Keynote Speaker

Professor Larissa McLean-Davies

Executive Dean of the Faculty of Education and Arts, ACU 

Friday 17 July
8:00am-4pm
ACU St Patrick’s Campus
115 Victoria Pde, Fitzroy VIC

Register now

This annual one-day event brings together leaders and innovators in education for a truly unique journey of growth and inspiration. Dive into a powerful keynote presentation, thought-provoking discussions, illuminating spotlight sessions, inspiring presentations, and dynamic round table dialogues.

The Showcase will spotlight the rich, context-responsive learning happening across a broad range of settings as educators, teachers, leaders and young people respond deeply to the needs of their communities – enabling all to flourish. 

We understand flourishing as “all aspects of a person’s life being good, including the context in which they live” (VanderWeele & Lomas, 2024). Flourishing is shaped by the quality of our relationships, the environments we inhabit, and the opportunities we have that allow us to grow and contribute. Innovation, in this light, is not an add-on, a top-down directive, or a flashy solution. It is a constant, relational response to context—born from deep attention to what is emerging in our practice, in our learning, teaching and leading, and in our communities. It is realised when we reimagine challenges as sites of possibility and bring curiosity, creativity, risk-taking, and relational trust to our innovation work. 

Flourishing Through Innovation 

We are looking to showcase stories of flourishing through innovation related to ways educators, teachers, and school leaders are: 

• Responding to the emerging needs of their learning community, through localised learning, teaching, and leading actions and ways of being in community.
• Prototyping responses to challenges as opportunities through dynamic cycles of learning, teaching, and leading through feedback and informed action.
• Co-designing learning with young people and the broader community that is relevant and authentic which creates experiences of belonging and connectedness
• Storying learning, teaching, and leading by investing in relationships across their community that create the conditions for all to flourish.
• Re-imagining processes, structures, relationships and partnerships, centred on enabling deep connected learning for all within community.
• Disrupting ‘the way we have always done things around here’ by re-imagining what might be possible and necessary for all to flourish – individually and collectively within community and nature.
• Using technology or tools with intentionality, not just novelty, that creates flourishing life-centred learning environments.

Whether subtle or systemic, local or large-scale, your innovation belongs here. This is a space to share, to learn, to reflect and set future actions together on how we learn, teach, and lead in ways that make flourishing possible.

Register now