Theme: Education as Tension: Embracing Uncertainties and Complexities
Friday, March 27, 2026 | In-person
* Deadline for submissions extended to Monday, January 26
Download a copy of the EGS 2026 poster
The Education Graduate Students (EGS) Conference, an annual event organized by the students of the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, is set to take place once again. We welcome and encourage participation from all departments within the Faculty of Education. The main purpose of the conference is to showcase the work undertaken by graduate students in all its diversity of subjects and conceptual approaches to theory and practice. This event is also intended to provide a community space for participants to receive feedback from peers, and an opportunity to practice in preparation for national and international conferences.
The theme for this year’s conference is Education as Tension: Embracing Uncertainties and Complexities
In physics, tension is a force that causes motion or acceleration in objects. In literary analysis, tension reflects a sense of uncertainty, and anticipation created by a situation or conflict. In macramé, each knot requires a balance of tensions, neither pulling too tightly, nor leaving the threads too loose, to create the intended pattern. Drawing on these multiple senses, this year’s theme seeks to direct our attention to the more foundational tensions, pushes and pulls, co-habiting paradoxes that inform education as institution and as practice.
Educators and scholars are actively engaged with tensions in education – in its purposes, notions of best practices, and adaptations to changing times and technologies. The theme this year ‘Education as Tension’ is an attempt to think about the in-between spaces of tension we constantly dwell in and negotiate–whether between lived and planned curriculum (Aoki, 1986/1991); conserving the world and preserving newness (Arendt, 1961); teaching for socialization or subjectification (Biesta, 2017); education for liberation or dehumanization (Freire, 1970/2000).
To have a conversation on this theme here on traditional and unceded lands of the Musqueam people, facing the historical truth of violence perpetrated at and through residential schools, invites us to pause and consider the ways our teaching and learning experiences are framed, both for and by us; and how that informs our own understandings and practice of what we call ‘education’. We imagine the conversations generated at the Conference not as attempts to define solutions, but to sit with the contrarian, conflicting forces that shape our work – in both our thinking and practice.
This year’s theme has the capacity to invite a wide range of papers and inquiries within Curriculum and Pedagogy, including but not limited to tensions around:
- Questions of Representation and Legitimization
- Dominant and marginalized discourses in education
- In/Ex-clusions and hidden meanings in/ of educational spaces
- Education in shifting contexts of Local and Global
- Pedagogies of Disruption
- Discourses of authority, accountability and autonomy
- Teaching for justice
- Re/Constructing subjects in aesthetic education
- Curricular Complications
- Innovations and Tradition in education
- Schooling and Education
- Emergent Technologies and Education
Please note that these categories are indicative, and should not be considered as limiting the scope of the proposals. All proposals that speak to the broader theme of the Conference are welcome.
We invite you to submit your abstracts to edcpgradpeeradvisor@gmail.com
by January 26, 2026, using the subject line EGS submission. We accept presentations in several formats, including single papers, symposia/panels, and workshops/ creative modalities. The word limit for the abstracts for all the above formats is 300 words. We hope to see many of you in March!
References
Aoki, T. (1986/1991). Teaching as In-dwelling Between Two Curriculum Worlds. In W. F. Pinar & R. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 159-165). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.
Arendt, H. (1961). Between past and future: Six exercises in political thought. Penguin Books.
Biesta, G., Taylor & Francis eBooks A-Z, & Taylor & Francis eBooks EBA. (2017). The rediscovery of teaching. Routledge, Taylor & Francis group.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.; 30th anniversary ed.). Continuum. (Original work published 1970.)