EERA Blog
European Educational
Research Association
Learning by Doing Research: the Ukrainian Educational Research Association
Maintaining reliable contacts, networking, and sharing ideas are some of the best ways to empower educators. And professional and research associations help educators achieve these goals. The Ukrainian Educational Research Association (UERA) was created five years ago to boost interdisciplinary research synergy in the field of education.Freeing Educational Research from dusty bookshelvesHistorically, educational research in Ukraine was purely in the domain of Pedagogy which in Ukraine is a discipline dealing with history and theory of education, including its forms and methods. A quick search of the National Library of Ukraine database shows that 2729 candidate dissertations (Ph.D....
School Uniform Policy in Scottish schools: Control and Consent
A topic that is of continued interest to educational researchers – but also to teachers, pupils, and their parents - is school uniforms. As you may know, there is a marked difference between what pupils wear in school in the UK (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), Ireland and the rest of Europe (recently Malta changed from formal uniforms to tracksuits). We set out to look into the reasons that schools give for having school uniforms. I conducted the research with thirteen students from across the University of Aberdeen. A week-long course was designed to teach the qualitative data analysis software NVivo while taking part in an authentic research project. This was to provide...
Turning a leaf: a new procedure for European Education Research Journal Special Issues
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,...
Caring for Those who Teach Online – Reflections from a Virtual Staffroom
When schools and higher education institutions closed their doors in March 2020, some of the implicit and informal supports for teacher educators disappeared. As teacher educators migrated to new modes of teaching and learning, institutional supports such as IT upskilling, educational technologies, professional development, and assistance from HR were provided. However, many staff commented that the burden of the expectations placed on them often exceeded what they felt capable of responding to in a personal capacity. With this as the backdrop, I want to reflect on how staff in one institution developed more informal ways of supporting each other and building community in a time of...
Education Outside the Classroom – An Innovative Teaching Concept During COVID-19
Education Outside the Classroom is a teaching concept which aims to counteract the health risks due to children’s inactivity and further support the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
Posthumanism and Education
The rapidly changing world and new challenges have led many of us to wonder if the current ways of understanding and organizing education are adequate. One emerging perspective in the field of education is posthumanism. Although posthumanism is often considered in a coherent-sounding way in many contexts, it is not a single, unified theory and it has been used in many areas of education. Its multiple voices can be interpreted in many ways – ways that cannot all be introduced in this short text. In general, however, the common goal of the posthuman is to shake dualistic thinking and the dominant position of the humanism. This means that in posthuman thinking humans are not seen as...
How Design Thinking in Education can Help During COVID-19
In April 2020, Dr Fiona Chambers, a Senior Lecturer in PE and Sport Pedagogy at University College Cork in Ireland, drew an idea on the back of an envelope. She envisioned a plan to kickstart sport and physical activity during and beyond the pandemic, using the principle of Design Thinking in Education. This idea has become the first Global Design Challenge for Sport and Physical Activity. Here she tells us the reason behind this challenge and how she went about organising it.
Intercultural Translation through EERA and ERG
María Angélica Mejía Cáceres first heard of EERA and ECER via a post on the web about the summer school: Doctoral Studies in Environmental and Sustainability Education: Contextualizing the Process at the University of Cambridge. It was the first event that María Angélica attended where she needed to speak English all the time so it was a bit of a challenge. María Angélica agreed to write about her experiences, both at the summer school and her further engagement with EERA at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) in 2019.
Supporting a European Community of Emerging Researchers
In her first post, Saneeya Qureshi told us a bit about the history, goals and achievements of the Emerging Researchers’ Group. We wanted to know a bit more about Saneeya’s personal experience with EERA and the ERG.
5 More Tips for Completing your PhD
The second post in our series of really helpful tips for doctoral students.
The Challenges and Opportunities of Physical Education within the Context of Health and Wellbeing
During the #ReconnectingEERA online conference, a symposium was held to showcase just some of the excellent Physical Education research that is currently being carried out in Scotland. The symposium was organised in collaboration with SERA and their PE network (ScotPERN) in order to build capacity, share ideas and facilitate conversations. Dr Shirley Gray and Dr Rachel Sandford provide an overview of the online symposium, reflect on the discussion generated and consider implications for future research agendas.
How Social Capital Affects your Research
While thinking about research, most researchers focus on the research questions, design, and methodology aspects. However, we may forget about the most important thing about research, as well as our life – the fact that we are human beings. When I was conducting research for my master thesis, this was the part that I had forgotten. There are qualities that we cannot hide, like our colour of skin, our biological gender, and our career (if we are being truthful). And then social capital and being an outsider or insider come into prominence.
Write for the EERA Blog
If you’d like to contribute to the EERA blog, take a look at our Submission Guidelines to find out how to successfully pitch a blog post to our Editorial Team. Then send us a quick email to blog-mail@eera.eu
We look forward to hearing from you