In just 10 to 15 years the landscape of education and training has been transformed by the emergence of new learning spaces - creating spaces that are hybrid in character; that are cross- cultural, cross-sectoral and cross-institutional and, because of this hybridity, profoundly challenge the prevailing cultures, sectors and institutions of education and training. One expression of this changing landscape is evident in the proliferation of cross-national education and training provision. Europe, itself, is a new educational space in which national, super- national and sub-national interests must be negotiated and reconciled with existing, and emerging, education and training, and learning agendas. NAFTA follows Europe's regional initiative, creating a North American space which challenges education and training in once disconnected nation-states. Other regional spaces are even less developed and nation-states adopt other strategies aimed at global connectedness. Australia, for example, has extended its education export role, offering programs and building cross- national partnerships in a complex cultural and economic agenda. Universities, Technical and Further Education (TAFE) Institutes and some schools now provide off-shore and on-shore learning supports that generate income and provide cosmopolitan learning opportunities to support knowledge workers in the global economy. These developments extend the challenges of within- nation cultural pluralism and cross-cultural communication (eg. indigenous education) to different national jurisdictions (eg. international education). Another expression of this change is evident within nation-states. Here there has been a reconfiguration of the old structures of formal education and training institutions (schools, TAFE Institutes, and universities), their sharply defined boundaries and purposes, and their familiar actors and patterns of agency. In Australia, for instance, schools have taken on vocational education and training (VET in schools). Industry-community partnerships work with schools and TAFE to support 'at risk' youth (eg. Local Learning and Employment Networks (LLEN), industry-education partnerships). Vocational education is provided in enterprises (work-based education, workplace delivery) and community settings. Universities vocationalise their courses and workplace training is targeted at professional occupations (muddying the vocational-professional division). The teachers' role has become ambiguous in these settings. On the one hand teachers have been subjected to increased management, their professional discretion curtailed by corporate and systemic imperatives. On the other hand, there is an emerging cohort of entrepreneur professionals who see learning as their business but in spaces that lie beyond traditional institutions. These developments are both driven and further confounded by the re-design of education and training on an outcomes, rather than inputs, model and by the proliferation of ICT. Traditional understandings of the time-based character of learning are undercut by the outcomes model, its pressure to recognised prior learning irrespective of its location and what is learned, and its just- in-time focus on plugging gaps and learning for performance. And the way face-to-face relationships, which previously sustained learning, have become increasingly mediated by technology complicates our conception of education with issues of information-transfer and entertainment. A thousand questions arise from these developments: ¤ What are the key characteristics, dynamics, impacts and implications of these developments? ¤ What challenges do they present to policy, to institutional traditions, and to social movement? ¤ How can new educational spaces be understood and explained? ¤ What do they mean for contemporary global/local dynamics and for education and training? ¤ And how can research inform on-the- ground praxis that remains committed to social justice? These are some of the issues that will be taken up in the symposium, titled: Understanding new educational spaces: concepts, research and powerful knowledge