EERA is celebrating 30 years in 2024, and as part of our anniversary celebrations, we have invited people who have been at the heart of the association to share their memories and reflections. In a series of blog posts, which will run throughout 2024, we will share those precious memories, from the people who helped foster the global EERA community.

In this blog post, Dr Peter Gray takes a rather light-hearted yet nostalgic look back over the meetings and encounters of EERA and ECER, and wonders whether the spark can be rekindled.

EERA is 30! Like an old flame, there is nostalgia, the desire to tie up loose ends, regret, and exhilaration. I remember EERA, and ECER in particular, as a love affair with conversations and possibilities, ultimately something in the past that was life-changing, but unreal.

Professionally, I owe everything to chance meetings at ECER, and its kaleidoscope of cities, Geneva, Ghent, Helsinki, Gothenburg, Istanbul, Cadiz, Porto, Budapest, and more, the complex architecture of education in bricks and cuisine, locality and world-making. Passionately, I loved the anticipation of arrival, meeting the wonderful EERA office team, everything in order and yet everything in the chaos of ideas and interactions, fluid, a kiss of learning and desire. Desire for what? 

Always there was the Manhattan moment of critical mass, the idea that two and a half thousand people, intelligent, bright, outward-looking people, could somehow explode education into what it should be, a blinding light overcoming the desperate human condition of violence and stupidity. Yet, how could we achieve this? Thousands of papers, presentations, and answers, yet no progress. How could this knowledge be captured and made to fly?

We tried, of course. The spark was there, the team was forming, and the technology kept moving forward. But still, we are at the margins of science, amateur researchers with our small, dim-burning candles of evidence against the hadron colliders and their fundamental particles. Not a single useful result, and yet physics gets billions; we get what’s left. 

This is the disappointment of lovers, the promise unfulfilled of nirvana, crushed by the realities of work and domesticity. We all went home afterwards and filled in forms, did the washing, went back to the everyday. The same thing happens at festivals, a sudden sense of community ending in a long journey home. 

No-one is to blame, because the essence of this communality is that there is no divine leader, no mindless idiot in a suit driving us towards death and degradation. We tried and did our best, but, as in love, there is always a fatal flaw. We have mountains of evidence, but no vision. We have an army, but no ammunition. We have the desire, but reality always drags us back.

 ECER was and is, at least for me, about becoming an insider, whilst outside dull reality, about knowing the personalities and the systems, about recognition. And yet there should have been more. Being inside is no good unless there is a relationship with the outside. Educational research, our love, ultimately retreats into the comfort of home, rather than becoming the one true source of light and inspiration.

My great ECER moment in Porto, 2014, was not a three people and a dog presentation in a sleepy seminar room. It was a massive outdoor concert, Stopestra, the answer to musical and political austerity. Eighty musicians playing to five thousand dancing professors, singing our way out of the past. That was our moment, but we missed it. Education continues as a dismal drizzle of PISA results, pointless testing, PhDs with no philosophy.

How can we return to our love, when she has settled down in a nest of flatpack furniture and earnest upbringing? Can we ride out for the last time, giving everything we have to the cause? Like an affair, we began with a future and ended in the past. Why have we not generated something beyond the boundaries of tradition and history? Why are we not changing the world?

 I loved EERA and ECER, and I still love them, but when we meet, it is shy, awkward, a quick coffee in Conftool. I wonder about how it could have been, and how it could be still. I am not jealous of her new lovers, who are doing what lovers always do. I am happy to keep the faith, to review and rewind. Thank you for everything, EERA. See you someday!

EERA is celebrating 30 years in 2024, and as part of our anniversary celebrations, we have invited people who have been at the heart of the association to share their memories and reflections. In a series of blog posts, which will run throughout 2024, we will share those precious memories, from the people who helped foster the global EERA community.

In this blog post, Associate Professor Emeritus Lejf Moos reflects on his involvement in EERA and ECER, and his time as EERA President from 2009 to 2014. 

EERA has for thirty years grown from non-existence into an active and important participant and agent in European education research. It has been pivotal because global and European politics and its dissemination channels, such as transnational agencies[1], from the outside constructed the educational space: networks, flows and policy scapes. The influences increased rapidly and became cornerstones in the contexts and frames in which educational research works (EERA: a participant or an agent).

I have been privileged to take part in the development of the association in the greater part of that period: In the late 90s, I was a regular participant in the ECERS. In the first decade of the new century, I was a member of the EERA Council, followed by five years as the president. Over the latter decade, I have again enjoyed participating regularly in ECERs, but with minor knowledge about the inner life of our association.

The life of EERA has changed enormously from being a loose association of 12 national associations with a small office in Glasgow to being a large association with an office in Berlin. When we experienced that more, many more associations wanted to join us (from 32 in 2009 to 42 in 2024), we found there was a need for more organized and professional structures. The office was moved to Berlin, and highly professional staff was hired. The EERA governance also needed modernization, so a new Constitution described the relations between the Council and the Executive Board, the Emerging Researchers Group, the networks and their convenors, the journal, and, of course, the ECER.

We extended our activities to become more attentive to our surroundings and contexts. It may be claimed that EERA has gotten more political over time, and that is true and well-founded because it is pivotal to know the situations that individual researchers must work in, and that also applies to national and, in particular, transnational associations. One example is the relations with the European Commission through work on the Horizon 2020 project. Another, according to the Council minutes, is the public response to the Russian war on Ukraine.

From the very beginning, EERA was intended to act as an important link between national research associations and the European Union, in line with the European Commission’s discourse of Europeanization. A few EC initiatives were recommended by the association, but over time this link vanished. One reason for that was that EERA had gone beyond the EU area to include membership from more European countries and, at the same time, was active in co-constructing the WERA (World Education Research Association). Another reason was that the EC moved in directions that were incompatible with EERA’s thinking. In 2010, when the Horizon 2020 White Paper was launched, it had no room for humanities and social sciences and thus for education research. We had to respond and react to this tendency, and we did so with help from Philip Keraudren from the EC. We were active, together with more than 40 (now 70) other associations, in establishing the EASSH (European Alliance for Social Science and Humanity) in 2015. Since then, this alliance has been very active and successful in influencing the EC together with the ISE (The Initiative for Science in Europe) and, of course, EERA.

I think the work on the council and with the network conveners on Horizon 2020 has been one of the most inspiring experiences of my work in EERA. Colleagues from a vast majority of national associations and scientific fields were eager and committed to collaborating with colleagues and the Executive Board in several seminars and discussions, and in establishing the EASSH. These activities have contributed a great deal to finding and defining EERA’s place in the political and scientific landscape while at the same time strengthening the relations between EERA and the national associations through the functions of each representative on the council.

As mentioned above, for thirty years, EERA has seen ourselves as working within and for the Europeanization and, at the same time – as real academics – being profoundly critical in the ways the EU and EC work in relation to education and educational policies.

Looking back, we have worked for two major changes over time: We have wanted to expand our reach beyond the EU member nations, into a Greater Europe. This is clear when reading the list of member associations to EERA. Secondly, we wanted to further high-quality educational research for the benefit of education and society as a European space for critical, scientific exchanges of ideas, discourses, and discussions in relation to transnational and national research and governance, and their diverse forms of hard, soft, and discursive governance (A panel discussion).

Summing up, I see a very successful association that continuously and successfully works to assist and inspire education research and education researchers all over Europe, as mentioned above, but even more important is the continuous work of the networks and, of course, the ECER. In 2023, there were more than 3.000 participants in Glasgow. I wonder: How big shall EERA and ECER become?

[1]The EU (European Union), EC (European Commission), the UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and the OECD (The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development)

EERA is celebrating 30 years in 2024, and as part of our anniversary celebrations, we have invited people who have been at the heart of the association to share their memories and reflections. In a series of blog posts, which will run throughout 2024, we will share those precious memories, from the people who helped foster the global EERA community.

In this blog post, Dr Jani Ursin, reflects on his experiences as a Networks’ Representative on the EERA council, and the inclusive community of researchers he has engaged with over the years.

What I’m reflecting on in this blog post mainly relates to my time as Networks’ Representative on the EERA Council (NRC) from September 2015 to September 2019. What does a Networks’ Representative do? Well, I didn’t know much when I was elected as the new NRC in 2014, but a year of shadowing prepared me well for my role as an NRC.

The main role of an NRC is, as the name suggests, to represent all the EERA networks. EERA has more than 30 networks, which vary greatly in size and nature. As I moved from being a Link Convenor in Network 22: Research in Higher Education to being an NRC, it obviously took some work on my part to adopt this role. However, my four years’ experience as an NRC has provided me with a wealth of knowledge and insight into educational research that has far exceeded my initial expectations.

My time as NRC involved many meetings (Executive Board, EERA Council, and Link Convenor meetings), seminars (such as the Network Seminar), planning for future ECERs and other EERA activities, and all kinds of informal gatherings (the best decisions are made over dinner, right?). Common to all of these were lively, profound, and sometimes challenging discussions about educational research and its role in Europe and beyond. Occasionally these discussions ended up being very philosophical and thorough, such as what constitutes a network or what is a European perspective (I still do not have a comprehensive answer to these questions). Nevertheless, all the discussions we had really broadened my understanding of educational research and especially of the different contexts in which educational research is carried out. I think that participating in various EERA activities has helped me to get out of my own rabbit hole and really try to look at educational research from a ‘European perspective’.

A community of researchers

One of the strategic priorities of the EERA is to be an inclusive community of researchers. I think that EERA has succeeded in this. The openness of EERA and its networks to different research traditions and methodologies, as well as the promotion of dialogue between them, is evident when participating in ECERs. In addition, EERA pays particular attention to welcoming the next generation of researchers, and colleagues from countries where educational research is still in development, into the EERA community and into the educational dialogue. Personally, participating in EERA activities for more than two decades has helped me to build a network of great colleagues, many of whom I consider friends, with whom I can discuss and share whatever is on my mind.

In EERA we often tend to say that the networks are the essence of the association. I would argue that the people – network members, early career researchers, ECER and ERC participants, Council members, the Executive Board and the EERA office – are the heart and soul of EERA. The EERA community is made up of genuine, hard-working, committed, yet fun-loving people. In times of uncertainty, a sense of belonging is important – and belonging to the EERA community gives hope for a better and brighter future!