ECRPL 2027

Call for contributions

Fourth European Conference on Reflective Practice-based Learning (ECRPL) 2027

We invite educators, researchers, and practitioners to join us in exploring current developments, challenges, and opportunities related to Reflective Practice-based Learning (RPL) in higher education, professional education, and professional practice at the Fourth European Conference on Reflective Practice-based Learning.

Following the success of the Third European Conference on Reflective Practice-based Learning, we are pleased to announce that the Fourth ECRPL Conference will take place in Aalborg, Denmark, from 22 to 24 November 2027.

Reflective Practice-based Learning in Changing Contexts

Reflective Practice-based Learning is an emerging contribution to educational research and professional education. It emphasises experience, reflection, inquiry, and action as central dimensions of learning and professional development. RPL recognises reflection as an integrated part of learning and offers important perspectives on the relationship between theory, practice, professional identity, and professional action.

Professional education and professional practice are currently shaped by significant societal, technological, organisational, and cultural transformations. Learning and professional development increasingly unfold through complex interactions between people, technologies, materials, environments, professional practices, and institutional contexts. Digitalisation, artificial intelligence, changing professional roles, new learning environments, and evolving forms of collaboration are transforming how professionals learn, participate, make judgments, and develop their professional identities. At the same time, questions of participation, belonging, inclusion, and professional responsibility are becoming increasingly central across educational and professional contexts.

The conference welcomes both theoretical and empirical contributions related to reflective teaching, learning, supervision, placement learning, organisational development, and professional practice in higher education and across professions. The conference programme includes full and short paper presentations (research tracks), keynotes, poster presentations, networking opportunities, a pre-conference master class, and a social programme with a welcome reception and conference dinner.  

Information about keynote speakers and the conference programme will be updated continuously.

Keynote speaker

Cathrine Hasse

When Materials Matter: Posthumanist Learning and Professional Judgement in Changing Practices

Professional learning is often described as something that happens in and between people, but learning also takes shape with technologies, artefacts and material surroundings. Drawing on posthumanist learning theory and educational anthropology, this talk explores how humans learn to perceive, act and judge through socio-material and cultural relations.

Technologies are not neutral tools added to practice; they can reorganise attention, participation, professional identities and what counts as relevant knowledge. Empirical examples from education, professional work, robotics and AI show how new technologies create both new learning potentials and new frictions. A central question is how preceding learning and culturally developed resources shape what professionals are able to notice, question and make meaningful in changing situations. In relation to generative AI, this also calls for relational Socratic ignorance: the capacity to recognise what we do not know and to frame questions within a professional interpretive framework. The talk will summarize how reflective practice-based learning can cultivate professional judgement when learning is understood as a collective achievement of people, materials, technologies and environments.

Biography

Cathrine Hasse is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Learning at the Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University. Her research explores learning, culture, materiality and human–technology relations, with particular attention to how technologies such as robots, digital tools and AI reshape perception, participation and professional practice. She is the author of An Anthropology of Learning: On Nested Frictions in Cultural Ecologies and Posthumanist Learning: What Robots and Cyborgs Teach us About Being Ultra-social. Across ethnographic studies of education, science and technology, she develops interdisciplinary approaches connecting anthropology, cultural-historical psychology, postphenomenology and posthumanist theory.

Conference Themes

We are particularly interested in papers that explore the following three thematic areas:

Submission Guidelines

All contributions must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference.

Author guidelines 

See the author guidelines for ECRPL 2027