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EERJ Special Issue: The Bologna process – diverse harmonisation

by Dr Lars Ulriksen | EERJ, NERA, NW 22 Research in Higher Education, NW 28 Sociologies of Education

The European Educational Research Journal (EERJ) was created by EERA to further the aims of the association and its members, educational researchers across Europe. It is a scientific journal interested in the changing landscape of education research across Europe. It publishes double-blind peer-reviewed papers in special issues and as individual articles. As part of the ongoing cooperation with EERJ, the EERA blog will share updates and information about upcoming and published special issues and articles alongside blog posts from EERJ contributors.

You can find out more about the EERJ and the benefits of a European journal presenting international educational research at the end of this blog post.

The EERJ March 2023 Special Issue was dedicated to the topic of student tradition patterns, from bachelor to master’s level in post-Bologna Europe. We asked the guest editor, Lars Ulriksen, to share his research with the EERA blog.

Special issue: Student transition patterns from bachelor to master’s level in post-Bologna Europe

Vol 22, Issue 2, 2023

First published online March, 2023

Lars Ulriksen

Jens-Peter Thomsen

David Reimer, Ulrike Schwabe

Elisabeth Hovdhaugen, Lars Ulriksen

Lene Møller Madsen, Henriette Tolstrup Holmegaard

Heather Mendick, Anne-Kathrin Peters

When, during the past two decades, I have attended conferences and seminars on higher education, ‘the Bologna process’ has been a recurrent theme, sometimes linked to a discussion of ‘the European Higher Education Area’. One of the intentions behind the formation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) was to make it easier for students to move between higher education institutions and programmes in different European countries. The Bologna process was launched to achieve this goal, setting up various principles and guidelines with which the countries that had decided to join the process had to align.

What is the Bologna process?

At the heart of the Bologna process is an idea of harmonisation. To allow for a smooth transition between different institutions across countries, there had to be a similarity that allowed students to transfer credits. A key part of this harmonisation was (and is) the 3+2 structure, stipulating that university programmes should be structured in two cycles, a three-year bachelor programme and a two-year Master’s programme. In some countries, this structure caused substantial changes, e.g., in countries where Master’s programmes had previously been integrated entities rather than two separate stages of a bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree.

This harmonisation has been an object of criticism [1]. At the same time, it has been questioned to what extent the implementation of the EHEA was, in fact, as uniform as assumed [2]. The adoption of the Bologna principles into national policies was affected by national agendas and developments. Thus, the harmonisation unfolded differently in different countries. One could argue that diversity would be an advantage in order to benefit from the possibility of studying in different countries, but in all events, the Bologna process has harmonised the EHEA, but with national differences.

A student’s perspective on Bologna

However, what does it look like from the perspective of the students who have to navigate the structures and principles of EHEA? What happens when the policy is made into text, as Ball puts it [3]? The March EERA Special Issue of EERJ addresses this with an emphasis on the student perspective. Previous studies of the Bologna process have tended to focus on the policy and curriculum level, but at the end of the day, it is students who experience the consequences of the way policy documents are interpreted and transformed into specific study conditions at courses and study programmes.

The papers in the special issue discuss this with different focuses and methods. Some consider the effects at a macro level based on quantitative data. Others use qualitative methods to investigate the way students at an individual level act within the changed framework of a 3+2 structure. In both approaches, the focus is on the consequences at a national level: What are the implications of changes implemented as a part of the Bologna process for students in different countries and programmes? However, what becomes visible when looking across the papers is that the consequences not only vary across countries, but that even at the same institution, disciplinary differences mean that students are affected differently by the new structure.

Differences between countries

One example is the papers by Thomsen [4] and by Reimer & Schwabe [5]. The two papers take a quantitative approach to explore the consequences at a macro level of the introduction of the 3+2 structure in educational systems that had previously been characterised by integrated master’s degrees. The papers analyse data from Denmark and Germany respectively. While each paper offers interesting results at a national level, together they provide a comparative look at differences across systems. A striking result is the effect on access to higher education for different socio-economic groups. In Germany, it seems that introducing the transition state from the bachelor to the master’s level has made the system less equal (contrary to one of the expressed intentions of the process (Prague Communique, 2001)). In Denmark, on the other hand, this does not seem to be the case. The structure does not affect the chances of students of different socio-economic backgrounds – instead, the inequality has remained depressingly unchanged since the 1990s.

Differences between disciplines

Another example is a comparison of the reflections and experiences of students in two different study programmes at the same university [6]. While the students in the integrated programme could just follow the traditional path of the discipline with a long history in science, students in the other programme found choosing what to do after the bachelor’s degree more challenging and uncertain. This is because they attended an interdisciplinary bachelor programme without a long tradition. Thus, differences between disciplines and the institutional capital linked to the disciplines present the students with different opportunities and difficulties.

The benefits of the EERJ Special Issues

For me, the papers of this special issue show why we should have an EERJ journal and special issues, and why we should use different methods in educational research. Looking across national contexts makes us aware of similarities as well as differences, and it reminds us of both what is different and what is common across borders. Bringing analyses of the same topic in different contexts together in one issue emphasises precisely this point because the separate analyses engage in a conversation with each other. This conversation concerns national differences, but also the contributions of different methods and levels of analysis – that the patterns at the macro level are lived in individual practices that, in turn, are reflected at an aggregate level in the statistical analyses. The dialogue between the papers invites curiosity and further study of the dual process of harmonisation and diversity.

Contributions to the EERJ March Special Issue

Students’ choices and paths in the Bologna degree structure: An introduction to the special issue
Lars Ulriksen

Moving to opportunity: Student trajectories in the post-Bologna university system in Denmark
Jens_Peter Thomsen

Stability or change? Social inequality at the transition from bachelor’s to master’s degree programmes in Germany. Empirical evidence from four graduate cohorts
David Reimer and Ulrike Schwabe

The historic importance of degree structure: A comparison of bachelor to master transitions in Norway and Denmark
Elisabeth Hovdhaugen and Lars Ulriksen

Science students’ post-bachelor’s choice narratives in different disciplinary settings
Lene Møller Madsen and Henriette Tolstrup Holmegaard

How post-Bologna policies construct the purposes of higher education and students’ transitions into Masters programmes
Heather Mendick and Anne-Kathrin Peters

Key Messages

The Bologna process has mostly been studied at a policy level, but we should also consider what it looks like from the students’ perspectives
Even though the Bologna process introduces a uniform structure, its implementation does not always have the same consequences in different countries, e.g., concerning how it affects equal access to higher education
Even within the same country, students at different study programmes may experience the 3+2 structure differently because the disciplines have different institutional capital
The special issue is an example of what is gained by using different methods and bringing together different contexts

Dr Lars Ulriksen

Professor at the Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen

Lars Ulriksen is a professor at the Department of Science Education at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on the encounter between students and the higher-education programmes with a particular focus on students’ transitions into higher education and onwards. He is the head of the University Science Education research group.

ORCID: 0000-0002-7094-132X

https://www.ind.ku.dk

References and Further Reading

[1] Wihlborg, M. (2019). Critical viewpoints on the Bologna Process in Europe: Can we do otherwise? European Educational Research Journal, 18(2), 135-157. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904118824229

[2] Broucker, B., De Wit, K., Verhoeven, J. C., & Leišytė, L. (Eds.). (2019). Higher Education System Reform. An International Comparison after Twenty Years of Bologna. Brill Sense.

[3] Ball, S. J. (1993, 1993/04/01). What is Policy? Texts, Trajectories and Toolboxes. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 13(2), 10-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/0159630930130203

Ball, S. J. (2015, 2015/05/27). What is policy? 21 years later: reflections on the possibilities of policy research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(3), 306-313. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2015.1015279

[4] Thomsen, J.-P. (2023). Moving to opportunity: Student trajectories in the post-Bologna university system in Denmark. European Educational Research Journal, 22(2), 146-169. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041211046748

[5] Reimer, D., & Schwabe, U. (2023). Stability or change? Social inequality at the transition from bachelor’s to master’s degree programmes in Germany. Empirical evidence from four graduate cohorts. European Educational Research Journal, 22(2), 170-197. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041221101293

[6] Madsen, L. M., & Holmegaard, H. T. (2023). Science students’ post-bachelor’s choice narratives in different disciplinary settings. European Educational Research Journal, 22(2), 216-235. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041221095151

EERJ Special Issue: Researching space and time making in Education

by Decuypere, Hartong & Oudeweetering | ABCEduc, DFG, EERJ, NW 28 Sociologies of Education

The European Educational Research Journal (EERJ) was created by EERA to further the aims of the association and its members, educational researchers across Europe. It is a scientific journal interested in the changing landscape of education research across Europe. It publishes double-blind peer-reviewed papers in special issues and as individual articles. As part of the ongoing cooperation with EERJ, the EERA blog will share updates and information about upcoming and published special issues and articles alongside blog posts from EERJ contributors.

Introduction―Space-and time-making in education: Towards a topological lens

Vol 21, Issue 6, 2022

First published online February 16, 2022

Mathias Decuypere
KU Leuven, Belgium

Sigrid Hartong
Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, Germany

Karmijn van de Oudeweetering
KU Leuven, Belgium

Have you ever had the feeling that time is going faster than it used to? That this acceleration is doing something with our idea of what good education is, or should be? That the pandemic has done something to our understanding of what it means to teach and learn physically ‘here’, or digitally ‘there’? That it is hard to say where and when exactly the workday of an educator starts or ends?

Space and time are made

These questions show us that it is increasingly getting more difficult to talk about space and time as if they are naturally just ‘out there’, surrounding us and our social lives. Contrary to such an instrumental and ‘neutral’ understanding of space and time, nowadays, we equally often hear that space and time are (partly) human constructions, and that our understanding of them changes continuously. For instance, the emergence of online educational platforms and other digital tools allow people from all over the world and across different time zones to be simultaneously present in a class or lecture.

Like a magnifying glass, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has powerfully invigorated and accelerated processes of digitization, and even more clearly illuminated how much impact they have on the educational field. As living rooms have transformed into do-it-yourself classrooms, as computer screens have served as both blackboards and lecturing halls, and as after-school programs have spread over the day, the pandemic has concretely shown how space and time are not only abstract ‘givens’. Rather than that, they have turned the self-evident and previously somehow “tacit” character of space- and time-making in education, into a topic of crucial concern.

Social topology at work

In our Special Issue in the European Educational Research Journal, we discuss and elaborate on one approach that allows us to research such processes of space- and time-making: (social) topology. The usage of topology is not necessarily new in educational research, but it has hitherto merely been used in very complex, theoretical, and abstract manners. In this Special Issue, our aim is to bring together various empirical studies that work within the framework of social topology. In adopting a topological lens, all the studies contained in the Special Issue show topology ‘at work’: they make it very concrete how you can, by means of this framework, research different sorts of space(s) and time(s) in educational practices.

Making educational spaces and times

Topology thus focuses on space and time as relational constructions that are made by humans, and that at the same time have a very profound impact on humans. A very intuitive example of this is the switching of the clock when we enter and exit daylight saving time – we then all very clearly feel the impact of our (human) tinkering with time. In our Special Issue, we have collected various contributions that show the different sorts of spacetimes that exist in the field of education; most of the time even existing at once. Where, for instance, does a lecture take place when it is being distributed in a digital form as a lecture capture and when it is equally being discussed online on Twitter?

Similarly, when and where does something like a borderless ‘European education’ take place when it is happening online? Where does it begin and where does it end?

These are the kind of questions that are addressed in our Special Issue, and that show the importance of using a topological lens in order to do research that focuses on the making of educational spaces and times. Moreover, as the Special Issue shows, these newly emerging spaces and times, when they are introduced in our educational systems, are doing something with and to do those systems. For instance, they create new sorts of professions and new types of professionalities. Equally, they are rhetorically deployed in such a way that they install particular future visions and desires into students and teachers.

Conclusion

In summary, then, our Special Issue focuses on educational spaces and times as things that are continuously being made. Moreover, the articles in the collection do so by giving mutual attention to space(s) and time(s).

As such, the collection greatly advances our understanding of how the spatial and the temporal continuously interact with each other, and thus makes a clear case for the importance of analyzing both conjointly, without seeking to privilege one over the other.

You can access the EERJ Special Issue here (open access). If you are interested in submitting to the EERJ, you can find the Submission Guidelines here.

Prof. Mathias Decuypere

Associate Professor of Qualitative Research at KU Leuven, Belgium.

Mathias Decuypere is Associate Professor of Qualitative Research at KU Leuven, Belgium. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mathias-Decuypere

Professor Sigrid Hartong

W3-Professor of Sociology at Helmut Schmidt Universität Hamburg, Germany.

Sigrid Hartong is W3-Professor of Sociology at Helmut Schmidt Universität Hamburg, Germany. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sigrid-Hartong

Karmijn van de Oudeweetering

Doctoral candidate at KU Leuven, Belgium.

Karmijn van de Oudeweetering is a doctoral candidate at KU Leuven, Belgium. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Karmijn-Van-De-Oudeweetering

Hackathons: A Creative Approach to Developing Researchers and Solving Educational Challenges

by Dr Gillian Lake | EERJ, NW 22 Research in Higher Education, NW 3 Curriculum Innovation

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 example of one such event is a hackathon. A hackathon is a rapid, time-bound, pressurised problem-solving event.

Hackathons first emerged in the late 1990s. The ‘tech’ community broadly agrees that software programmers working on the export of cryptographic software in the OpenBSD project coined the phrase ‘hack’ to describe the exploratory work they were doing. Since then, Hackathons have been used widely in companies the world over; for example, they have led to the creation of many so-called ‘unicorn’ companies. More recently, their worth has been recognised in addressing worldwide challenges affecting climate and education.

DCU Institute of Education held its own two-day virtual hackathon event called ‘Hack to Transform’. This weekend event for postgraduate research students invited participants to solve/hack an education challenge for the 21st Century. In Hack to Transform, the focus was on one particular quadrant of The DCU IoE Postgraduate Researcher Development Framework: Personal Effectiveness Competencies. These intangible competencies include personal agility, teamwork, independence and creativity. Hack to Transform enabled research students to practise their creative problem-solving skills in order to create a pragmatic solution to the education challenge. The education challenge was broad enough to cover the range of research interests among the teams:

How can we ensure the most effective education experience for all in the 21st Century?

After one-minute pitches delivered by the students to their fellow participants on their proposed approaches, they voted on the five most workable solutions, using Tricider. They then formed five teams of three within which they could hack. The research students used the six stages of Design Thinking as a foundation for their approach to the challenge (Razzouk & Shute, 2012). These are:

Empathy – gaining an empathetic understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve. Setting aside your assumptions and gaining insight into users and their needs
Define – stating users’ needs and problems. Defining the core needs and creating the problem statement.
Ideate – challenging assumptions and creating ideas… thinking outside the box. Looking for alternative ways to solve the problem
Prototype – creating some possible solutions
Test – checking with key stakeholders regarding viability of prototype…seeing if solution meets stakeholders’ needs
Launch – putting the solution out to ‘market’. This was not achievable in the short space of time on this event.

Working in a new team was central to the event. Education research students can often operate in a workspace vacuum, working in a solitary independent manner on their research (Carpenter, 2012, Pyhalt Toom, Stubb, Lonka, 2012). Indeed, most of the students who participated in this event had never met one another. The feeling of togetherness (even virtually) generated in working towards a common goal intensively over the two days developed relationships among the students which didn’t exist previously. They relied on one another and pulled expertise from a wide-ranging pool of resources.

The teams of research students were each supported by a mentor from outside of the university and academic setting. This increased their awareness of differing audiences for their work and the importance of clarity in what they were suggesting as a solution. Mentors were approached as they were experienced leaders in their fields. Some were international and some were from the tech industry, from where Hackathons are thought to have originally emerged

Students were encouraged to present their solution to the assembled judging panel in an innovative way, so no slide decks! Some solutions included short films and interviews with key stakeholders. Judging criteria were provided in advance, and a scoring rubric was used by the five judges to pick the worthy winner: FUNdamential Education, which offered a novel approach to delivering education in the future.

The experienced judging panel remarked on the “high standard and innovation of the student presentations despite the limited timeframe”. Both they and the mentors were impressed by the professionalism, creativity, and reflexivity exhibited by the first-time participants. Mentors observed the bi-directional learning that occurred between themselves and their team. Strong working relationships were built.

Feedback from the students was also very positive, with many of them citing the “fun” they had and the opportunities they had to network “…with people with whom [they] otherwise would not be in contact” and “to work on creative ideas under pressure”. One student stated, “It has been fantastic to share this experience with people interested in solving big questions in education”. Many of the wider staff in the Faculty (including Management) attended the final presentations and prize-giving ceremony. Their presence and subsequent endorsement of the event, coupled with the positive feedback from participants, has ensured that Hack to Transform will be an annual fixture on the Faculty’s research events calendar into the future.

This Nano CBL event provided an opportunity for the realisation of the vision for Doctoral study in the Institute of Education at DCU. That vision espouses the principle that postgraduate study does not operate within a blank space, but rather within a vibrant, dynamic, and interactive academic community.

Dr Gillian Lake

Assistant Professor in Early Childhood Education and Chair of Postgraduate Studies by Research at DCU Institute of Education

Gillian is an Assistant Professor in Early Childhood Education and Chair of Postgraduate Studies by Research at DCU Institute of Education. She is also a Fellow of Advance HE, (FHEA) in the UK.

She was a Primary Teacher in Ireland for many years before first undertaking an MSc in Child Development & Education (University of Oxford). She was then awarded the Elfrida Talbot Scholarship to undertake a Doctorate of Philosophy in Education at University of Oxford, focusing on language development and Early Childhood Education. She has continued to work in this area, both as a lecturer (DCU & Oxford Brookes University, UK) and a researcher.

Her current research projects in the area of Early Childhood Education have allowed her to collaborate with industry, the early childhood sector and international research partners. She was recently invited to join the review panel for the International Journal of Early Years Education and is a regular reviewer for the European Early Childhood Education Research Journal.

Gillian was shortlisted for both the DCU President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the DCU President’s Award for Engagement in 2021. She is DCU’s representative on the National Academic Integrity Network and has just secured SATLE Funding – €15, 000 (National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education) for a project which is investigating Awareness of Academic Integrity across all DCU stakeholders.

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EERJ Special Issue: What is the ‘public’ in public education?

by Professor Matthew Clarke | EERJ

The European Educational Research Journal (EERJ) was created by EERA to further the aims of the association and its members, educational researchers across Europe. It is a scientific journal interested in the changing landscape of education research across Europe. It publishes double-blind peer-reviewed papers in special issues and as individual articles. As part of the ongoing cooperation with EERJ, the EERA blog will share updates and information about upcoming and published special issues and articles alongside blog posts from EERJ contributors.

What is the ‘public’ in public education? Mapping past, present and future educational imaginaries of Europe and beyond

Vol 21, Issue 1, 2022

First Published January 10, 2022, Editorial

This special issue explores past, present and potential future imaginaries of ‘public’ education in Europe and beyond. The special issue is set against a backdrop of political turmoil, including support for far-right forms of populism; it is also set against a historical background of several decades of significant change in the social, political and economic contexts of education, whereby schools and universities have been reimagined and reorganized in order to conform to the marketized and managerialist contours of the neoliberal imaginary; and it is set against the background of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has led to lockdowns and school closures in many countries and prompted many to question supposedly ‘normal’ ways of doing school and education in less turbulent times.

The term “unprecedented” has been used frequently to talk about current times. This is a time marked not only by a turn to right-wing populisms, often harking to neo-conservative, nostalgic notions of a glorious past and captured in slogans such as #MakeAmericaGreatAgain; #MakeChinaGreatAgain; #MakeBritainGreatAgain. It is also a time of collective left-wing rage and resistance movements such as #decolonising education, #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, #democracy4HK, #precaritystories, and #occupy. Technological inventions and innovations, as well as extreme weather events brought about by climate change, such as the massive 2019 Australian bushfires, are challenging the very existence, form and future of homo sapiens, and other species on planet Earth. For all these reasons, the special issue is topical and timely.

With such a complex backdrop, the special issue insists on the importance of recognizing the multi-dimensional nature of the notion of the public. Rather than defaulting to a commonsense private-public binary, our multidimensional perspective encourages us to identify at least six overlapping domains in relation to which school provision varies within and across time and space. These include:

the purposes of education
questions of accountability
issues of funding
matters of governance
issues of professionalism
issues of access.

Looking at the papers in more detail, the first two contributions, Pedagogic Rights, Public Education and Democracy (Heimans, Singh, Kwok) and The marketization of education and the democratic deficit (Säfström and Månsson), draw on French philosopher Rancière’s work on democracy to think with and about the ideas of ‘the public’, ‘publics’ and ‘emergent publics’.

Mendel’s On the haunted “public” in public education in Poland draws on Derrida’s notion of ‘hauntology’ to identify the traces of the ‘public’ in Poland that are from a different historical period, are strange to the present, but nevertheless still impact upon it.

The paper by Clarke and Mills, “We have never been public”: Continuity and change in the policy production of ‘the public’ in education in England, offers a historic perspective on the notion of the public and its deployment, highlighting the shifting discourses and practices within which the idea of ‘the public’ has been mobilized and made meaningful over several centuries.

Wrigley’s paper, Learning in a time of cholera: Imagining a future for public education is concerned with how public schools could be other than they currently are. Drawing on Marxist theory and Wolfgang Klafki’s curriculum theory, he develops principles for constructing ‘the common school’.

Thompson, Mockler and Hogan’s contribution, Making work private: Autonomy, intensification and accountability, reports on a multi-jurisdictional study conducted in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and England that involved interviews with 130 school and system leaders, policymakers and union officials.

Finally, Verger, Fontdevila and Zancajo’s paper, The instrumentation of public subsidies for private schools: different regulatory models with concurrent equity implications, surveys the provision of education across OECD countries to explore the multi-faceted and vernacularised consequences of public funding for private education.

The papers in this special edition offer alternative narratives to the dominant neoliberal education policy discourses and practices. They are activist in the sense of questioning and challenging the ordering of the sensible in dominant narratives of education across the globe.

About EERJ

The European Educational Research Journal was been created by the European Educational Research Association (EERA) to further the aims of the association and its members, educational researchers across Europe.

Education research increasingly crosses the borders of the national through its subjects of study, scholarly collaborations and references. The EERJ publishes education research papers and special issues which include a reflection on how the European context and other related global or regional dynamics shape their educational research topics.

You can find more about the EERJ here and browse the archive here.

Professor Matthew Clarke

Professor of Education, York St John University, England

Matthew Clarke is Professor of Education at York St John University in England and has also worked in universities in Australia, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates. His research interests focus on education policy and politics, particularly their implications for teachers, and his work draws on psychoanalytic, political and social theories. Recent books include Teacher Education and the Political: The power of negative thinking (Routledge 2017), Lacan and education policy: The other side of education (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Education and the fantasies of neoliberalism: Policy, politics and psychoanalysis (Routledge 2022).

Turning a leaf: a new procedure for European Education Research Journal Special Issues

by Professor Grek and Paolo Landri | BERA, EERJ, NW 23 Policy Studies and Politics of Education, NW 28 Sociologies of Education

2020 has been a year like no other. On 31st of December 2019, the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of ‘pneumonia of unknown etiology’. Less than a year later, the COVID-19 pandemic has shattered social life as we know it. The disease has taken tens of thousands of lives, whilst confining billions to their homes in worldwide ‘lockdowns’, in an effort to mitigate the spread of the lethal disease. In a matter of days, the global health emergency led to an education crisis, too. As country after country ordered school closures, education was suddenly faced with an extraordinary new reality: billions of children around the world became homebound, unable to go to school.

Yet, education did not stop. From nurseries to schools to higher education, we saw concerted and speedy adaptation efforts to create home-schooling and online education environments where students and teachers can interact. The extent to which these solutions are effective, or even available to all learners, will be studied in depth in months and years to come. What is certain is that, similar to all other social policy areas, the effects of the pandemic in education are disproportionately worse for those from more unstable and weaker economic and social backgrounds.

This challenging context was the one in which the European Educational Research Journal changed editors’ hands; after the hard work of its founding Editor-in-Chief Professor Martin Lawn, and a successful five years’ spell under the editorial leadership of Professors Maarten Simons and Eric Mangez that followed, EERJ has now become an established and scientifically recognised journal in the field of education research in Europe and beyond.

EERJ is interested in the changing education research horizons in Europe. It sees the field as one that crosses borders through its subjects of study, our scholarly collaborations and the increasing complexity of a fluid and interconnected world. We see our work as the new EERJ co-editors as one of further enhancing the European research identity of the journal. We believe that this will be achieved by following the footpath of our predecessors in promoting the peer review and publishing of robust empirical education research, as well as balancing the journal’s publication profile by moving to a greater parity of the journal’s share of special issues with issues that feature independent article submissions.

As many of you know, EERJ has been closely associated to the annual European Conference of Education Research (ECER); we take part in the early career researchers’ conference, giving publishing advice to younger scholars; we organise the conference’s MOOT, a discussion forum around a topic of current interest; and we publish the keynote lectures. The journal, for a long time now, through this productive relationship with ECER, encouraged strong conference panels to submit articles as special issue proposals. Although EERJ will continue to do this important work, it also has to be acknowledged that the journal would now benefit from turning over a new leaf and allowing equal space for the publication of independent research papers, too.

Further, it has also become apparent that this is not just an aspiration that relates to scholarship only but perhaps also to practicality: at the moment there is a list of special issues in the pipeline; although all of them are high-quality contributions to the field of education research, the current reality of the global pandemic further increases the need for the journal to be able to be responsive to its contemporary, highly demanding and fluid historical and political environment by publishing independent articles timely and proactively.

Therefore, following a recent editorial board meeting and the agreement of all its members, EERJ will follow a new process for special issue submissions. This will be as follows:

EERJ will introduce a new ‘Expression of interest’ form with a deadline of the end of September annually. This form will be used as a tool for the evaluation of the significance of the proposal in relation to its empirical and conceptual analysis, and its contribution to the aims and the scope of the journal. At the end of this competitive process, only a certain number of special issue proposals will go forward. The successful candidates will be invited to submit full proposals by the end of December. Full proposals will be evaluated closely: we will retain the option of rejecting a proposal if they do not fulfil the specified criteria, although we will be giving feedback and helping authors submit strong contributions. Following this process, we hope that annually, by late January, we will have an outcome that will trigger the preparation of three special issues per year.

The context in which EERJ is working today is one in which the mobilizing discourses of the European Education Area, combined with other ‘borderless’ flows of internationalisation of programmes, public-private partnerships and university alliances, are re-shaping the milieu of research in education. Above all, the current global pandemic, with its catastrophic effects on European economies and societies, has had -and will continue to have- a direct impact on education research in Europe. Regardless of the detrimental effects of this crisis, education research in Europe is currently thriving: a recent EERJ call for papers for a special issue on ‘Education in the Pandemic’ drew almost 200 high-quality abstracts of empirical research. A continuous challenge for EERJ is to be able to reflect on our current education condition and respond to it by publishing reflexive, robust and innovative research. We hope that this shift in the journal’s profile will help EERJ continue to flourish and grow in an increasingly competitive academic publishing environment and a highly uncertain and unequal world.

Professor Sotiria Grek

Professor of European and Global Education Governance / University of Edinburgh

Sotiria Grek is Professor of European and Global Education Governance at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Sotiria’s work focuses on the field of quantification in global public policy, with a specialisation in the policy arenas of education and sustainable development. She has co-authored (with Martin Lawn) Europeanising Education: Governing A New Policy Space (Symposium, 2012) and co-edited (with Joakim Lindgren) Governing by Inspection (Routledge, 2015), as well as the World Yearbook in Education: Accountability and Datafication in Education (with Christian Maroy and Antoni Verger; Routledge, 2021).

Paolo Landri

Senior Researcher of the Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies at National Research Council in Italy

Paolo Landri is a Senior Researcher of the Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies at National Research Council in Italy (CNR-IRPPS). His main research interests concern educational organizations, digital governance and educational policies. His latest publication is: (2020) Educational Leadership, Management, and Administration through Actor Network Theory, London, Routledge.