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Ukrainian Higher Education and the International Education Community in the Context of Russian Assault on Ukraine 
On the 24th of February 2022, the world witnessed the most unexpected and unbelievable turn of events – a full-scale war in a country located in geographical Europe. Russian government and military, in cooperation with their partners in Belarus, launched a military assault on Ukraine’s infrastructure, civilians’ lives, freedoms, and sovereignty. Higher education (HE), along with other areas of life, has taken a backstage while people have been sheltering and/or fleeing to seek safety. Nevertheless, the backstage for Ukrainian wounded HE in these circumstances does not mean a full submergence by the war. The number of damaged or destroyed educational establishments, including higher...
Gender and attainment in Northern Ireland: How can we understand the division?
Post-primary attainment is commonly measured through GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) examinations which are completed in the final year of compulsory schooling in the UK at age 16. The GCSE attainment outcomes of pupils are annually reported in Northern Ireland by the Department of Education. They are presented according to school type (grammar schools which select pupils based on their academic ability on an entrance test (also known as the transfer test) or non-grammar schools which are not academically selective in their intake of pupils), socio-economic status (Free School Meal Eligibility) and gender. The gendered division in educational attainment in Northern...
Harnessing Digital Technology as a Pedagogical Tool in Early Childhood Education
Children today are born into a world where digital technology is omnipresent and permeates all areas of their lives (O’Neill, 2018). Yet one area which appears hesitant to embrace technology and harness the possibilities it can provide is the early childhood education sector (ECEC). Here in Ireland, the Department of Education and Skills (DES) has developed a digital strategy for primary and post-primary schools. This is fortified by a national support service which provides training and resources to support teachers in successfully incorporating technology in their educational practice. However, the DES has stopped short of recommendations for technology to enhance learning for children...
Equity in Education during COVID-19 and the Danger of “Microwave Equity”
The last two years have been quite challenging for the world and for educators. First, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world for a while, and many learning institutions were closed as a result of the pandemic.[1] At the same time, the increasing strength of the anti-racism movement from the United States and across the world has highlighted the importance of equity, inclusion, and equality in education in such a time as this. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent school closure globally led to 1.6 billion children[2]missing out on education, which has further amplified the inequalities inherent in many education systems. In many regions around the world, for example, in Europe, groups...
The Hero’s Journey – What PhD Students can learn from storytellers
Are you an early educational researcher struggling with the three monumental philosophical questions – where am I, where do I come from, and where am I headed – regarding your project? Nice to meet you. I wrote this post for you. Having experience as an educational researcher, I was recently asked to share it with my peers, who are also pursuing a master's degree in pedagogical supervision – the majority of whom are teachers, and for whom this is a first-time experience undertaking educational research. I revisited my PhD Hero's Journey to share with them the joys and hardships of an educational research project. The hero's journey refers to the mythological narrative archetype that has...
Hackathons: A Creative Approach to Developing Researchers and Solving Educational Challenges
What do we expect from our education postgraduate research graduates in the 21st Century? The pace of society and its workplaces demands innovative, creative thinkers. This sits alongside all of the composite research skills they should acquire during their research degree (Ireland’s Nationals Skills Strategy 2025, DES; Doctoral Skills Statement, IUA). During the slow burn of a research degree, it can be tricky to obtain fast-paced transversal skills, such as innovation, dynamism, and quick problem-solving. Events that allow research students to use strategies like design-based thinking (Razzouk & Shute, 2012) through challenge-based learning (CBL) tasks offer a way to do this. An...
Reimagining Global Education together: towards a more comprehensive and contextually relevant understanding for the future
Global education is an emerging research theme in Finland. Although primarily framed within a European context, it is important to ensure that any form of global education is locally relevant. Within a local Finnish context, then, research done by different scholars at different institutions must be in tune with one another. With this purpose in mind, scholars from various universities in Finland met for a three-day retreat organised by the Global Education Research in Finland (GERIF-network) on 9 December 2021 at the Konnevesi research station, near the town of Jyväskylä. Global education research, as any research topic, benefits from being mapped and made visible. This allows peers to...
Reimagining Teacher Education Pedagogies and Policies in the Context of Mass Global Migration
Diversity across the world is hardly new, but its nature is changing given the growing number of refugee and migrant children, placing increasing stress on schools to meet their learning needs [1] These increases in transnational mobility have teachers struggling to reconsider their everyday practices to accommodate many more newcomers in their classrooms, even while immigrant and refugee students lag behind their nonimmigrant peers academically. [2] [3] [4] In 2019, the number of international migrants reached 272 million; 33 million of them were children. Among the world’s migrants are nearly 29 million refugees and asylum seekers who have been forcibly displaced from their own...
Developing a Classroom Tool to Promote Critical Perspectives on ‘Single Stories’
EERA is delighted and honoured to be partnering with the Global Educational Network in Europe (GENE) to make significant research funds available to our members to further research the area of global education. We asked the recipients of the Global Education Award 2020/21 to share their research with the broader EERA community. In 2009, the Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, delivered a Ted Talk about what she called The Danger of a Single Story. Adichie’s central theme is that how stories are told, who tells them, when and how, is ‘really dependent on power’. She illustrates this by drawing on her own experiences of being subjected to single stories about Africa as a place of...
Building Partnerships via an Interactive Map of Critical Global Citizenship Education
EERA is delighted and honoured to be partnering with the Global Educational Network in Europe (GENE) to make significant research funds available to our members to further research the area of global education. We asked the recipients of the Global Education Award 2020/21 to share their research with the broader EERA community. The ECIGAL research group at the University of A Coruña in Spain is dedicated to promoting and researching Critical Global Citizenship Education (CGCE). We are committed to designing collaborative projects that bring together regulated education institutions (such as schools and universities) with other relevant social agents, such as NGOs and other organizations...
Translating across words, paradigms, and traditions of education
EERA is delighted and honoured to be partnering with the Global Educational Network in Europe (GENE) to make significant research funds available to our members to further research the area of global education. We asked the recipients of the Global Education Award 2020/21 to share their research with the broader EERA community. At the beginning of 2021, the two authors of this blog, along with Finnish colleagues Inkeri Rissanen and Katri Jokikokko, received a Global Education Award from the GENE network. With this award, they promised to do something they were all passionate about: Explore teacher students’ implicit knowledge in issues related to global education and consider how...
World Education Research Association: A Global Community of Educational Researchers
In April 2009, representatives from 24 education research associations around the world unanimously affirmed their commitment to establish a global network of educational scholars to advance education research worldwide. The establishment of the World Education Research Association signaled an ambitious commitment to work together as a global community of organizations to undertake initiatives that are global in nature and celebrate the diversity of traditions of local communities of educational researchers. As an international, non-profit, non-governmental association of associations established for scientific and scholarly purposes, WERA seeks to forge new collaborations and cooperation...
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