Congress Invitation

International Congress of Educational Administration (ICEA)

We would like to welcome you all to the 15^th International Congress of Educational Administration (ICEA), the annual convention of the Educational Administration Research and Development Association (EARDA). ICEA has been the platform  for disseminating research, as well as sharing and discussing the local and global knowledge in the field of educational administration for more than a decade. ICEA has been widening its international visibility with the participation of leading national and international scholars in Educational Administration, Leadership and Policy.

Given the current state of social distancing rules and travel limitations, our congress will be held virtually this year, using the Zoom platform. The theme of the 2021 congress is “Educational Leadership for Social Change and Development in the Post-COVID World.” Education serves an important function in addressing the key societal issues while responding to the needs of different social groups. We have witnessed the realization that “the COVID-19 treated all social groups equally” has remained highly rhetorical over the last 18 months, since the onset of the pandemic. The COVID-19 has deepened the inequalities among social groups and particularly elucidated the already inherent disadvantages. Like other social domains, the pandemic has negatively impacted the access to and/or delivery of education and created new challenges for some social groups. As a result, addressing the problems of different social groups and accomplishing the social transformation function of education has largely failed. In that sense, educational leadership plays a critical role in reconstructing education as a tool of social change. The role of educational leadership for social change and development has always been conceptualized as an indirect one. However, in addition to the indirect role, we have witnessed the direct involvement of educational leaders in responding to the needs of different social groups in Turkey. As a result, the open and wide discussions on the relationship between educational leadership and social change during our Congress, we hope, will contribute to the understanding by addressing the key issues facing our societies in the post COVID-19 period.

As we developed the theme of this year’s Congress, we considered several dimensions of the issue. It is evident that accomplishing social change through educational change,  a wide exchange of theory, practice and methods with relative fields of sociology, economic, organization science, anthropology is a necessity. In other words, producing a knowledge base on the role of educational leadership for social change deserves rigorous and cross-disciplinary research, discussions and exchange of ideas. ICEA, with its national and international collaborators, provides an important scholarly arena for the exchange of these ideas.

Hopefully the first ICEA of the new decade, with the contribution of national and international delegates, will elaborate on the competing views on educational leadership for social change and development, while all of the delegates will equally benefit from the debates and discussions during the Congress.

Prof. Dr. Mehmet SİNCAR
Prof. Dr. Yaşar KONDAKÇI
Organization Committee Chairsthe