 Good morning, and welcome everyone to the epistemi nine. It is an online international conference to review research on science technology and mathematics education epistemi is a flagship conference in science education research, organized by the homey Hava Center for Science Education, TIFR, and this conference is ninth in the epistemi row, but epistemi nine is unique in some sense because this is also the first fully online epistemi conference. And as a co-convener myself, Deepa Chari, and my colleague, Ayush Gupta, we are very proud and equally excited that we have gathered around us participants who will experience an enriched science education research discussion space, which is essentially made available through the epistemi nine for next five days. Today is our welcome session and the first day of this international conference. And before starting the actual program, we would like to start with by expressing our sincere gratitude to all the plenary speakers, to the speakers, which involves oral as well as poster presenters, all the conference participants, reviewers, all the session chairs and moderators who really helped us to design the program, how it appears as of today. And also thanks to the large team of HBCSE including our advisory committee members, local organizing committee members, our steering team, our review management committee, our mentors, and many other people who are without which the event wasn't just possible. So today's welcome function firstly involves an address by our center director Professor Arnab Dacharya, who will share the history of epistemi conference and followed by that, Ayush and myself will share more specific detail about what was our region behind epistemi nine. So without any delay now I invite our center director Professor Arnab Dacharya to welcome you all for the conference. Thank you. Thanks, Deepak. So, welcome to epistemi nine. And since this is an online conference, I should say not just good morning. I don't know where you are all watching from so good morning good evening good afternoon wherever in the world you are. Thank you so much for joining us for epistemi nine. So on behalf of HPCSE the homie Baba Center for Science Education. I'm delighted to welcome you all to this now what Deepak said is a flagship conference on STEM education that is hosted by us periodically the conference that is currently happening in India in this particular field. And this year's epistemi conference is of course, kind of different, because it's being hosted virtually. And that means that I am actually a little sad that we can't welcome you to our tiny but what we think is a very beautiful and green campus. What you're seeing behind me is not a virtual background it's actually the greenery that surrounds us and you know while it can rain like crazy in Mumbai in there is a certain charm of the Mumbai monsoon that we would love to have your experience if you're with us over here. But anyway, welcome all the online. This is the ninth in the series of epistemi conferences. This series started off way back in 2004 with the first conference that was actually not held at HPCSE it was the other outlier in the series this one's online. That one was actually held in Goa. That's where it started. Of course, after that, the conferences moved to the HPCSE campus, and we've had them pretty much at two year intervals, mostly around Jan February in the winter where it was a very nice pleasant time at that time. And every edition of epistemi has brought together leading scholars from across the world across India. You know, leading scholars in STEM education in the field who have given us overviews on what directions are you know currently being pursued. What are what is the progress happening in science, technology, mathematics, design, etc. education areas for the Indian community. This has been proven to be a really valuable meeting point. It allows us to nurture a very small research community in STEM education in India, and it's provided a forum. It's provided this ground for academics, teachers, people in curriculum development, people in policy, it's brought together people and allowed them to listen to the cutting edge of what is happening, but also allowed them to forge linkages that have lasted well beyond the conference, both within the country, as well as beyond the country. So I was looking through the past epistemi, you know the list of conferences. And it's fascinating to see, you know, speakers who are very young researchers in epistemi one. I don't know whether they presented a poster or something. Today they're giving a plenary talk at epistemi nine. And I think this is one of the, it shows that this conference has really, you know, made its mark in the Indian context. So epistemi every conference has had a sort of special theme within this overall area of science and STEM education. For example, epistemi six, it looked at emerging computational media in science education. So, you know, and this epistemi is no different. We continue this tradition, looking at a very important theme, which is of equity, equity and access equity and opportunities in STEM education. So this epistemi is going to stand out for looking at one of the really difficult problems that all of us need to worry about. Of course, as the conference picked up the first three were sort of, you know, epistemi 123 by four we had this very beautiful logo. I hope you've looked at it. Look at all what's hidden in it. We had this unique logo. And, you know, over the next few days, I'm sure you'll be listening to lots of wonderful talks and have a really good time here. And I'd like to particularly give a shout out to Ayush and Deepa and the team of organizers reviewers and all of them who, in spite of various constraints, you know, disruptions due to the pandemic. You know, we've, we've had debates of when should we do this conference how should we do it. But at the end of it they've really been able to put together an eclectic mix of wonderful talks and posters, exploring different dimensions of STEM education. So we're going to actually in a treat over the next few days, exciting deliberations. I hope you're going to have some fantastic learning experiences, and you will be with us. We've tried our best to choose time slots that sort of should make it reasonably okay for people no matter where they are to at least attend some parts of this without having to stay awake all night. Right. So apologies if you had to wake up early morning for the this session or stay back very late. But I think the rest of the conference you'll find it's not too difficult. Of course, before I end I must thank the data Institute of Fundamental Research TIFR parent institution for their support and the support has been vital it's enabled not just this epistemi but all the past series of conferences to happen. Without that we would not be in this situation today. So we are we're always thankful for the support that we get from them. And again, while we can't offer you the hospitality of the HPCSE campus. I do hope you have a very pleasant experience in this epistemi. So on that note, welcome once again, and over to you I should be able to take us ahead. Thank you. Thank you very much for the speech as center director. So now I welcome Professor Ayush Kukta, co-convener of epistemi to welcome you all and share our region about this particular epistemi which is epistemi nine, the fully online conference in the epistemi series. So Ayush over to you. Thank you, Deepa and welcome everybody. Deepa and I started thinking about the conference. There was a time that we were like thinking about you know what what special focus should we really take for the conference. And one of the places where we landed was thinking about like what are really challenging problems in our field that have been talked about, but we are still to make a lot of progress around those issues. Some of the themes that stuck out to us were one on equity, and the other on research to practice and I just wanted to share a little bit about our vision for what these terms mean, because they also mean different things to different people. Equity what we understand it as our understanding is efforts to address historic and ongoing inequalities and injustices in our society. Often, these are structured along social category lines that we are quite familiar with, such as gender, race, caste, economic status, national status, citizenship, disability, and so on and so forth, right. And one of the symptoms of this equity has been the idea of representation, right like who is at the table. And oftentimes what has happened is, well there are two kinds of things. There are two kinds of things one is that the large part of research in STEM education still does not attend to equity we keep talking about students ideas about XYZ topic without or students excellence in XYZ topic, their ability to do science without actually attending to what is the social location from which these students are coming from our students from other social location, having access to these spaces are teachers from other social locations having access to these places. So, there is the question of who is at the table, but one of the problems that has happened also is that equity has gotten reduced to this idea of who's at the table. And the danger there is that we miss out on the kinds of disciplinary practices in science technology engineering and mathematics that actively keep out people institutional policies, again, that are structured so that people are kept out of these STEM spaces, or if they find access to those STEM spaces they find it very hard to stay in those stem spaces they are kicked out of them. Right. And the cultural sort of like disciplinary that sort of like happens in terms of when people from marginalized locations are trying to assert themselves, they are disciplined into conformity. And these are all aspects of equity and so equity ultimately has to look at power, and has to look at the people in power, and challenge them so that we can have a better, a more equitable space so that was one kind of an idea the other idea is research to practice, which is translating what we have learned from research into practice. Oftentimes, this has been restricted to the idea of teacher education and teacher PD, teacher professional development. And I think it's time for us to expand that beyond that right. Here's one idea where research and practice research to practice and equity should not be seen as two different themes at least in our minds they are joined together, but research on equity should inform how the practice of teaching and learning is happening. At the same time the idea of research to practice should inform how we engage with equity, not just in the fields of our research but also in our institutions in our professional communities, right like even if we look at the current epistemic, we should be concerned that we don't have enough representation of folks from marginalized locations, not only from India but across the world. And so think about these two ideas research and practice and equity together. And in some sense try to you know like our hope is that the conversations would help people expand beyond sort of like a really narrow research focus into actually how we are engaging with this in our day to day lived existence. So that's a little bit of a vision we'll see how how it all goes. Deepa, do you want to take over. Yeah. Thank you, I use and thanks for wonderfully putting our broad vision behind epistemic nine. As I was pointed out we have tried to include equity and access at many individual strands so it doesn't look very different but we have to think about it every time when we think about disciplinary practices and also about different other strands in science education research and hopefully we'll be able to do that beautifully in next couple of days that was our central message for epistemic nine. As a co-convener I would also like to add a few things that we wanted, or we planned to do at this epistemic platform, but couldn't include in this five days program because it is already full pack but I just at least would like to acknowledge a few things that we have planned and we hope to do so in as a spin off event in next couple of months. So firstly we'll be doing a spin off event exclusively for teachers and teacher educators in India in couple of months down the line, and this event will include further some of this year's epistemic stands in the form of workshops and panels which we were really hoping to do in person at HBCSE but of course when we moved to virtual platform we decided to make a space for these events sometimes later in but under as a spin off event of epistemic. Secondly there were a few in person workshop that we couldn't conduct due to some constraints and we plan to host these at HBCSE in the near future so like keep an eye on epistemic website and you will see some more interesting spin off events that will be posted time to time on our epistemic nine website. Thirdly we have made a web proceeding of epistemic nine available on the conference website for now so if you scroll down epistemic nine home page you will also see a PDF version of our web proceeding which is there for now but we have also we are also looking forward for an ISBN proceeding for referencing purpose which will be eventually shared with all of the participants and also with all other dignitaries who helped us to organize this science education research conference successfully. So keep an eye again for the ISBN proceeding but most of the things that you will require for epistemic nine all the talks proceedings papers are available in this existing PDF copy also a lot of information about the conference scheduling speakers and their contact information a lot of it is also available on our website so you can like you can keep looking and both of these documents like both our conference proceeding as well as our website is quite an information source throughout for these five days. And lastly epistemic conference has been a great networking hub for many birding science education researchers in India and worldwide. And though we have tried our level best to have this spirit ongoing even in the online conference we are also aware that many of you will be missing out some in person interactions with our larger HBCSC community during this online event so in epistemic nine we started with a few new ventures. Firstly there will be a small post conference fund which will enable a few conference participants in India for extending the interactions that they started at epistemic and they will be and we are we are trying to put a call about it shortly on our epistemic conference website so please keep visiting our website if you're interested in such extended interactions with HBCSC members after the conference. There will be more details that will be added on our website about it but I think this is the first time since the conference moved into virtual space we thought let us at least keep this space and this networking opportunity on going through the conference fund so that was the last announcement in the call and I think I'll just make a few one or two brief announcements regarding epistemic schedule as well. Please note that the conference is being designed or planned in two time slots one is in the pre lunch or morning afternoon slot according to the Indian local Indian time and then the second slot is a different afternoon or evening times on every day. I would like to request all the audience to check the conference schedule available on website as some days we start early and some days we start late to accommodate the speakers who have joined us particularly from different parts of the world. So the conference case if you keep an eye on conference schedule every day there are slight changes when we start the afternoon session so please have a look at it so you don't miss out any session and plan the next five days accordingly. So I think yes with all those announcement I welcome you all on behalf of epistemic team once again and we hope you will have a wonderful time at this online conference and we'll be starting our first event of epistemic nine right at 1030s so we can take a break of 10 minutes and our first thing in the talk is our first event in epistemic nine is a plenary talk by Professor Sarah Calbert so stay tuned and we request session chair to start the first session at sharp 1030. So if you want to hang out you're more than welcome but otherwise we can take a small 10 minutes national break and then we can rejoin at 1030 Indian standard time so thank you everyone once again and stay tuned for the next five days for epistemic nine.