Welcome

Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiești

Education Sciences Department

Teacher Training Department

French Alliance of Ploiești

French Institute of Bucharest

Prahova County Council and Prahova County Museum of Natural Sciences

organise

the International Conference

Managing differences: the challenge of the contemporary world

under the high patronage of the French Embassy in Romania

Ploiești, June 28-29, 2018

 

Guest of honour: Olivier Grenouilleau, Historian, Research Director of Roland Mousnier Centre (Paris-IV Sorbonne) and of the Academia Europaea, Former University Professor (Lorient, Institut Universitaire de France, Sciences Po Paris)

If modernity evolved under the sign of unity, where human nature, identified with reason, participated in the creation of otherness, postmodernity has evolved under the sign of differences: humanity becomes essentially preoccupied with highlighting, and sometimes even inventing, differences. Just as in modernity school represented the central field for cultivating unity (reason and autonomy), in postmodernity it has become a battlefield for facing and/or confronting differences (for their legitimation or on behalf of them). From Kant to Derrida, we firmly believe school must know and be able to manage the balance between unity and differences.

The areas of scientific thinking, history, humanities and social sciences, education sciences, language sciences, literary studies, didactics of languages and general didactics, sociology, psychology, communication, journalism and the media, they all face the difficulty of striking a balance between unity and diversity, between identity and otherness.

We invite you to reflect on this challenging issue and to take part in the conference debates on topics such as:

  • Education and the challenges of contemporary world
  • Equality and inequality of opportunities in school
  • Differences and differentiations in education
  • The issue of differences in psychological counselling
  • The psychology of differences 
  • How to avoid excessive complexity and simplistic reductionism in disciplinary learning 
  • Reflections on teaching ‘sensitive’ classroom issues
  • Difference and opposition in the language sciences
  • Types of discourse: differences and similarities
  • Conflictual and/ or consensual management in verbal interactions
  • Rhetoric and dialectic: managing differences in opinion
  • Managing differences in discourse: controversy
  • Tradition and innovation in teaching foreign languages
  • Identity and otherness: managing differences throughout the history of humanity
  • Identity and otherness in literature
  • Tolerance or rejection of others in the contemporary world
  • Truth, post-truth and false truth in contemporary media
  • Values transmitted through social networks
  • Information and communication technology (ICT) in education

The list remains open to participants’ suggestions …