“For over twenty years, IARSLCE has been known to thousands of scholars as a network that helps to consolidate the value of SLCE for our understanding of the world and communities and has helped to launch the scholarship of many brilliant publicly engaged researchers.
IARSLCE is the only international organization whose expressed primary purpose is to cultivate, encourage, and present research across all engagement forms and educational levels; and it fulfills its mission by embracing all research frameworks (e.g., positivist, interpretive, participatory, critical, etc.), methods (e.g., qualitative, quantitative, mixed, etc.), and approaches (e.g., basic, applied, action, engaged, evaluation, etc.). The Association promotes high quality trans-disciplinary research across a wide range of approaches and forms and builds the capacity of scholars, practitioners, and community partners to engage in such research.”
For almost 20 years, until it was interrupted by the Coronavirus pandemic, IARSLCE has been running a flagship annual international conference, mostly somewhere in the USA, usually attended by hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the world. Our team has been attending the IARSLCE conference and presenting our work there since 2016.
Through the paper and poster presentations at the conference, we are able to learn about the state of the art in the implementation of SL courses across the world, learn from them and benchmark against them. We are happy to note that our understanding of the core concepts and the application are comparable with the best. We have, of course, learned a lot about a wide range of research methods. We are able to adopt some of them important findings to our own work.
Through IARSLCE, we get to know many of the leading researchers and practitioners, and are able to draw on their expertise by engaging them as speakers at seminars, workshops and conferences for our colleagues back home as well as those in the Asia-Pacific region. Because of the great distance, most in the Asia-Pacific find it difficult to travel to these conferences. Hence bringing some of the excellent speakers to our region is one way to draw our community closer to the world-wide community.
Further, we are able to develop many collaborations with leading universities in SL. These include student exchange, joint projects, on-line co-teaching in a global classroom, joint research, and other innovations. Many of these exciting projects are discussed in more detail elsewhere in this book. These are probably some of the most valuable results of our participation in IARSLCE.
We have, of course, been presenting and publishing many papers through IARSLCE. These enable us to share our results with a wide audience, and compare our results with the state of the art. Through the process, we become aware that the IARSLCE community, despite its continued efforts to internationalise and diversify, is still heavily North American-centric. There are significant SL communities in South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, who are under-represented at IARSLCE. Surely, these communities can benefit more from the wealth of expertise at IARSLCE, and the IARSLCE community can also benefit from the diversity of challenges, experiences and insights from these communities - if we can bring these communities closer together. For this reason, Dr. Stephen Chan joined the IARSLCE Board of Directors in 2019.
For example, in the Asia-Pacific region there are many governments that are authoritarian to various degrees - it can obviously pose challenges to SL projects which attempt to address root causes of inequality, in areas of political power, freedom, economic opportunities, education, etc. In many countries, there are also strong influences of religion faiths and distinctive cultural practices in many aspects of life, which may pose different types of challenges to SL. On the other hand, the multi-ethnic and multi-religion environment in many Asian countries expose the youths to a plurality of experiences and challenges. In many Asian countries, young people are highly adapt in advanced information technology and social media. These characteristics pose serious challenges bur many also be conducive towards a very dynamic Sl community. In the face of social isolation imposed by the Coronavirus, these factors are becoming more and more relevant.
The IARSLCE community also appears to be populated more by people in social science and humanities, with fewer participants from hard sciences and engineering. It does not appear that the hard science and engineering disciplines are inactive in SL. Perhaps for some reason they tend to congregate around other events or groups, such as the GHTC. Hence there is plenty of room for growth at IARSLCE, in terms of internationalisation and diversity.
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