Annual Meeting Theme

Educating for world-making: Envisioning and enacting sustainable solutions to global crises

The ISLS Annual Meeting 2025 theme is intended to

1. Recognize global, environmental and social crises, but also to emphasize the optimistic view for envisioning new solutions to global crises.
2. Honor teachers, students, citizens, and researchers as active transformative agents or world-makers of the future.

We invite the ISLS community to embrace utopias, agency, imagination, speculation, and futures thinking, as central aspects of education and educational research. The theme engages participants in reflecting on and theorizing personal, social, and networked aspects of world making and discussing advances of the field and planning future ways of expanding societal and global impact of the learning sciences.

The theme also emphasizes how the learning sciences are concerned with research and development of tools, practices, and environments for knowledge-creating learning. Creative knowledge practices engage learners in knowledge-building inquiries, co-designing, co-inventing, and co-making complex artifacts, and taking part in extended ecosocial innovation projects. By this, the theme calls for building research-practice partnerships which focus on solving problems of practice and tailoring investigations according to the practitioners’ needs rather than mere academic interests.