The 38^th Annual international seminar of International Society for Teacher Education (ISfTE) happened last week in Japan from 13 to 18 May, hosted by Joetsu University of Education. The main participants of the conference were teacher educators, researchers and associated professionals, among which also Kinley Seden representing EDiTE and providing insights into her research findings.

The theme for the conference was Teacher Education in the Post Nation State Era: Education for welfare instead of warfare. The conference allowed groups to explore on critical global educational issues from a broad perspective by keeping the local challenges at the forefront during the discussions. It also enabled group to discuss on research findings and paper that are still in progress.

One of the unique trend of ISfTE’s was its small working group engaging in intensive dialogue following the papers offering feedback and suggestions to each paper within the working group. The essence of such platform was to improve the overall aspects of papers. During the conference, the first 2 days was spent on reading the group members papers and the third day was spent on presenting what each of the member expects from their members on the paper followed by critical and intensive dialogue on it. And during the final day, each group had to work on a way to present the final discussions capturing the essence of the whole group’s paper.

Kinley, who engaged in all activities throughout, had a very active role in one of the groups in staging a roleplay and facilitating knowledge from the group through their active engagement. She emphasized her group’s common theme as “active learning” wherein she briefly explained that the educators from all walks of life are expected to translate learning into action with assessment assessing learning rather than testing knowledge and by involving student in the assessment process. She also highlighted that the decolonization of curriculum should be done following a bottom up approach rather than top down and it should be deconstructed by the students. As the theme of the group was active learning, the presentation was ended with the note: “Teachers should do less of talking and more of doing in the classrooms.”

Kinley had the chance also to share information about EDiTE and discussed about the EDiTE project with the conference participants. Her biggest accomplishment from the conference was networking and finding expert in her research area who promised to render their support and feedback to better her research work. She looks forward to collaborating with these experts.