On organizing educational research communication in Europe: Past experiences and possible futures

The pioneer years

Armin Gretler (2007) tells the history of the initiation of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) in the early 1990s. Here we note two important sets of actors. Firstly, we had the working of international organizations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Community, who were pointing out the importance of establishing cooperation and communication among educational researchers in different parts of Europe. Secondly, in Europe a set of national and special research organizations were founded a couple of decades ago, including the Nordic Educational Research Association and its British counterparts in the early 1970s. The interests among these actors were further underlined by the development of a European research area and European research funding initiated in order to deal with the challenges that Europe was facing.

When I entered the EERA council in the mid-1990s it was a small and handy organization – the council consisted of around 10 persons, often having the meeting around a table in Edinburgh where we had our headquarters at that time. The council members were appointed mostly by national research organizations. At that time, James Calderhead as the EERA President and Wynne Harlen who was Director of the Scottish Council for Research in Education were playing main roles in organizing the EERA council work. I was appointed President by this small council in the late 1990s. At that time we organized the first ECER (European Conference on Educational Research) meetings with around 500 participants for the next few years.

Initially the EERA was a small organization with a small set of activists and networks. In a way the organization was not stabilized but we survived these pioneer years, where the ECER was the main source of income. The national organizations and the EERA networks were important as a social basis for the EERA and in outlining ways of work. We discussed informally different ways of stabilizing the organization – the role the networks should have or how to diminish the democracy deficit in an organization that was not based on individual memberships but was constituted as an umbrella organization of different national and special organizations. We also dealt with issues on how to improve research communication and to make educational research more visible and communicative. However,the most important task for EERA was to survive in the somewhat turbulent situation at that time.

The expansion years

The pioneer time turned into what in many ways was a period of expansion. The EERA grew rapidly over the years and the organization stabilized in networks and office, I would say very much due to the competent work carried out in our office. So did the number of different national research associations that turned into members of the EERA. Thus, the council consists today of persons representing more than 30 member organizations, and here we also find a line of candidate national organizations, as can be noted at the EERA website. In the EERA there are, in 2014, 32 networks plus the emerging researchers’ group, dealing with various issues in educational research. In the networks increasing numbers of papers are offered by the conference participants. For instance, at the 2014 ECER circa 200 papers were listed just within the Policy network and a similar number were presented in the Higher Education network.

Considering research communication and matters of intellectual organization that it is associated with, we have not only conference papers and their ongoing publications in journals and books. Central to the EERA research communication is the European Educational Research Journal (EERJ) that started in 2002. Here more than 500 articles have been published. Subscriptions to the EERJ have also increased in number; since 2006 they have more than doubled and are now up to almost 2500. The EERJ also expanded and covers large parts of Europe in 2014 in terms of authors, as well as in the editorial board meetings (Lindblad, 2014).

The expansion of the EERA is remarkable in almost all ways and we could not expect such a success story in the middle of the 1990s.

Reflections on the European Educational Research Association expansion

Above I have dealt with the EERA expansion in a quantitative way: in the number of member organizations and networks as well as in the growth of attendees to the annual conference ECER and the numbers of papers presented, and so forth. Now, the question is what kind of progress do we find in this expansion, given the ambitions of the EERA.

As we can note in the history of the EERA, it was founded as a learned society with a specific set of purposes: ¹

These purposes are presenting a basic task for the EERA to improve communication with different actors in different ways and to present findings and contributions of educational research among researchers, as well as for policy-making and professional practices. How do such expectations fit with the ways the EERA has been developed?

Firstly, what is easily visible is that the number and spread of the EERA members is a good thing, relative to the ambition to organize and increase cooperation among educational researchers in Europe. Although the Northwest of Europe for a long time has had a large impact on the EERA, for example considering officers and memberships, participants in the Southern and Eastern parts of Europe are growing in importance in networks and as council members and in, for example, EERJ publications and the editorial board (Lindblad, 2014).

Secondly, what I actually conceive of as a challenge is to deal with some implications of the intellectual organization of the EERA in terms of networks and presentations carried out. The growing networks in the EERA are encompassing whole worlds of educational research. They are mostly highly productive and present a lot of interesting research for those who participate in the activities of these networks or are addressees of their research. However, they are only occasionally visible for ECER attendees outside their activities. Thus, in a way the constitution of the EERA into networks is producing visibility problems in research communication. This has of course been discussed over the years and different measures have been carried out with symposia with participants from different networks, network convenors’ meetings or open spaces in receptions, roundtables and so forth. It is a challenge that the EERA shares with other organizations, such as the American Educational Research Association.

How is it then possible to capture this challenge?

To be a little specific, it is a pity that the suggestion of Armin Gretler to make a comparative study of the educational research associations has not been realized since the pioneer years (see Hofstetter and Schneuwly, 2002; Lindblad and Mulder, 1999). In my experience from the Nordic Educational Research Association it could be a most worthwhile field of study.

To be a little bit more general, although much is achieved in the EERA as an organization, there is to me a problem concerning the differentiation and integration of the activities of the EERA and also concerning research communication in general in Europe. Such a problem could be expected given the situation of educational research having many addressees and kinds of resources, as pointed out by Whitley (2000) in his analysis of differences in academia. According to him economics, which is quite similar to education research in this respect, could be regarded as a fragmented adhocracy with a lack of a distinct centre and little of recognition of the significance of research findings. To this is added the precondition that we within European educational research seemingly find different research traditions and research cultures that further more complicates research communication and cooperation.

Prospects for the future of the European Educational Research Association

We are now in a situation where the EERA is a story of success in terms of expansion in numbers and in presentations of research over Europe. A question is then if the EERA will say that what is achieved is good enough and that the organization has developed a winning concept that works and presumably will continue to work. Or should the EERA work in order to further improve research visibility and research communication?

For me, it seems to be of interest to develop some ideas in the second direction. In order to give more concrete preconditions for analysis and action I will put forward a short agenda for increased visibility, research communication and organization.

Given the view of the past and the present as shown above, there is a need to improve the communication within and between the parts and parcels of educational research – to recognize differences and boundaries in the specialties on one side and to increase communication inside and outside European educational research on the other side. I put forwards two strategic targets.

One: increased visibility

The networks are key ingredients in the EERA’s work. They are nice as they are, but some of them are very large but still somewhat invisible if you are not part of them. My suggestion is that the networks should be given opportunities to be developed into what we might name divisions with the support of strategic resources. To turn into divisions there is a need for the networks to do the following:

Thus, some of the networks might consider this to be an interesting alternative for the future with increased visibility in the EERA, and also to communicate outside the EERA, as stated in the purpose of our organization.

Two: increased reflexivity

A strategic idea to improve not only research visibility but also to advance reflexivity in and on educational research is to develop an Observatory of European Educational Research. ² This would be done in order to comprehend and to analyse past and current research and to map the European Educational Research Field with its agents, networking and research traditions, as well as infrastructures and knowledge production. This is in turn conceived of as an important precondition for educational research collaboration as well as the visibility of educational research in Europe for different agents.

Excurse: an observatory is usually the name of an instrument to observe the world around us – the sky or a territory – and by that also a basis for making valid statements about this world. From the history of science we learn about the importance of observation and the making of observatories (Daston and Lunbeck, 2011) in order to improve knowledge about nature. We learn about the use of observatories by, for example, the naturalists – and the working of scientific communities in conversations about observations done and the establishment of approved facts. Based on such examples we can note that an observatory is not only an instrument but also an object with interactive qualities facilitating and framing communication about the phenomenon to be studied and the knowledge to be developed and archived. Given this it is important to construct an observatory into an interactive and communicative context and to analyse the construction and function of an observatory in relation to this context.

An observatory of and for European educational research would become an infrastructure for research communication based on the collective efforts of the EERA’s networks and member organizations. A first step would be to do a comparative analysis of educational research in different national and cultural contexts. Here the member organizations could play an important part. A second step would be to engage the networks in the making of research reviews and handbooks covering their field of study. A third step would be to test such an observatory in research planning or in doctoral courses in educational research. Given progress in these steps the observatory could also be used in communication with different agents in the field of education, such as education policy and teaching institutions. To my understanding this is a way to further realize the stated purpose of the EERA.