A Conference in "Creativity in Early Education"

The Eminent Speakers at the conference

It’s 7 am in Paris and I’m just sitting in a café waiting for Naomi’s flight to arrive in a few hours. In some ways it is good as it will give me time to reflect and distil what has happened since I left Sabah on Friday afternoon. 

 I arrived at my hotel in Kuala Lumpur about 9 pm and that gave me some time to work on the presentation/ workshop that I was doing on Sunday at the conference on “Creativity in the Early Years of Education”. Yes I know it was leaving it rather late but I was so busy before I left and I just had to work on my powerpoint a bit and as I’m rather a novice with that sort of thing it takes me ages to work it out. Anyway, having never been to a conference outside a British Council event I wasn’t sure what to expect and I won’t bore you with all the details but just to say it was fantastic. There were about 150 people attending, mostly from Malaysia , but the speakers were from Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Philippines, Hong Kong, Brunei and they all seemed to be very eminent in their field except me! 

They say these conferences are all about networking and that is indeed what I did. I met some lovely people who were very passionate about Pre-school education and at last I knew why British Council had given me those business cards! The presenters were treated to a lovely meal in a fish restaurant in the evening and then Sunday arrived and my 11 am slot approached. I was hoping that there might be less people on a Sunday but my workshop /presentation on “Critical Thinking in Storytelling” was full. I felt a bit nervous to start with but once I got going it was fine and there were lots of good ideas and stories that were told at the end. 

Storytelling in my workshop

The rest of the day was full of lively and political discussion which is unusual in Malaysia and there was a passionate appeal from a lady who represents UNESCO, to get pre-school education recognised as an important and separate issue for the UN. There was a closing ceremony and presentations and fond farewells and lots of promises to keep in touch – and I hope I will as there were some wonderful people attending.