Please find featured below and attached for download, a paper on planning for the Shanghai Forum on Lifelong Education which will be held on 15 November immediately before the Hong Kong conference. Denise and I will participate and are preparing papers. The Forum is more ambitious than I expected and is now seen as “a permanent and international summit forum on lifelong education and learning city” and so is something we should take into account in any PASCAL activity in the learning city area beyond 2014.

You will see from the attached paper that the Forum is being hosted by the National Centre for Educational Development and Research, the National Center for Community Education research and Development, and the Shanghai Municipal Institute for Lifelong Education (SMILE). SMILE is the body that links the East China Normal University with Shanghai City Council for the Shanghai Learning City initiative with Professor Jian Huang the Vice Chair of SMILE.

This linking Shanghai with two national organisations gives the Forum a national flavour which is reflected in the subject of the 2013 Forum “Building Chinese Learning City – the Achievements and Challenges”. Papers have been invited from Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities with 10-12 to be selected for presentation at the Forum. While the Forum will be conducted in Chinese, I have been told not to worry about interpreting. I assume that abstracts at least will be in English.

The reach of the Forum beyond Shanghai to Beijing and possibly elsewhere should give us some useful perspectives on learning city development in China from a Chinese perspective to supplement the good papers we have in the PIE collection on Shanghai and Beijing, as well as the Han-Makino article in the International Review of Education special issue. The timing of the Forum was set at my request so that the Forum should provide a useful lead in to the Hong Kong conference. Jian is coming to the Hong Kong conference so that the opportunity will exist for discussion of possible PASCAL links with the Forum as a permanent international summit on lifelong education and the learning city.

I will keep you informed on developments.

Peter Kearns