ATEE 2026 Annual Conference

🎭✨ Meet Grupa Coincidentia - and their award-winning production 'Superheroes'!
As part of the cultural programme around Association for Teacher Education in Europe Annual Conference 2026 in Białystok, we are delighted to introduce Grupa Coincidentia, an independent theatre formation from Białystok renowned for its inventive work in the theatre of animated form - an independent Białystok theatre company creating object and puppet theatre for adult audiences. 🇵🇱
'Superheroes' is a co-production with Germany's Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel, directed, designed and with puppets by Michael Vogel, music by Charlotte Wilde, live music and improvisation by Robert Jurčo, and performed by Dagmara Sowa and Paweł Chomczyk. 🎶
In a stage world where the live performers stay grounded, it is the puppets, objects, materials and masks that are endowed with superpowers - shifting shape, taking flight, breathing fire and conjuring the illusion of life. Reaching back to the ancient roots of the hero myth - for there would be no Superman without Heracles - the production builds a contemporary fairy tale and asks a deceptively simple question: what should the Arch-Hero of our times be, and would such a figure step in to resolve the military conflicts that haunt the more sensitive part of the globe? ⚡
The acclaim has been international: the show has toured to Leipzig (Germany), Brno (Czechia) and Veszprém (Hungary), where it was honoured for its freedom of stage expression. 🏆
We warmly invite our ATEE colleagues and guests to experience this bold, visually striking piece on 26 August 2026 - the second day of the conference. A perfect encounter between teacher education, culture and the imagination. See you in Białystok! 💚

‼️ATEE Annual Conference 2026 - Keynote Spotlight #4 of 4 ‼️
Professor Piotr Zamojski (Polish Naval Academy) turns to 'a border we all seem to find difficult to cross' - one that is neither geographical nor institutional, but lodged in how we think: a border that 'limits our educational thinking, imagining, and theorising.'
Keynote lecture: 'Being a Teacher: Recollecting teaching beyond the logic of production'
That border, he argues, is 'a hegemonic imaginary' shared silently across the ideological spectrum, in which 'education is a production process... that ends with... designable results which can be grasped and measured'. It is a logic of efficiency and accountability that even folds the personalisation of learning into the same drive toward 'optimisation and efficiency' - and that, he warns, 'is irreconcilable with one's most fundamental experiences of teaching and being taught'. What it crowds out is everything that makes teaching human: 'the relational atmosphere of a classroom, the joy of teaching, sharing one's love for the subject matter, or enacting free time (scholē)'. Drawing on Heidegger's notion of recollection and Arendt's understanding of education, Zamojski closes with 'an invitation to cross this border and liberate our educational imagination' - a fitting note on which to complete our keynote series and our 50th-anniversary theme, Crossing Borders with and in Teacher Education.
Białystok - 25-28 August 2026
Read the full abstract on our website: https://atee.uwb.edu.pl/programme/keynote-speakers

‼️ATEE Annual Conference 2026 - Keynote Spotlight #3 of 4 ‼️
Professor Katrin Poom-Valickis (Tallinn University) begins with the world as it is now: 'in times of growing societal and geopolitical uncertainty, becoming a teacher increasingly involves navigating borders-between institutions, knowledge traditions, expectations, and within oneself'.
Keynote lecture: 'Teacher Education in Uncertain Times: Border Crossing as Core Professional Capacity'
Drawing on Blömeke's competence-as-continuum model, she frames teacher development as a journey of 'continuous border crossing across personal, institutional, cultural, and temporal dimensions' - one that is 'rarely linear'. Some of the hardest borders, she suggests, are internal: 'beliefs, identity tensions, emotional responses, professional vulnerability, and unexamined assumptions' that shape how teachers engage the external divides between university and school, theory and practice, research and lived experience. Her conclusion reframes the very condition the title names: becoming a teacher is 'not merely about acquiring knowledge and skills, but about cultivating the capacity to remain open, reflective, and responsive in changing contexts'. Border crossing, on this view, becomes the defining feature of the learning professional - 'someone who approaches uncertainty not as a threat, but as a space for inquiry and professional growth'. A perspective that sits at the very core of our 50th-anniversary theme, Crossing Borders with and in Teacher Education.
Białystok - 25-28 August 2026
Read the full abstract on our website: https://atee.uwb.edu.pl/programme/keynote-speakers

‼️ATEE Annual Conference 2026 - Keynote Spotlight #2 of 4‼️
Professor Michele Schweisfurth (University of Glasgow) argues that 'education in Europe and across the globe is at a crossroads, with the language of crisis perpetuating a sense of urgency' - which makes it exactly the moment to re-examine pedagogy comparatively, across scales from the global to the local.
Keynote lecture: 'Pedagogy in International Perspective: borders and border crossings'
Her target is what she names'disaster didacticism': a global discourse 'generating universal prescriptions for classroom practice that promise to improve teachers' work and pupils' learning'. But pedagogy, she reminds us, is 'both the observable act of teaching and everything that shapes it' - deeply embedded in its geographical, cultural, institutional, disciplinary and digital contexts. Which is why good teaching looks different across cultures, and why 'pedagogical norms have a life of their own beyond technocratic efforts to understand and impose 'what works'. The lecture closes by interrogating 'the entrenched borders, divisions and misunderstandings found in research and planning on pedagogy' - a fitting provocation for our 50th-anniversary theme, Crossing Borders with and in Teacher Education.
Białystok - 25-28 August 2026
Read the full abstract on our website: https://atee.uwb.edu.pl/programme/keynote-speakers

‼️ATEE Annual Conference 2026 - keynote lecture spotlight!‼️
Professor Nicole Mockler (University of Sydney) opens her keynote with a poem by Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska - Utopia, 'an island of certainty where nothing is ambiguous; a place that nobody inhabits'.
Keynote lecture: 'Nobody Lives There: Border Crossings, Utopia and the Price of Certainty in Teacher Education'
For Mockler, that island is a metaphor for 'the vision of teacher education that has come to dominate policy across diverse national contexts: risk-free, guaranteed in its outcomes, stripped of the complexity that makes teaching genuinely educational'. Drawing on Carol Bacchi's question - 'what's the problem represented to be?' - she argues that wherever we look, teacher education is 'constructed as the same problem and subjected to the same solutions: more standardisation, more prescription, more performative accountability'.
And her conclusion goes straight to our conference theme: 'The borders that matter most in teacher education are not geographical or institutional. They are made by policy... Naming those borders, tracing their construction, and imagining what lies beyond: this is the work of crossing them'.
Białystok - 25-28 August 2026
Read the full abstract on our website: https://atee.uwb.edu.pl/programme/keynote-speakers

Today’s meeting of the ATEE 2026 Organising Committee. Only 3 months left until the conference - and the serious faces say it all. 😅
A lot of hard work, coordination, decisions, and planning behind the scenes… but we are getting there! 💪 See you in Białystok this August!

🎉 Review phase completed!

We are delighted to announce that the review process for ATEE 2026 Annual Conference has now been completed, and all authors have already received their decisions.
A huge thank you to all our reviewers, who took on this enormous task and delivered thoughtful evaluations within an exceptionally short timeframe. Your dedication, expertise, and generosity truly reflect the strength of our academic community - we are deeply grateful. 🙏
And our warmest congratulations to all authors whose proposals have been accepted - we look forward to welcoming you to Białystok! 🎉

See you on 25-28 August 2026 as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of ATEE! ✨

The abstract submission process for the ATEE 2026 Annual Conference 'Crossing Borders with and in Teacher Education' is now closed.
We have received a remarkable number of submissions from colleagues across the world, representing a wide range of academic traditions, cultural contexts, and thematic fields. Thank you for trusting our conference with your work.
Our reviewers are now working to ensure that every abstract receives careful, fair, and substantive consideration. We are committed to a transparent process and will communicate decisions as soon as the review is complete.
Białystok, in the 50th anniversary year of Association for Teacher Education in Europe, is preparing to welcome you. See you on 25-28 August 2026!