Dear Conference Attendees,
Welcome to Dubrovnik, Croatia, Europe!
On behalf of the Organising Committee and serving as the Chair of the 1st Thematic ECHA Conference entitled Creativity Research & Innovation in Gifted Education: Social, Individual, and Educational Perspective, it is my great pleasure and honor to invite you to this international scientific conference in the City of Dubrovnik, Croatia, Europe.
This is the first ECHA conference ever to be held in the Republic of Croatia.
The organiser of the conference is the Faculty of Education in Osijek, offering this conference as the registered European Talent Point (ETP) in the European Talent Support Network (ETSN). The conference will take place from 16th to 18th October 2019 in the beautiful historic city of Dubrovnik, the UNESCO World Heritage Site, on the Croatian Adriatic coast.
The best possible way to introduce the role that the ECHA has taken in contemporary gifted education is to have the Faculty of Education as the organiser of the first ECHA conference in Croatia.
At the 1st Thematic ECHA Conference, we offer the most important topic in giftedness theory and education: Creativity. We chose to invite researchers and educators, both national and international, to engage in an intensive in-depth empirically based discussion on creativity and innovation, and how they relate to the theory and education of giftedness.
Creativity and innovation are our past, current and future strengths greatly needed in overcoming numerous pressing issues that we encounter daily as developing communities. Creativity results in truth and beauty, as well as their opposites. Ability, competence, expertise, and eminence are involved in creativity, but so is wealth, power, and influence. Creativity may be sweet, refreshing, and positive. At the same time it may leave a very sour and bitter aftertaste because creative behaviors, both negative and positive, are embedded in human nature.
The sun-grown mandarins in the Dubrovnik area as the analogy for creativity and its nature, the conference theme of our first thematic conference, will be ripe for the scheduled conference in 2019, waiting for us to share in the sweet harvest of creativity research, knowledge, know-how, and wisdom. Though some of that wisdom may be bitter, it will point to much needed positive creativity. The conference that we cordially invite you to attend as a participant, and to take part in as an author, aims to offer you the opportunity to bring back to your community positive and fresh innovative approaches to be used in gifted education, for the benefit of us all.
With gratitude for supporting our shared efforts,
Yours sincerely
Conference Chair, Željko Rački, Ph.D.
ECHA Specialist in Gifted Education
ECHA National Correspondent
