Networks Archives - Page 4 of 13

Beyond Research: The transformative power of the Emerging Researcher’s Conference

by Aigul Rakisheva | Emerging Researchers' Group, KERA (Kazakhstan)

EERA’s Best Paper Award is part of EERA’s strategy to promote emerging researchers and support high-quality research in the field of education. The award is specifically designed to motivate young researchers to turn their conference presentations into full papers suitable for publication in research journals.

We asked the winner of the EERA Best Paper Award, Aigul Rakisheva, to tell us about presenting her research at ERC 2022, the invitation to participate in the Best Paper Award (BPA), and the effect it had on her career and her life.

Participation in ERC 2022

The process of writing the manuscript began long before the competition. Initially, I prepared an application to participate in the conference, which resulted in two blind peer-review feedback. I am thankful for the feedback from the peer reviewers, which proved to be instrumental in effectively preparing my presentation. The feedback primarily focused on clarifying aspects of the research methodology, the conceptual framework, and adding a final section that highlights the significance of my work in the European context. While the overall feedback did not require significant changes to my work, it provided essential guidance as I continued to develop the paper based on my research.

Subsequently, I presented my research at the ERC 2022 conference. The disparity in educational outcomes between urban and rural students remains a pressing challenge not only in my home country but also in various regions, including Europe. The study aimed to explore the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in addressing this issue. By investigating the 2018 PISA data, the research sought to identify how ICT impacts Kazakhstani students’ academic performance in Reading, Math, and Science, potentially bridging the urban-rural education gap. This research adopted a fully quantitative approach, utilizing data from the 2018 PISA assessment, which includes a diverse sample of Kazakhstani students from both urban and rural schools. The statistical analysis revealed that access to ICT resources in schools is vital in improving students’ learning outcomes. Additionally, students’ interest in ICT and their perceived competence in using ICT are significant factors contributing to their academic success.

An invitation to participate in the Best Paper Award

About a month after presenting my work, I received a call inviting me to participate in the Best Paper Award (BPA) competition. Initially, I felt concerned that my manuscript was not fully prepared, and I doubted if I could meet the short time frame and the rigorous review process. However, after careful consideration, I realized that participating in the competition would be beneficial for several reasons. Firstly, the set time frame would motivate me to expedite the completion of my manuscript. The additional expert review would be invaluable in improving my paper, making it more robust and suitable for submission to a reputable journal for consideration.

Additionally, selected authors can submit their work published in the international peer-reviewed European Educational Research Journal (EERJ) and Studia Paedagogica journals which I believe to be a great opportunity. These platforms offer scholars an excellent opportunity to share their findings on local or national European studies, further amplifying the impact and relevance of their research within the scholarly community.

The process

Participation in the competition involves a months-long journey, during which emerging scholars tirelessly work on their articles, adhering to deadlines. During this process, I sought formative feedback, further enhancing my work and providing clear direction for improvement. I also engaged in discussions with my co-author Dr. O. Toskovic, which proved immensely beneficial in refining my ideas, strengthening my arguments, and ultimately producing a more polished and impactful paper. The iterative nature of incorporating feedback has been crucial not only for my paper but in my growth as a researcher and has allowed me to continually strive for improvement.

Winning the Best Paper Award

23 - 259 ECER Conference Aug 23rd 000168

Winning the Best Paper Award increased the visibility of the study within the academic community. This award not only acknowledged the significance of our work but also drew attention from researchers and other emerging scholars. This recognition has paved the way for further dissemination and opportunities for my research to make a broader impact.

I encourage future participants in the Best Paper Award to embrace the spirit of competition and rise above any self-doubt that may hinder their progress. While it is natural to have uncertainties about the quality of the work, remember that what truly matters is the invaluable feedback you receive and how you utilize it to fuel continuous improvement. Embarking on the journey toward excellence entails an unwavering commitment to growth and lifelong learning.

Key Messages

Engaging with ERGs/ERCs provides valuable networking and collaborative opportunities with fellow researchers and education experts.

Participating in ERGs/ERCs can enhance the visibility of researchers’ work, potentially leading to broader dissemination and increased recognition.

Involvement in ERGs/ERCs cultivates better communication skills and boosts emerging researchers’ confidence as they interact with peers and present their work to diverse audiences.
ERGs/ERCs create a nurturing environment that encourages constructive feedback, paving the way for ongoing research enhancement and continuous improvement.

The perceptions of minoritized pupils on student-teacher relationships

by Julia Steenwegen | NW 14 Communities, Families, and Schooling in Educational Research, NW 7 Social Justice and Intercultural Education

At ECER 2023 in Glasgow, Julia Steenwegen from the University of Antwerp will present her research about the minoritized students, and their perceptions of the student-teacher relationships in mainstream and supplementary schools. We asked Julia to give us an overview of her research, and the implications for minoritzed students in Belgium, and beyond.

Student reflections

This is the response of a pupil when asked about the differences between her supplementary school and her Flemish mainstream school as part of a project investigating minoritized pupils’ views on the relationship to their teachers.

Some background – Minority students in Flanders, Belgium

Against a backdrop of persistent inequality in education throughout Europe, and in Flanders specifically, studies find that there is a gap not only in academic achievements between minoritized pupils and their peers, but also in the quality of student teacher relationships. The student-teacher relationship is of crucial importance to students’ educational pathways, yet teachers indicate feeling ill-prepared in teaching the diversity of their classrooms [1]. Students with a migration background tend to evaluate the relationship to their teachers as not as positive as their majority peers [2].

Other research has shown that some teachers hold ethnic prejudice towards their minority students [3], this is particularly worrisome as only a very small percentage of teachers in Flanders have a migrant background [4]. The difference in ethno-cultural background – called Ethnic incongruence [5] – between teachers and students in mainstream schools is often hypothesized as an explanation for the different evaluation of student-teacher relationships. What is currently missing from the research is the perception of those minoritized pupils.

Our research methods

Supplementary schools pose a unique vantage point from which to study minoritized pupils’ views on the student-teacher relationship. They are educational spaces [5] organized by minoritized communities to support their youth, usually take place during the weekend, and they often focus on teaching heritage language and culture. These schools are widespread, with as many as 45% of pupils in Flanders attending them at some point, as a yet unpublished paper by Coudenys and colleagues shows. That makes them particularly interesting to study in light of this project. After all, contrary to the mainstream Flemish schools in which most teachers are of white majority backgrounds, teachers in the supplementary school tend to share their pupils’ migrant backgrounds.

Pupils attending both mainstream schools and supplementary schools are in an exclusive position to compare two different settings and reflect on what is constructive to a strong relationship, in their experience. To this end, we conducted group interviews with 29 minoritized pupils in two supplementary schools. The pupils were between 9 and 12 years old and voluntarily decided to take part in the interviews, either alone or with a friend.

Our findings

To our surprise, we find that throughout all these interviews, in which the pupils recount and reflect on their relationship to their teachers in the mainstream Flemish school as well as in the supplementary school, not one of the pupils points towards the ethno-cultural background of the teachers. Rather, they give a nuanced depiction of their relationships in each context both on an academic and an emotional level. This is in line with other research [6] suggesting that children do not rely on ethnic categories to organize their world.

On an emotional level, the pupils indicate that they find the teachers in the mainstream Flemish schools to be less available to them overall. The children point towards factors such as class size to make sense of this lack of availability. Many of the pupils describe situations in which the teacher did not intervene in fights or altercations in the classroom, negatively impacting the quality of the relationship. The children are especially grateful to those teachers that show an interest in their cultural backgrounds. Some pupils remember teachers who asked about their supplementary schools fondly, while acknowledging that such interest is rare.

While there is not always a clear-cut difference in the pupils’ perception of the teachers from one context to the next, they do almost uniformly declare a difference in the support they receive academically. The pupils report that they are reluctant to ask their mainstream teachers for help because they expect to be turned down. The children relate how they keep their questions to themselves, and then ask their teachers in supplementary school to explain to them at the weekend.

Implications for practice, beyond Belgium

We conclude by highlighting some important implications of our findings. Importantly, there is ample research [7] that emphasizes the importance of diversity in teacher staff in terms of countering prejudice, academic expectations, role models and more. The findings of this project do not seek to diminish that importance. Rather, in a reality of ethnic incongruence in student-teacher relationships we make some suggestions to better support pupils of minoritized backgrounds. First, pupils appreciate curiosity from their teachers. Interest in their cultural backgrounds and, relatedly, asking questions about their experience in the supplementary school is clearly beneficial. Second, the pupils were very perceptive of the pressure their teachers experience, and therefore they found them less approachable. And third, there are ample resources available in the supplementary schools. There could be much gained from a meaningful exchange between these different educational contexts.

Key Messages

Supplementary schools pose an interesting vantage point from which to study the perspectives of minoritized pupils.
We study the student-teacher relationship from an academic and an affective dimension.
Pupils describe that they feel better emotionally supported by their teachers in the mainstream school when they show an interest and open attitude towards their ethno-cultural background.

Julia Steenwegen

PhD Researcher

With past experience as a primary school teacher, Julia’s research focus is on inequality in education. Her main focus is on the resources in children’s networks that provide support in their educational pathways.

Orcid: 0000-0001-6743-9788

References and Further Reading

[1] Berkovich, I., & Benoliel, P. (2020). Marketing teacher quality: Critical discourse analysis of OECD documents on effective teaching and TALIS. Critical Studies in Education, 61(4), 496-511.

[2] Agirdag, O., Van Houtte, M., & Van Avermaet, P. (2012). Ethnic school segregation and self-esteem: The role of teacher–pupil relationships. Urban Education, 47(6), 1135-1159.

[3] Van den Bergh, L., Denessen, E., Hornstra, L., Voeten, M., & Holland, R. W. (2010). The implicit prejudiced attitudes of teachers: Relations to teacher expectations and the ethnic achievement gap. American Educational Research Journal, 47(2), 497-527.

[4] Nulmeting herkomst leerkrachten in het Vlaamse onderwijs

[5] Thijs, J., Westhof, S., & Koomen, H. (2012). Ethnic incongruence and the student–teacher relationship: The perspective of ethnic majority teachers. Journal of school psychology, 50(2), 257-273.

[6] Steenwegen, J., Clycq, N., & Vanhoof, J. (2022). How and why minoritised communities self-organise education: a review study. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 1-19.

[7] Sedano, L. J. (2012). On the irrelevance of ethnicity in children’s organization of their social world. Childhood, 19(3), 375-388.

[8] Goldhaber, D., Theobald, R., & Tien, C. (2019). Why we need a diverse teacher workforce. Phi Delta Kappan, 100(5), 25-30.

Using nonviolence to reconceptualize inclusive education in the Global South

by Gaston Bacquet | NW 4 Inclusive Education, NW 7 Social Justice and Intercultural Education

My doctoral research has been exploring how developing a philosophy of nonviolence can help offset discrimination and exclusion in Chile, a country that has attempted to tackle the issue of inclusiveness through a Global North narrative that has focused primarily on disability and special needs. This blog post explores how nonviolence education can promote a sense of equality and inclusion not purely from such perspective, as has been the norm for the last two decades, but from one anchored in an understanding of cultural, economic, sexual, and ethnic diversity.

Previous assumptions on inclusivity

The very nature of my research project has inclusiveness at its core; not exclusively as a method often and primarily focused on students with special needs, but as a way to experience human relations rooted in an equitable view of others. It involved reading and discussing nonviolent perspectives in education, engaging in weekly contemplative practices such as developing empathy and practicing compassion, and peer-teaching. Participants were all pre-service teachers from Chile, a nation that in the last 4 years has been beset by social violence, much of which spilled over into educational establishments.

These participants’ previous assumptions on what inclusiveness is ranged from “I thought inclusiveness was only a way to adapt materials for special-needs students”, to “I used to think about inclusiveness from a technical perspective rather than understanding what makes a person different from another, or singular”, to “I used to believe inclusiveness was about including other people, but now I understand it as being aware of their differences, acknowledging and appreciating them”

This somewhat incomplete understanding of inclusiveness is hardly surprising, if one is to look at two factors. The first is the definitions and principles of inclusive education we find in research done by Chilean scholars and Chilean government documents; for while it is true that Law 20.845 on Inclusive Education from 2016 seeks the “elimination of discrimination and the approach to diversity”[1], it is also acknowledged that these efforts have focused on and been prompted by widening access primarily to people with disabilities. A report from the National Disability Agency states that inclusive education has been “driven towards the social participation of people with disabilities, their families and civil society, in order to implement the changes demanded by students and our society” (p.1). Research by Chilean scholars in this area (Iturra-Gonzalez, 2019; Manghi et al., 2020; Martinez and Rosas, 2022) on the other hand, tends to use the terms “inclusive education” and “education for students with special needs” interchangeably. There is, as I mentioned, a second factor that shapes this view of inclusiveness: a close inspection of available research done in Chilean education reveals that it draws heavily and almost exclusively on studies and sources from the Global North on this issue, and this is problematic: such research has in fact for decades focused almost exclusively on disability rather than on a holistic approach.

[1] In Spanish in the original: “eliminación de la discriminación y el abordaje de la diversidad”, translation by me.

An argument for what inclusive education should mean today

Given the above, I argue that the idea of inclusiveness I have described is both inaccurate and incomplete, and it is here that nonviolence educational philosophy brings a more holistic understanding of what inclusiveness should look like. To begin with, Judith Butler (2020) has argued that all lives have equal worth; violence in any dimension arises when we see others’ lives as having less worth. Inclusiveness from a nonviolent perspective comprises everyone who has been historically marginalized, excluded, and discriminated against. In other words, whose lives have been socially and culturally devalued. This is where we can establish a link to non-Western traditions (i.e., Ubuntu, BuenVivir, Buddhism, and yoga), which were explored during the study. What these traditions have in common is that they promote a sense of a mutually bound existence regardless of our faith, gender, ethnicity, beliefs, modes of life, ability, literacy or education.

When defining ubuntu, for instance, Desmond Tutu (1999) explains:

“A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are” (p.29)

He further adds that the ultimate goal of ubuntu is to achieve social harmony through shared human participation, and that in the end, we can only be human beings through other human beings; therefore, committing an act of violence against someone is an action of dehumanizing both the victim and ourselves.

These were concepts that were missing from the participants’ original interpretation of inclusiveness, and why they were exposed to these ideas early on in the project; for instance, one of the earliest assignments for participants was to watch a short video on the meaning of inclusiveness in education by Indian scholar Sadhguru. His vision, which I share, is that inclusiveness is not “an idea or a campaign”, but an individual experience of connecting to other human beings, and of bringing this connection into the whole range of activities we engage in, be it educational, economic or spiritual, in order to flourish. One participant explains:

“I really liked what Sadhguru mentioned in his speech about inclusiveness in education, “Survival cannot happen without inclusiveness”, as I think this is a point that many people tend to forget. For me, inclusiveness is about integrating different people into a group. However, this integration should not only be to include or accept a person into this group, this action also serves to see other people as equals” – P24

Perhaps the most important insight participants expressed concerned a paradigmatic shift that moved from an individualistic mindset to a more collective one, as can be seen from the observations below:

“I noticed the sense of community in which I work with others as “we”, but also as my own growth as an individual. Western people, on the other hand, are taught that the only thing that matters is the “ego”, ourselves, everything that surrounds us, we own it” – P1

“I am part of a network that should be constructed with love, understanding, and diversity. We are part of the same whole in humankind, but we are diverse. It is this diversity that configures this classroom. I am because you are: I wouldn’t be a teacher without the students and vice-versa”– P10

“In Indigenous knowledge, we are devoted to help others not for the sake of our own benefit but, more profound, for the sake of our humanity” – P20

“It is the relationship with others that makes us human. The interactions with people that surround us is what allows to be fulfilled, we thrive in communities but we also see our humanity when we come in contact with those towards whom we direct it” – P2

These insights speak of several dimensions worth highlighting; the first is the impact of Western epistemologies in creating an individual viewed as separate from other human beings, and which directly contradicts what an inclusive environment should be. Secondly, they emphasize the fact that human beings are in fact interdependent and not the participants of what Butler calls ‘the fantasy of our self-sufficiency’ (2020). They also speak of the realization of what non-Western wisdom traditions offer in this context: a philosophy that proposes a manner in which we as humankind should be living: not for ourselves but for each other. As this participant notes:

“Fostering this idea that we depend on our peers to learn is a big step in starting to create a non-violent environment. Stop competing, include those who have different ideas, want the success of my classmates for the good of everyone. These are ideas that the new generations will acquire and gradually reform the worldview of society”. – P5

Conclusion

In conclusion, what participants’ insights show is how the nonviolent perspectives offered throughout the project indeed helped them reconceptualize their conception of inclusiveness to one that encompasses the full diversity of our human experience, rather than a method focused on disability alone as an exclusionary/inclusionary dimension. Several of the realizations and comments offered here speak of an appreciation of individual differences, while at the same time embracing inclusiveness as a guiding moral value that recognizes our shared humanity.

I would also argue that this kind of inclusiveness constitutes the strongest form of opposition against any kind of Othering, and that to cultivate that, to generate the kind of love that Garvey (1923) suggested should infuse education so that it could ‘soften the ills of the world’ (p.17), we need to learn to see others not as Others but through an empathetic lens that rehumanizes everyone regardless of our differences. This in the end is the contribution that non-Western epistemologies can make in the formulation of a nonviolent pedagogical framework.

Key Messages

We need to review how we view ‘inclusion’ from primarily focusing on students with special needs
Inclusion must be anchored in an understanding of cultural, economic, sexual, and ethnic diversity
Non-violent education can promote such a sense of equality and inclusion
It is important to decolonial perspectives on inclusiveness

Gaston Bacquet

Associate Tutor / 3rd-year PhD student

Gaston Bacquet is a 3rd-year PhD student at the University of Glasgow. His research attempts to bring decolonial perspectives on nonviolence to teacher training within the Global South; said research draws from indigenous wisdom traditions such as ubuntu and Buen Vivir, as well as Eastern philosophy, and it aims at using the philosophy of nonviolence as a means to promote inclusiveness in all its dimensions. He also works as an associate tutor at Glasgow, where he teaches Qualitative Research Methods, Modern Educational Thought and supervises postgraduate students in the Educational Studies and TESOL programs. He is a guest lecturer for Education and Violence in the Education and Sustainable Development Master’s Program.

Research Gate link: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gaston-Bacquet-2

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9802-7249

Staff profile: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/education/staff/gastonbacquet/

References and Further Reading

Brito-Rodriguez, S., Basualto-Porra, L., Posada-Lecompte, M. (2021). Perceptions of Gender Violence, Discrimination, and Exclusion among University Students. Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de Genero de El Colegio de Mexico. Retrieved here: https://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?pid=S2395-91852020000100209&script=sci_arttext

Butler, J. (2020). The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. Verso https://www.versobooks.com/books/3758-the-force-of-nonviolence

Garvey, M. (1923) In Amy Jacques-Garvey (Ed.) Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, vol. 1.Atheneum.

Iturra Gonzalez, P. (2019). Dilemas de la educación inclusiva de Chile actual. Revista Educacion Las Americas8, 1-13. https://revistas.udla.cl/index.php/rea/article/view/7/6

Manghi, .D., Bustos Ibarra, A., Conejeros Solar, M.Aranda Godoy, I., Vega Cordova, V., Diaz Soto, K. (2020). Comprender la educación inclusiva chilena: Panorama de políticas e investigación educativa. Cadernos de Pesquisas 50(175), 114-134. https://www.scielo.br/j/cp/a/YsJW7Td5j8KkPxwrqHYTmrq/?lang=en

Martinez, C. & Rosas, R. (2022). Students with special educational needs and educational inclusion in Chile: Progress and challenges. Revista MedicaClinica Las Condes 33(5), 512 – 519. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0716864022001031

Rojas, M.T., Astudillo, P. and Catalan, M. (2020). Report: Diversidad y Educacion Sexual en Chile: Identidad sexual (LGBT+) e inclusion escolar en Chile. UNICEF. Retrieved at: https://www.mineduc.cl/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2022/03/DIVERSIDADSEXUALYEDUCACION_CHILE.pdf

Ryoo, J,, Crawford, J.,Moreno, D. & McClaren, P. (2009), Critical Spiritual Pedagogy: Reclaiming Humanity through a Pedagogy of Integrity, Community, and Love, Power and Education 1(1), 132-148

Tutu, D. (1999). No Future Without Forgiveness. Image Books

DE INCLUSIÓN ESCOLAR QUE REGULA LA ADMISIÓN DE LOS Y LAS ESTUDIANTES, ELIMINA EL FINANCIAMIENTO COMPARTIDO Y PROHÍBE EL LUCRO EN ESTABLECIMIENTOS EDUCACIONALES QUE RECIBEN APORTES DEL ESTADO https://www.bcn.cl/leychile/navegar?idNorma=1078172.

The UK Sustainability and Climate Change policy paper – An analysis

by Dr Athanasia Chatzifotiou | BERA, NW 30 Environmental and Sustainability Education Research, ESER

In April 2022, the UK Department for Education (DfE) published a policy paper laying out a strategy for the education and children’s services systems on the topic of sustainability and climate change. Dr Athanasia Chatzifotiou, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sunderland in the UK took a closer look at the policy paper to help us understand its provisions and proposals.

Key Messages

The Strategy identifies the importance of sustainability and climate change aiming to reach teachers and other professionals engaged in a variety of children’s service systems.
The Strategy has limitations that emanate from the language used and its actual content that is not presented in a clear and coherent manner for different stakeholders.
The Strategy acknowledges the DfE’s role in sustainability, and it promotes mainly knowledge on its environmental aspect (e.g. focus on biodiversity, outdoor/nature knowledge, etc.). The social aspects of sustainability are hardly addressed, and the economic ones are presented as job opportunities.
The Strategy takes into consideration important policies, and national and international initiatives but it fails to show how these can inform the action areas and initiatives that drive the Strategy.
The Strategy does not enable practitioners to facilitate a thorough climate and sustainability education where both socio-economic and socio-scientific issues can be taken into consideration.

The Strategy

The policy paper Sustainability and climate change: a strategy for the education and children’s services systems (referred to as the Strategy onwards) should be welcomed. It had been missing from the wider political and educational context (Greer, King and Glackin, 2021).

The Strategy identifies the importance of sustainability and climate change and is aimed at teachers and other professionals engaged in a variety of children’s service systems. Aside from the positive note upon its entry, however, the Strategy has limitations. These limitations emanate from the language used and its actual content that is not coherently presented for different stakeholders (e.g. teachers, civil servants etc.). For instance, the vision presented aims to make the UK ‘…the world-leading education sector in sustainability and climate change by 2030’, but the Strategy applies to England only. This rhetoric is accompanied by principles (e.g. ‘..we will seek opportunities to work with others… Evidence will be at the heart of our activity… we will make the greatest impact. We will adopt a systems-based approach…’, etc.) that are hard to argue against, but it is also hard to see how these aims will be achieved. These limitations are discussed below in relation to the general provisions the Strategy makes and to climate education in particular.

The Strategy’s provisions

The Strategy acknowledges the DfE’s important role in all aspects of sustainability. It highlights the overall aim of reducing our environmental footprints in accordance with achieving Net Zero. Net Zero is the ‘umbrella’ UK policy for decarbonising all sectors of the UK economy by 2050. However, there is a focus on environmental sustainability that creates a disequilibrium among the social, economic and environmental aspects. This also favours the country’s economic goals rather than its educational or environmental ones (Dunlop and Rushton, 2022).

While the Strategy acknowledges the DfE’s role in sustainability, its focus centres upon knowledge (e.g. biodiversity, outdoor/nature knowledge, etc.). Rushton and Dunlop (2022, p.3) identified a similar issue arguing that the Strategy: “…is on learning more about…not empowering young people to act for the environment or challenging the root cause of climate change.” This is evident in the Strategy’s identified Action areas (five in total) and initiatives (three in total).

The Actions are:

1) Climate Education,

2) Green Skills and careers,

3) Education Estate and Digital Infrastructure,

4) Operations and Supply Chains and

5) International

The initiatives are:

1) the National Education Nature Park (a virtual nature park)

2) the Climate Leaders Award (similar to other awards like the John Muir Award, Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, etc.)

3) Sustainability Leadership (noting support from senior management leadership).

Within the above, the social aspects of sustainability are barely identified, and the economic ones are presented as job opportunities. For instance, the Action area ‘Green skills and jobs’ highlights only the potential number of green jobs that will be created and nothing more; the Action area ‘Education Estate and digital technology’ contains information around heating solutions, water scarcity, etc. that links them to school buildings without clearly showing the role of teachers and children in these.

Even though the Strategy takes into consideration important policies, national and international initiatives (e.g. the United Nations’17 Sustainable Development Goals and UNESCO’s ‘Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), the Paris Agreement and Glasgow Climate Pact, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child (UNCRC), the UK Climate Change Act (2008), etc.), it fails to show how these can inform the action areas and initiatives that drive the strategy. An example of such failure can be seen with the initiative National Education Nature Park. The focus seems to be mostly on environmental knowledge (e.g. ‘deliver improvements in biodiversity, contribute to the implementation of the nature recovery network, etc.); a ‘trend’ that shows in other counties as well (Monroe, Plate, Oxarart, Bowers and Chaves, 2019). Nowhere is visible how the 17 SD goals or the Convention on Children’s Rights can inform the above in a manner that professionals can make a change. The focus on environmental knowledge is prevalent throughout the Strategy including climate education.

Action Area 1 – Climate Education

I want to focus on Climate Education (Action Area 1) because the proposals are for children to learn about nature, the cause and impact of climate change and the importance of sustainability. These suggestions reflect once more an approach to ‘learning about’ rather than empowering action. Admittedly, the latter is much more difficult to achieve, especially in an educational context where mainly discipline and conformity are promoted amongst pupils.

The Strategy highlights particular National Curriculum subjects (e.g. science, geography, etc.) that can promote such learning from early years onwards. It highlights the GCSEs (General Certificate for Secondary Education) in design and technology, food preparation and nutrition, and economics as topics that can further enhance the importance of learning about sustainability while at the same time, it announces a new natural history GCSE by 2025 for ‘deeper knowledge of the natural world’.

This interest in knowledge is further enhanced by the proposed annual Climate Literacy Survey from 2022 to benchmark progress in improving the climate knowledge of school leavers. Knowledge is important, but Rushton and Dunlop (2022) identified that teachers and students alike were asking for more critical thinking, doing research, taking action, communicating and networking with others. Knowledge alone does not necessarily lead to environmental action (Skamp, Boyes and Stannistreet, 2009). Still, the Strategy sees science knowledge as most fitting for climate education. This is reflected in science teachers’ Continuing Personal Development (CPD) and on developing a Primary Science Model Curriculum to include ‘an emphasis on nature to ensure all children understand the world’.

This ‘knowledge overload’ manifests itself in the implicit alignment that the Strategy brings between Climate Education and Education for Sustainable Development. However, throughout the Strategy there is neither a clear distinction between the two nor any links made for teachers to see how they relate to each other.

Climate change and political impartiality

Finally, and most disappointingly, the section on Climate Education closes with a message on political impartiality.

The message, amongst other things, says: “Teaching about climate change, and the scientific facts and evidence behind this, does not constitute teaching about a political issue and schools do not need to present misinformation or unsubstantiated claims to provide balance.”

Climate education is a socio-scientific issue (Henderson, Long, Berger, Russell, and Drewes, 2017) and as such it carries socio-political dimensions. A systematic review of effective education strategies in climate change education highlighted a distinction between ‘just the facts’(that is, ‘learning about’) and ‘also the actions’ approaches which refer to an apolitical and a political approach to the issue of climate change education (Monroe et.al, 2019).

When priority is given to ‘just the facts’, then the socioeconomic dimensions of climate and sustainability education – which are explicitly included in the United Nations Sustainable Goals – are compromised. Scholars like Gayford and Dillon (1995) have clearly shown since the ‘90s the dilemmas and difficulties that teachers face when teaching environmental issues precisely because they span through all domains (social, economic, physical). There needs to be a balance between the scientific information and the value-laden nature of climate and sustainability education. This kind of balance is missing from the said Strategy.

Conclusion

The Strategy has given schools an opportunity to consider their sustainability and climate education approaches. In a way, it is contributing towards ‘spreading the word’ on the importance of educating and acting upon environmental and climate issues. Acquiring scientific knowledge about these issues is paramount; but also of paramount importance are the socio-economic dimensions of these issues.

References and further reading

Department for Education, (2022). Policy paper: Sustainability and climate change: a strategy for the education and children’s services systems. Retrieved from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sustainability-and-climate-change-strategy/sustainability-and-climate-change-a-strategy-for-the-education-and-childrens-services-systems

Dunlop, L. and Rushton, A.C. (2022). Putting climate change at the heart of education: Is England’s strategy a placebo for policy? British Education Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3816

Dunlop, L. and Rushton, A. C. (2022). Five ways the new sustainability and climate change strategy for schools on Englabd doesn’t match up to what young people actually want. The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/five-ways-the-new-sustainability-and-climate-change-strategy-for-schools-in-england-doesnt-match-up-to-what-young-people-actually-want-181966 [Accessed 5/4/2023]

Gayford, C. and Dillo, P. (1995). Policy and the practices of environmental education in England: a dilemma for teachers. Environmental Education Research, v.1, p.173-183.

Greer, K. King, H. and Glackin, M. (2021). The ‘web of conditions’ governing England’s climate change education policy landscape, Journal of Education Policy, DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2021.1967454

Henderson, J. Long, D. Berger, P. Russell, C. and Drewes, A. (2017). Expanding the foundation: climate change and opportunities for educational research. Educational Studies, v.53, n.4, p.412-425. DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2017.1335640

Monroe, M. Plate, R. Oxarart, A. Bowers, A. and Chaves, W. (2019). Identifying effective climate change education strategies: a systematic review of the research, Environmental Education Research, 25:6, 791-812, DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2017.1360842

Skamp, K. Boyes, E. Stannistreet, M. (2009). Global warming responses at the primary secondary students’ beliefs and willingness to act. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, v. 25, p.15-30

You’ve been hired! Exploring the future of learning design using speculative methods

by Dr Eamon Costello | ESAI, NW 13 Philosophy of Education, NW 16 ICT in Education and Training

The latest annual survey from the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) highlights the changes in the profession of those who work in the spaces where technology, teaching, and learning intersect. The brokers who work in these vital in-between places of education have been referred to as “third space professionals”.

A range of titles is reported in the ALT annual survey by respondents, with the most common being “learning technologist”. For real, paid work, people apply for more prosaic-sounding jobs than that of a “third space professional”. There may be gaps, if not tensions, between academic parlance and how we speak in the real world.

If this resonates with you, and you are a pragmatic person who seeks tangible, real-world solutions, rather than abstract academic notions, then stop reading now. If, however, you would like to work at a more-than-real posthuman University – in an entanglement of technology, plants, animals, emotions, gods, and demons, where you would write learning designs directly onto other people’s hearts – then read on.

Key Messages

Learning designer/technologist roles continue to increase greatly both in number and their scope.
The roles of learning designers/academic developers/learning technologists/heads of teaching and learning centres are vitally important but complex.
Speculative methods are being increasingly used in both teaching and educational research.
Speculative methods (specifically speculative fiction) can be used to think about the impact of learning design roles and imagine strange but bright university futures for and of them.

Conceptualising learning design roles

A recent exercise conducted with learning designers in Ireland aimed to creatively analyse, conceptualise and represent the role of learning designer. It proceeded from the contention that a digital learning consultant, or an academic developer, or a head of digital education, are more than their titles. And they are more than their skills. Indeed, they are more than human. We do not live as job titles, as bunches of disembodied skills and competencies, nor even as perfectly differentiated individual human beings. Rather, we live deeply entangled in the language that describes us, in the tools we use [1], in each other, and in the non-human beings of this world [2].

To make sense of this provocation, and to learn how learning designers actually feel and live this entanglement, we adopted a more-than-real speculative approach. Speculative methods are not premised on measurement or “what works” but rather on “not-yetness”. They attempt to create or leave space for dreaming about what is yet to come. They are approaches “aimed at envisioning or crafting futures or conditions which may not yet currently exist, to provoke new ways of thinking and to bring particular ideas or issues into focus” (Ross, 2007).

In our study, we analysed a collection of job postings for learning technology roles advertised in Ireland during the pandemic. Based on these, we interviewed several fictional learning designers. These people had just been hired into a strange university that exists in the near future. Below is an excerpt from one such fictional interview, adapted from the preprint version of our article, the full version of which you can read in the journal Learning Media and Technology.

Christine:

What was your last question? My learning design super-power? Ha ha, I like it! Well, we took this Info Lit class one time on posthumanism and speciesism. Also, that year we were editing Wikipedia, to fill in gaps on famous women, so I did Frances Power Cobbe. She campaigned for animal rights and the rights of women to vote and attend university. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole then, and read all about the Brown Dog affair, but I had to stop after a while because it was just so horrible that someone could be cutting up a dog who was clearly in distress. When I read about the medical students taking down the statue that commemorated the dog, I just felt my body shaking and I took both hands off my iPad and let it drop to the ground.

Anyway, long story short, I pick the ability to speak to animals as my superpower. I look after all the animals here in the Animal Aid Division of the Learning Design Deck. Me, and my friend Pema.

It all started with Isha. As a blind student, she had to fight for literally everything during her time in the University and for her dog Sandy too. But one time we were doing all this big data stuff, trying to catch people cheating in exam halls. An algorithm checked the similarity of students who sat close together and triangulated with sweat levels the system could see on their skin. We were looking at all these mood maps and I noticed that people sitting near Sandy in the exams seemed calmer. So that’s how the project of allowing dogs in exam halls started, because they had such a positive effect on people. And then we were loaning dogs out to students to take walks with. That evolved into our Library Dogs initiative. Later, I went back and looked at the data and realised that there was some uplifting effect for students in exams sitting near windows. Turns out, just seeing some plant life is good for you, a little bit of green. So, we started working connecting students with trees. The researchers were all excited and talking about oxytocin levels and so on, but it just seems like basic sense to me. It’s like something I heard once about how you need connection but you don’t need another person necessarily, just one tendril of love to something, and that could be looking in a dog’s eyes or touching a tree [3].

And the whole thing grew from there really, and we are rewilding parts of the University now. I look after all the animals, primarily the dogs, but also the ones that are part of other projects: cats, monkeys, snails, kites, buzzards, crows. And the sand martins who do this like hunting ballet over the lake in the evening when I’m walking home – sweeping through invisible clouds of insects. There was some dispute I think, a student protest, as the University wanted to build something where the lake is – maybe a carpark.

How does that one go? University (noun): A set of warring fiefdoms united around a common cause of parking. That’s the biggest threat to the plant and animal projects – new university buildings and developments. But my favourite part of the Uni is a patch of old scrub out back of the library. It must be earmarked for a building because it’s not landscaped or mowed or anything. It’s just thistles and poppies and stones but sometimes I go in and lie down there. I try to feel the world under me to see if I’m still here or maybe if it’s still there.

Conclusion

This blog post attempts to give a flavour of how speculative methods, in this case, design fiction, can be used to represent and explore evolving educational roles. The next step of the research involved analysing the above persona, along with two others, by presenting them to real-life learning designers to seek their feedback on the fictions’ validity, and resonance or otherwise, with their own lived experience.

We drew on literature related to ethics of care in education and the philosopher and theorist Simone Weil to help frame this analysis. You can read about what happened next in the full version of the associated article. Our work tried to show people with complex embodied existences that spread beyond the formal boundaries of their work in educational settings. We attempted to counter the neoliberal construction of identities of workers that are comprised of disembodied skills. Instead, we tried to problematise this question of who and what people do in particular roles, not according to their skills alone, but as people who have bodies that experience joy and suffering.

We attempted to show learning designers as existing in a tangled web of objects, people, and experience. In this way, we hopefully shone some light on the complex roles these people play in the messy territories of contemporary, and near future, education.

Acknowledgements

A wonderful team of learning design and learning design-adjacent superheroes contributed to the published article (Costello et al, 2022): Steve Welsh, Fiona Concannon, Tom Farrelly, Clare Thompson and Lily/Prajakta Grime (who is doubly acknowledged as the creator of the beautiful images).

Dr Eamon Costello

Associate Professor of Digital Learning

Dr Costello has worked in industry and university settings for over 25 years. He is deeply curious about how we learn in different environments. He is also concerned with how we actively shape our world so that we can have better and more humane places in which to think, work, live, and learn. He has taught and researched a wide range of topics in the places where people and technology mingle. He is an advocate of using the right tool for the job or sometimes none at all, for not everything can be fixed or should be built.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/eam0 RG: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eamon-Costello Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eamoncostello?originalSubdomain=ie Website: https://www.dcu.ie/stemeducationinnovationglobalstudies/people/eamon-costello

References and Further Reading

[1] Fawns, T. (2022). An Entangled Pedagogy: Looking Beyond the Pedagogy—Technology Dichotomy. Postdigital Science and Education, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00302-7

[2] Gourlay, L., Littlejohn, A., Oliver, M., & Potter, J. (2021). Lockdown literacies and semiotic assemblages: academic boundary work in the Covid-19 crisis. Learning, Media and Technology, 46(4), 377-389. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2021.1900242

[3] Brach, T. (2012). Radical Acceptance: Awakening the Love that Heals Fear and Shame. London: Random House.

Costello, E., Welsh, S., Girme, P., Concannon, F., Farrelly, T., & Thompson, C. (2022). Who cares about learning design? Near future superheroes and villains of an educational ethics of care. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2022.2074452

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

Fostering collaborative educational research: An EERA Network case study

by Dr Gristy and Dr Lasselle | NW 14 Communities, Families, and Schooling in Educational Research

The book ‘Research and Schooling in Rural Europe: An Engagement with Changing Patterns of Education, Space and Place’ by Gristy, Hargreaves and Kučerová, was published in 2020, with seminal chapters on educational research schooling in rural Europe. It was quickly and widely reviewed and praised. According to Redford(2021, p 633), it is a book ‘that sets a new standard for educational research and schooling in rural Europe.

This book is a hugely important contribution to the field. Its development and success are a direct result of collaboration through an EERA network. The book includes contributions from a wide range of authors from across Europe, for some their first publication in English.

We asked one of the book editors, Cath Gristy, and Link Convener of Network 14, Laurence Lasselle, to explain the process. They explained how at each stage of the book’s journey, the editors and authors made excellent use of the resources available within EERA (European Education Research Association) and its networks: Network Members, ECERs (the European Conference on Educational Research) and Network Funding.

Context – EERA Network 14 and ECER

As with all EERA Networks, EERA Network 14 (Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research) fosters communications between researchers and aims to facilitate collaborative research. Its major activity always takes place during the European Conference for Education Research (ECER), organised annually by EERA.

ECER is organised around 34 EERA Networks. Researchers from across the world submit their proposals to EERA Networks in the form of academic papers, symposia, posters etc. Proposals are then reviewed by reviewers within each network. Accepted proposals are subsequently presented at the annual conference. The format of the conference offers plenty of networking opportunities, as it has a packed programme of sessions of 90 minutes, breaks for tea and coffee and lunches and other social events, meetings with publishers and Network meetings.

Network 14 is one of the original EERA networks [1]. It was created by Dr Linda Hargreaves and Prof Rune Kvalsund in 1995. A group of European researchers started to share interests in the role and the place of small (or rural) schools in educational research. Over the years, the study of the relationship between school and community and place-based education would become one of the most popular thematic streams. More and more conference proposals regarding the topic were submitted to ECER, leading to more ECER sessions and more participants. An early collaborative work of the Network stream can be found in the special issue of the International Journal of Educational Research in 2009.

In 2012, Cath Gristy – one of the current fourteen EERA Network 14 co-convenors, attended her first EERA conference and participated in EERA Network 14 sessions. Here she met a group of researchers, including Linda, Rune and Silvie Rita, who shared an interest in education in rural places.

Initial concept developed at the EERA network-funded seminar 2013 in Prague

Every year, EERA finances various projects fostering Network activities, including researchers’ collaboration and publication. This NW14 group set out to begin a publishing project.

With an awareness of the importance of including the growing number of researchers from Eastern Europe, they successfully bid for EERA network funding to finance a seminar in Prague in 2013.

The group of seminar attendees (which included colleagues from Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia) worked together on a plan to promote research and publications in the field. Indeed, it was clear that there was a significant body of research work on education in rural places from Eastern Europe that was not available in English. One reason for this was the financial challenges many researchers were facing. By the end of the seminar, the plan for collaborative work coalesced around a collective book.

An Informal Meeting within ECER 2015 Budapest

The outline proposal was developed by Cath, Linda and Silvie Rita at an informal meeting of the group who met with other international rural educational researchers from Canada and Australia while participating in ECER 2015 (Budapest). The goal of the proposal was to gather a unique set of European scholars from a range of social science disciplines, including education, geography, pedagogy, psychology, and sociology, who would elaborate on the context and challenges faced by rural (or small) schools and their communities in several European countries, including the Eastern and Central European countries.

The book proposal to the US publisher IAG (Information Age Publishing) ‘Current research in rural and regional education’ Series, managed by Michael Corbett and Karen Eppley in 2016, was successful.

Further development of the proposal at ECER 2016 Dublin

ECER 2016 (Dublin) offered the opportunity for the three book editors (Cath Gristy, Linda Hargreaves and Silvie Rita Kučerová) to meet some of the book contributors and to give an oral report of the book progression at the Network meeting taking place during the conference (cf. the Network report).

At the same conference, Cath and Linda convened a two-part symposium entitled ‘Educational Research and Schooling in Rural Europe: An Engagement with Changing Patterns of Education, Space and Place’, focusing on a series of case studies located in Norway, Serbia, Czechia, Finland, and England., The three editors met and supported the contributing authors to ensure the good progress of each chapter. Contributions were now covering 11 countries: Austria, Czechia, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Serbia, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Second successful EERA Network Funding in 2017

The editors were keen to support authors who were publishing in English for the first time. All contributors had published their research findings in national academic journals or reports and/or regularly presented their contributions at English-speaking conferences, including ECER. However, some had not contributed to academic journals or books published in English for academic purposes.

The three editors were successful in their bid for Network Funding to support the book publication in 2017. Their application was in the spirit of Network 14 and EERA. It ensured the best development of a community of scholars from various fields and different countries, including enhancing their writing skills. It fostered scholarly collaboration and the dissemination of high-quality research.

After the Publication: Book reviews and Participation Activity in Network 14

educational research and schooling in rural europe

By 2019, the 395-page, 16-chapter book was ready for publication. It was now time to make it known to the community outside Network 14.

The editors approached key international journals in the field as well as potential reviewers, all with links to Network 14 and/or ECER. Within 18 months, six reviews – all recommending the book – were published: Hernan Cuervo for the Journal of Research in Rural Education, Paul Flynn for the British Journal of Educational Studies, Rebecca Ipe for the International Review of Education, Robyn Henderson for the Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, Laurence Lasselle for the Center for Educational Policies Journal and Morag Redford for the Journal of Education for Teaching.

Contributors continue to be active within Network 14 by submitting proposals to ECERs, and one of them joined the Network 14 co-convenors team in 2021!

Tips for publishing within the EERA Network

Engage with a community of scholars within an EERA Network and beyond
Build the community around a strong and topical idea
Submit symposium proposal to ECER
Identify publication opportunities
Look for EERA funding opportunities
Disseminate the publication

Cath Gristy

University of Plymouth (UK), Plymouth Institute of Education

Cath is a Lecturer at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, and her current research focuses on issues of inclusion and education in rural contexts. She is one of the co-conveners of EERA Network 14 (Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research).

Laurence Lasselle

Senior Lecturer, University of St Andrews (UK), School of Management

Laurence is a Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom, and her current research focuses on widening participation in Scottish Higher Education with a particular focus on access to Higher Education for Scottish rural and remote communities. She is the link convener of EERA Network 14.

References and Further Reading

Book:

Cath Gristy, University of Plymouth, United Kingdom, Linda Hargreaves, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and Silvie R. Kučerová, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University, Czechia, Educational Research and Schooling in Rural Europe: An Engagement with Changing Patterns of Education, Space and Place, Information Age Publishing, INC, 2020; 406 pp, ISBN: 978-1-64802-163-3.

A volume in Current Research in Rural and Regional Education, Series Editors: Michael Corbett, University of Tasmania, Australia and Karen Eppley, Penn State University, USA, Series Editors

Link to book: https://www.infoagepub.com/products/Educational-Research-and-Schooling-in-Rural-Europe

Reviews:

Hernan Cuervo (2021) Book review of “Educational research and schooling in rural Europe: An engagement with changing patterns of education, space and place.”, Journal of Research in Rural Education, 37:5, 1–5, DOI:10.26209/jrre3705

Paul Flynn (2022) Education research and schooling in rural Europe. An engagement with changing patterns of education, space and place, British Journal of Educational Studies, 70:2, 261-262, DOI:10.1080/00071005.2021.1978773

Rebecca Ipe (2021) Educational research and schooling in rural Europe: An engagement with changing patterns of education, space and place, International Review of Education, 67, 715–717, DOI:10.1007/s11159-021-09916-8

Robyn Henderson (2022) Book Review: Gristy, C., Hargreaves, L., & Kučerová, S. R. (Eds.). (2020). Educational Research and Schooling in Rural Europe: An Engagement with Changing Patterns of Education, Space, and Place. Information Age Publishing, Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, 32:2, 151–153, DOI: 10.47381/aijre.v32i2.343

Laurence Lasselle (2021) Book Review: Gristy, C., Hargreaves, L., & Kučerová, S. R. (Eds.). (2020). Educational Research and Schooling in Rural Europe: An Engagement with Changing Patterns of Education, Space, and Place. Information Age Publishing, CEPS Journal, 11 (Special Issue), DOI:10.26529/cepsj.1301

Morag Redford (2021) Educational research and schooling in rural Europe: an engagement with changing patterns of education, space and place, Journal of Education for Teaching, 47:4, 632-633, DOI: 10.1080/02607476.2021.1928482

EERA networks:

[1] Maria P. Figueiredo, Ian Grosvenor, Marit Honerød Hoveid, and Natasha MacNab (2014) The dynamic and changing development of EERA networks, European Educational Research Journal 2014 13:4, 404-417, DOI: 10.2304/eerj.2014.13.4.404

You can find other blog posts from the EERA Network 14 here.

Language scaffolding as a complex craft

by Errol Ertugruloglu | NW 31 LEd – Network on Language and Education, VOR (Netherlands)

Worldwide, an ever-increasing number of students undertakes (part of) their education in a second language.[1] And although Dutch exceptionalism would sometimes like us to believe otherwise, this development is also visible in the Netherlands.[2] Language–focused subject education is tailored to these multilingual educational contexts, as it supports specific knowledge and skills, as well as language development. [3][4] Nevertheless, a focus on language is not always an integral part of subject teachers’ teaching in multilingual environments. [5] Yet, very few studies have focused on the kinds of support that are provided.

Our research examines the types of language support teachers in Dutch bilingual secondary education do provide and the reasons they have for providing it. In these multilingual settings, the languages of instruction are Dutch and English. [6]

The Dutch Network of Bilingual Schools currently has more than 130 members [7] and most of the schools follow a curriculum that is similar to non-bilingual schools. The national curriculum guidelines include elements of citizenship education in subjects such as geography. Comparing practices across citizenship-related subjects [8] [9] allows for comparisons across schools and classrooms.

We asked eight teachers across four schools about the ways they support learning through English in their classrooms. We observed three lessons by the first seven teachers, and two lessons by the last one. After observing the lessons, we used Stimulated Recall Interviews to discuss the observed instances of language scaffolding to ask about their motivations for providing these types of support. We are currently trying to make sense of this data by using the concepts of whole-class scaffolding, language levels and scaffolding motivations.

We believe that these two examples make three important points. First, teachers do support students’ writing assessments. Second, when they do, it is not only for language or content reasons, but also for reasons related to disciplinary or broader academic literacy. Third, and perhaps most importantly, we need to view teaching as a complex craft where teachers do sometimes engage beyond the word level to help their students to create complex texts.

Perhaps they do not engage in these supports constantly. Perhaps it would be better if they did it more often. Perhaps we should just appreciate the language supports teachers manage to provide in demanding classroom environments where language support is one of the many important educational and psychological student needs that require attention at various moments. We believe that rather than dividing teaching up into checkboxes and deliverables, we should keep investigating the things teachers do well so that we can understand them better and spread good practices.

What is scaffolding?

Scaffolding is a rather contentious concept. [10] [11] Within this research, scaffolding is understood as a process by which a teacher responds to students’ needs by gradually adding support. By focusing on the type of scaffolding that helps students to continue with a difficult task individually, we are able to look at language support in both a focused and a broad way. [12]

The language part of language scaffolding is covered by language levels, as teachers modify their language support according to the varying needs of the students. In this way, we can see whether the scaffold is geared towards the word, sentence or text level, and also whether students are helped in more active or passive skills. [13]

Finally, we were interested in scaffolding motivations, or the reasons teachers have to engage in language scaffolding, whether it is to support students’ language or content development or disciplinary literacy. [14] Whereas content development refers to assisting students in coping with the subject matter, disciplinary literacy is about ‘learning to think like a historian, mathematician, […]’ [15], or in this case, like a social scientist.

A common problem for teachers in contexts is bridging the gap between the knowledge that students access through reading in class, and the type of knowledge they must display in written assessments. [16] After the work of Maton and others, we use the word unpacking to refer to the process by which a teacher helps students to access knowledge. Repacking is used to describe the process by which a teacher helps a student to display this knowledge in writing. [17]

Maton, 2013, p. 14

As in previous research, [18] rather than supporting students in producing difficult texts, our teachers mostly support the ways students access knowledge and help them to unpack difficult concepts.

Maton, 2013, p. 14

Examples of Repacking

Although this is an interesting finding in itself, some teachers do repack. And they do so not just for language or content reasons. Let me illustrate this with two examples, both from geography classes.

When asked about their language scaffolding practices, the first teacher describes a situation where they help students to answer questions.

‘… the kids write their answers on the board, and I go, okay: this is a peer review and how can we look at improving …the style of answering, the method of answer.

Where is the piece of information, where is the point of information we want, where is the next point? We are looking, we are coming back and highlighting: this is what the question is asking, this is the question word, this is the question phrase, this is the term, have we answered and seen these two question terms in your answer, build it up, and they write.’

We believe that this illustrates that this teacher is engaging in repacking as they help the students to formulate answers to difficult questions. And when asked about the reasons for engaging in this type of language scaffolding, they state that it is about ‘building up a habit’ and ‘how they understand my subject’.

In the second instance, another teacher describes the scaffold they provide for writing an essay.

‘I mainly use the interaction with the class to decide what goes up on the board. So the points, the explanations, and the examples are put on the board…

And for that, I took a number of slides I got from an English teacher with all kinds of linking words and asked them: ‘how can you link these sentences?’

So first, I showed them on the screen what the class already knew, these are also words that you can use to make this link, and also what should be in your final conclusion, what should be in there?’

And this teacher also does not see this instruction as something that focuses solely on language or content:

‘I don’t necessarily think it’s subject specific, I really think it’s quite general. I think most subjects use that [point-example-explain, ed.] structure. I do make my assignments so that this can be integrated so that I can help with this.’

Key Messages

Language supports are important for a variety of educational contexts
Teaching is a complex craft where teachers attend to many important educational and psychological student needs
A framework combining whole-class scaffolding, language levels, and scaffolding motivations can provide insights into the ways language scaffolds unfold in classrooms
Teachers support students’ writing assessments beyond language or content, including disciplinary or broader academic literacy
Finding out what teachers do, rather than what they should be doing can contribute to spreading good practices

Errol Ertugruloglu

Ph.D. student at Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands.

Errol Ertugruloglu is a Ph.D. student at Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching (ICLON). His background is Political Science (BSc. and MSc.). His doctoral research investigates the ways subject teachers support language in multilingual educational settings in the Netherlands. Among other things, he is interested in multilingual education, migration, and classroom practices.

References and Further Reading

[1] Jessica G. Briggs, Julie Dearden, and Ernesto Macaro, “English Medium Instruction: Comparing Teacher Beliefs in Secondary and Tertiary Education,” Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching 8, no. 3 (August 27, 2018): 673–96, https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2018.8.3.7

[2] Emmanuelle Le Pichon-Vorstman and Sergio Baauw, “EDINA, Education of International Newly Arrived Migrant Pupils,” European Journal of Applied Linguistics 7, no. 1 (February 28, 2019): 145–56, https://doi.org/10.1515/eujal-2018-0021.

[3] Adam Tyner and Sarah Kabourek, “Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study” (Thomas B, September 2020), https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED609934.

[4] Joana Duarte, “Translanguaging in Mainstream Education: A Sociocultural Approach,” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 22, no. 2 (February 17, 2019): 150–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2016.1231774.

[5] Huub Oattes et al., “Content and Language Integrated Learning in Dutch Bilingual Education: How Dutch History Teachers Focus on Second Language Teaching,” Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics 7, no. 2 (December 31, 2018): 156–76, https://doi.org/10.1075/dujal.18003.oat.

[6] Tessa Mearns and Rick de Graaff, “Bilingual Education and CLIL in the Netherlands: The Paradigm and the Pedagogy,” Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics 7, no. 2 (December 31, 2018): 122–28, https://doi.org/10.1075/dujal.00002.int.

[7] Nuffic, “Alle Tto-Scholen in Nederland,” accessed January 24, 2023, https://www.nuffic.nl/onderwerpen/tweetalig-onderwijs/alle-tto-scholen-in-nederland.

[8] Wolfram Schulz et al., IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2016 Assessment Framework (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39357-5 (p. 97).

[9] Margarita Ivanova Jeliazkova, “Citizenship Education: Social Science Teachers’ Views in Three European Countries” (PhD, Enschede, The Netherlands, University of Twente, 2015), https://doi.org/10.3990/1.9789036540056.

[10] Janneke van de Pol, Monique Volman, and Jos Beishuizen, “Scaffolding in Teacher–Student Interaction: A Decade of Research,” Educational Psychology Review 22, no. 3 (September 1, 2010): 271–96, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-010-9127-6.

[11] Esmaeel Hamidi and Rafat Bagherzadeh, “The Logical Problem of Scaffolding in Second Language Acquisition,” Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education 3, no. 1 (December 2018): 19, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-018-0059-x.

[13] Jantien Smit, Henriëtte A. A. van Eerde, and Arthur Bakker, “A Conceptualisation of Whole Class Scaffolding,” British Educational Research Journal 39, no. 5 (October 2013): 817–34, https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3007.

[13] Y. Y. Lo and A. M. Y. Lin, “Designing Assessment Tasks with Language Awareness: Balancing Cognitive and Linguistic Demands,” 2014, http://hub.hku.hk/handle/10722/213641.

[14] E Ertugruloglu, T Mearns, and W Admiraal, “Scaffolding What, Why and How? A Critical Thematic Review Study of Descriptions, Goals, and Means of Language Scaffolding in Bilingual Contexts,” accessed January 24, 2023, Manuscript submitted for publication.

[15]Steven Z. Athanases and Luciana C. de Oliveira, “Scaffolding Versus Routine Support for Latina/o Youth in an Urban School: Tensions in Building Toward Disciplinary Literacy,” Journal of Literacy Research 46, no. 2 (June 2014): 263–99, https://doi.org/10.1177/1086296X14535328.

[16] J.R. Martin, “Embedded Literacy: Knowledge as Meaning,” Linguistics and Education 24, no. 1 (April 2013): 23–37, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2012.11.006.

[17]Karl Maton, “Making Semantic Waves: A Key to Cumulative Knowledge-Building,” Linguistics and Education 24, no. 1 (April 2013): 8–22, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2012.11.005.

[18]Yuen Yi Lo, Angel M. Y. Lin, and Yiqi Liu, “Exploring Content and Language Co-Construction in CLIL with Semantic Waves,” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, August 30, 2020, 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2020.1810203.

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