribute their own ideas and matching activities.
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