The International Conference “Nurturing Critical Minds: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Education and the Workforce” Will Be Held in VU

The Institute of Foreign Languages at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University (VU), in collaboration with the University of Western Macedonia (Greece), is hosting an international interdisciplinary conference titled "Developing Critical Thinking: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Education and the Labour Market" from June 27th to 28th. Education and the Labour Market" from 27 to 28 June.

The conference aims to present research on critical thinking (CT) education in various university disciplines, share best practices, raise awareness about the importance of CT, and highlight exemplary practices in CT education. Additionally, it will aim to raise awareness among teachers about the need for direct (explicit and implicit) teaching of CT and to highlight best practices and methods.
Participants, educators, researchers and labour market professionals will have the opportunity to explore innovative strategies and share insights on how to collaboratively integrate the development of KM skills into education programmes.

The conference was also inspired by the Institute of Foreign Languages' participation in the Erasmus+ Think4Jobs project, which has explored KM in teacher education, foreign language teaching, economics, IT and medicine.

The conference will take a comprehensive approach to explore:

- The role of Knowledge Management (KM) in various academic disciplines: teacher education, medicine, economics, foreign language teaching, literature and intercultural studies, mathematics, and IT.
- Different approaches to developing Knowledge Transfer (KT) in university education.
- Knowledge Management (KM) and the development of generic competences in language teaching.

The two-day international conference will include the following sessions:

- On June 27th: Critical Thinking Development in Teacher Training Programmes“, „Critical Thinking Development in the Studies of Medicine“, „Critical Thinking Development in the Studies of Economics“.
- On June 28th: „Critical Thinking Development in Foreign Language Teaching“, „Critical Thinking Development in Literary and Intercultural Studies“, „Critical Thinking Development in Mathematics and IT Studies“.

The conference is organised jointly by the other VU faculties of Economics and Business Administration, Medicine, Mathematics and Informatics and Philosophy.

The programme can be found here.