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The ‘Logic’ Behind the Resumption of National Testing in the Danish State School System
On the 1st of February, the Danish Minister of Education, Pernille Rosenkrantz-Theil, announced that national testing would be resumed as of March 1st to evaluate the “learning loss” that has arisen in connection with the lockdown of state schools in Denmark. What is the logic behind this decision, and what does it say about the political priorities in relation to primary schools? The Danish Minister’s announcement that national testing must be resumed immediately after the reopening of public schools has not been well received by the Danish Union of Teachers and many individual teachers. For example, in an interview with the Danish radio station P1, teacher Anne Hammer pointed out that...
ECER 2021Geneva – Theme: Milestones and Challenges
ECER 2021 Geneva will focus on ‘Education and Society: expectations, prescriptions, reconciliations’. How relevant is this theme today in this specific context? Why is the city of Geneva a fertile ground in the field of education and of the development of the individual for hosting debates on reconciling societal expectations (sometimes disparate, diffracted or even contradictory) with the realities on the ground, and the needs of those involved in education, teaching and training? This contribution from Dr Stefan Bodea aims to provide some socio-historical and cultural milestones which should support decanting the essence of the Geneva call for contributions covering this theme: an...
Artificial Intelligence in Student Assessment: What is our Trajectory?
Bengi Birgili is a Research Assistant in the Mathematics Education Department at MEF University in Istanbul. Here she shares her research and insights into the development of Artificial Intelligence applications in the field of education and explains the current trajectory of AI in the Turkish education system. As a mathematics teacher and doctoral candidate in educational sciences, I closely follow the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in the field of education. Innovations in AI become outdated within a few months because of the rapidly increasing studies on image processing, speech recognition, natural language processing, robotics, expert systems, machine...
21 Years of The Austrian Society for Research and Development in Education (ÖFEB)
Twenty-one years ago, on March 31st, 2000, the Austrian Society for Research and Development in Education (Österreichische Gesellschaft für Forschung und Entwicklung im Bildungswesen; ÖFEB) was founded during a conference on teacher education in Vienna. The decision to develop a national educational research association had been taken half a year earlier during another conference where the need for an association of educational researchers was voiced. The founding meeting was attended by 16 persons; in the autumn of the first year, the Society had 60 members. The composition of the first executive board of directors already showed a major intention of the Society, namely to promote and...
What can international data tell us about education paraprofessionals? Almost nothing
In many schools and classrooms across the globe, the drive towards the inclusion of pupils with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream schools has become contingent on the creation and utilisation of a relatively new paraprofessional workforce, known variously as teaching assistants or teacher aides (TAs). It is claimed that in many countries, policies of mainstreaming pupils with SEN rely heavily on this ‘non-teaching’ workforce (Masdeu Navarro, 2015). The intertwining of inclusion and TAs leads to the view that TAs have become ‘the mortar in the brickwork … hold[ing] schools together in numerous and sometimes unnoticed ways’ (Webster et al., 2021, p2). Its relative intuitiveness –...
The Promise of Donna Haraway’s Philosophy: Knotting Together Better Educational Futures
As we have grappled with critical questions in our research and teaching, all of us contributing to this blog have been energised by Donna Haraway’s work. This blog explores the promise of Haraway’s philosophy for knowledge, learning and education. Donna Haraway’s philosophy offers conceptual and practical resources for navigating the complexities of contemporary educational problems.Reconceptualising knowledge, learning and education with Donna HarawayHaraway’s major early intervention was to challenge traditional notions of objectivity – which she called ‘the God trick’ (Haraway, 1988). She argued that objectivity was a Western masculinist, patriarchal tradition, which presumed...
Education in a Post-COVID World: Creating more Resilient Education Systems
Schools across Europe have been at the forefront of dealing with the COVID crisis since it began in 2020, coping with different systems of attendance, new methods of learning, and changing government guidance on how to operate. Many education systems have found themselves under pressure in these circumstances. Not all have fared well. Data from our research[1] tracking how primary teachers in England responded to the disruption provides some insights into whether and how COVID-19 can lead to more resilient education systems. Revaluing local knowledge is a vital element in rebuilding, reconnecting, and reimagining education after the pandemic. Our data shows that local knowledge provides a...
How to prepare for your first ERG conference
The Emerging Researchers' Group holds an annual conference, the Emerging Researchers' Conference (ERG), preceding the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER). We asked Estella Ferraro for some tips on preparing and attending your first ERG Conference. Going to an international conference for the first time can be overwhelming and exciting at the same time. It is an excellent opportunity to meet fellow colleagues from all over the world - I have met colleagues from Europe but also from Australia, Asia, South America, and Africa. It also gives you feedback on your research from outside the own academic framework, which can really open your eyes to entirely new perspectives. You...
How Dialogic Educational Research Reconnects Communities
At the European Conference of Educational Research in 2020, Professor Ramon Flecha presented his keynote "How dialogic educational research reconnects communities". Here he shares his research with our readers. My presentation was part of the panel at the European Conference of Educational Research in 2020, shared with two excellent speakers, with the outstanding coordination of Joe O’Hara. It was entitled 'How dialogic educational research reconnects communities', and it was organized around four sections: Dialogic social impact and the human right to science and education Dialogic Educational Research (DER) and Co-creation DER and educational communities DER and ethics. What is a...
Refugees and Education – Voices, Discourses and Policies
The issue of refugees and asylum worldwide is a topical debate, where statistics and states play a major role with regard to research. Research focuses almost exclusively on the now, on themes like borders, trafficking, and human rights. In Europe in particular, the years 2015 and 2016 marked a turning point, because the numbers of refugees who arrived and applied for asylum reached the highest level in the Post-World-War II era. The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ underlines the necessity to integrate the incomers into established communities. This is, however, not a new phenomenon. In political discourses and other actual debates around the entry, asylum process, and integration of refugees,...
Learning by Doing Research: the Ukrainian Educational Research Association
Maintaining reliable contacts, networking, and sharing ideas are some of the best ways to empower educators. And professional and research associations help educators achieve these goals. The Ukrainian Educational Research Association (UERA) was created five years ago to boost interdisciplinary research synergy in the field of education.Freeing Educational Research from dusty bookshelvesHistorically, educational research in Ukraine was purely in the domain of Pedagogy which in Ukraine is a discipline dealing with history and theory of education, including its forms and methods. A quick search of the National Library of Ukraine database shows that 2729 candidate dissertations (Ph.D....
School Uniform Policy in Scottish schools: Control and Consent
A topic that is of continued interest to educational researchers – but also to teachers, pupils, and their parents - is school uniforms. As you may know, there is a marked difference between what pupils wear in school in the UK (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), Ireland and the rest of Europe (recently Malta changed from formal uniforms to tracksuits). We set out to look into the reasons that schools give for having school uniforms. I conducted the research with thirteen students from across the University of Aberdeen. A week-long course was designed to teach the qualitative data analysis software NVivo while taking part in an authentic research project. This was to provide...
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