HCT-Dubai hosts Women's Education Conference

The three-day conference aims at moving beyond strategizing to realizing inter-college collaboration opportunities and refreshing the WEW mission to share best practices and foster exchange among educational institutions.

The conference included an overview of existing projects which are already in place in WEW Institutions, and which could become vehicles for future WEW collaboration projects for faculty and staff.

This provided a framework from which conference delegates were able to identify what sort of projects offer realistic opportunities for inter-college work. In this way, the collaborative focus of the conference can then be realized when delegates meet to strategize how to put the identified collaboration into action.

At least 10 different countries participated in the conference including the US, Canada, Japan, the Philippines, China, India, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Italy.

Professors with expertise in a wide range of social sciences took part in the conference, namely gender studies and ethics, the history of women's education, Arab history, mathematics, sociology and intercultural communication.

The network of more than 100 elite women's tertiary institutions from around the world brought more than 50 faculty together for 3 days to discuss how they can get the most out of the network and generate new and exciting opportunities for international collaboration between students and faculty. Some of the opportunities include Virtual International Exchanges between students, International Study Tours abroad, visits by international students to the HCT and collaborative research opportunities for students and faculty.

The three-day event featured several presentations on collaboration by both UAE based and international delegates. Many of the abstracts focused on how to use technology to help make the teaching of liberal arts subjects more global and help students to become more international citizens.

One of the conference organisers, Candy McLeod, stated "Today's technology challenges us as educators to work at the cutting edge, constantly seeking and creating new methodologies and ideas to engage our students as they become more internationalized, more interculturally intelligent, and simply better equipped to enter the modern global workforce than ever before."

The conference also featured breakout sessions for delegates to form focus groups discuss and plan concrete ways of collaborating in the future.
This is the second WEW Faculty conference. The last one was hosted by the prestigious women's institutions Smith College and Mt Holyoke College in the United States in May 2012. Previously there have also been WEW Directors' Conferences and a WEW Student Conference.