Elizabeth Cohen is Professor Emerita of the School of Education and Department of Sociology at Stanford University, California. She founded and directed the Program for Complex Instruction at Stanford for many years. She has written several books related to co-operative learning including the widely used book, Designing Groupwork, Strategies for Heterogeneous Classrooms.

View Elizabeth Cohen's Keynote Address

Neil Davidson is Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Maryland, and Senior Scholar in the University K-16 Partnership Development Center and in the Academy for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. He is one of the pioneers of co-operative learning, who developed the small-group discovery method of mathematics learning more than 35 years ago. He has written or edited seven books on co-operative learning. He is a founding member of the IASCE and served as its president from 1990-95. He was the first President of the mid-Atlantic Association for Co-operation in Education, and is now co-president of that association.

His research has been largely on the history of the co-operative movement, particularly in Canada. He has presented papers, participated in panels, given speeches and run workshops in over 200 academic and non-academic conferences and meetings in more than fifty countries. He is preparing volumes on Arctic co-operatives, the Canadian credit union movement and the British Columbia co-operative movement. He is engaged in long-term research projects on Prairie rural history and the history of the Canadian family.

Cheryl Turner has over twenty years’ experience of working in the field of adult education. Throughout that time she has taught in higher education and a range of community and further education settings. Prior to becoming a Development Officer for NIACE she was employed for thirteen years by the East Midland District of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA).

Cheryl has considerable experience of working with liberal programmes and of developing outreach projects, for example with parents in inner-city areas, women ‘returners’, parents of children with disabilities and survivors of domestic violence. In 1995 she became Director of the Association’s National Equal Opportunities Project. Cheryl joined NIACE in 1998 as a member of the Widening Participation Team set up to help administer the Adult and Community Learning Fund. She is also helping to develop NIACE’s contribution to the work of the voluntary sector and to citizenship issues. Her publications include ‘Learning to change: a WEA equal opportunities training pack’ (WEA, 1997), ‘Making a Difference: a resource pack for people who want to become more active citizens’ (NIACE, 1999), ‘Squaring the Circle: funding non-accredited adult learning under the Learning and Skills Council’ (NIACE, 2001).

Stephen Yeo is Chair of the Co-op College Board of Management; Chair of Co-op Futures; a Director of the Oxford Company of Learners; a Trustee of CfBT and of the Christendom Trust; Hon Professor in Social History at the University of Warwick. He was Principal of Ruskin College, 1989 - 1997. Before that, he taught and researched at the University of Sussex, and helped to found the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers and was active in the History Workshop movement, particularly in Co-op History Workshops.