European Educational Research Journal

In this paper I focus on a split within the field of educational research between those who approach education as an activity or practice governed by cause–effect relationships and those who see education as a human event of communication, meaning making and interpretation. Rather than just arguing against the former and in favour of the latter view, I outline a way forward in which the question of how education works and how it can be made to work better is considered a legitimate question, but where the answer to this question takes into consideration the specific nature of educational processes and practices. In order to do so I explore the ontology, the axiology and the praxeology of education through a discussion of the question of how education actually works (ontology), the question of what education might work for (axiology), and the question of what this means for making education work and making it work better in the everyday practice of teaching (praxeology). I preface this discussion with observations about the differing ways in which education as a field of academic scholarship has developed in Europe, in order to highlight that ‘educational research’ exists in at least two distinctively different configurations, and to show how the way in which the field has established itself in the German-speaking world might provide helpful resources for conceiving of educational research in a more educational manner.

The formation of the EERA has taken place over the last twenty years and it has accumulated practices and organizational procedures. The core principles of the Association were about inclusivity, represented through membership of national associations in the Council, and European identity, safeguarded by ECER regulations and the EERJ. The founding question of the Association, and a constant and useful heuristic device was ‘what does it mean to be a European educational research association?’ and a related question, ‘who are its members?’ The paper suggests that these questions should be used to review the work of the EERA again as they are in danger of becoming lost.

In this note I will comment on the development of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) as a European educational research organization and the current situation. In doing so I will put forward a few matters concerning the social and intellectual organization of the EERA and the visibility of educational research in Europe.

This paper offers some explorative notes accompanying the issues I addressed in the journal’s moot, which took place at the ECER 2014 conference (Porto, September 1-5). The notes that follow are explicitly written through the eyes of an emerging researcher, and offer three propositions regarding the future of educational research. These three propositions, which could be conceived as focal issues that I deem of paramount importance regarding the future of educational research, are centered around one general conviction, that is, that education in general and educational research in particular should be conceived in terms of being a common good - something of and for everybody, but not owned by anybody in particular. Based on this conception, the first proposition advances the importance of domain-oriented research next to approach-oriented research; the second proposition offers some thoughts on how to recompose the current publishing model; and the third proposition advances the idea that the European Conference on Educational Research itself could perhaps be partly conceived as and designed in terms of being a moot as well.

This article reflects on the future of European educational research (EER) and its politics of knowledge. EER is interpreted as a field of power/knowledge, where a hegemonic epistemic framework is raised that assembles an evidence-based epistemology, a ‘what works’ political rationality and a technocratic model of educational research. This implies the marginalization of the debates around the social, political and epistemological stakes of EER.

The article argues for the centrality of these issues into the debate and identifies some challenges for EER. Firstly, a point is made for an aesthetics of educational research work that has criticism as its inspiring principle and combines a problematizing disposition with the practice of research as inquiry. This implies also the extensive engagement of the EER community in a democratic and open normative dialogue with all those with a stake in education. Secondly, the article identifies two related epistemological challenges: (a) the making of epistemological pluralism as a distinctive trait of EER; (b) the exploring of the potentials involved in the practising of specific epistemological ruptures that concern the reframing of time, space and difference as constitutive categories through which we understand educational reality.

This article sets out to contribute to the current debate on the transformation of educational research with regard to global transitions and challenges. Nation-centred hierarchical organizations in Europe have increasingly failed to address emergent processes. And in contrast novel forms of governance have gained prevalence in controlling uncertainty and contingency in the transforming European Educational Research Space. The paper addresses one particular dimension of current educational research – that of the mechanisms by which transnational research operates within the European Educational Research space. Within this framework special attention is given to the issue of the governance, as a specific process shaping research cultures in the past, present and future, and to the role of European research associations as a system of evolving networks of ‘knowledge spaces’. The article problematizes assumptions about the potential of European research associations to construct vocabularies, perspectives and applications in an attempt to open up dialogues, discipline narrativity and create a new sovereign actor. The paper concludes with proposals for possible future visions based on the outcomes of the analysis of the nature of the current educational research governance.

This article is drawn from research in an ongoing multiple case study of the identity constructions of tertiary-level border-crossing students from mainland China to Hong Kong. It begins by outlining the contextual and conceptual background of the study, followed by the presentation and discussion of the three aspects of identity being constructed, including contestation against place-of-origin stereotypical identification, passive resistance against power regulations exerted by the original context and critical critiques of the Hong Kong and mainland Chinese societies. This paper argues that, compared with the Bologna process, the parallel but inverse-directional characteristics of the border crossing between mainland China and Hong Kong have significant implications on student mobility across the internal and external European borders, which are greatly influenced by the global context, against a background of the internationalisation of higher education worldwide.

This article studies the problem of the implementation of European educational standards in Kazakhstan higher education. This is considered in the frame of post-socialist education, when reforms in several post-Soviet states were undertaken under the Bologna Process. Kazakhstan, as this article argues, is justified for consideration in the frame of those post-Soviet countries involved in the Bologna Process (the Caucasus and the Baltic states) rather than in the context of neighboring Central Asian countries, which is the case found typically in the existing literature. The outcome derives from the nature of educational reforms in Kazakhstan undertaken at the system level similar to those of states that joined the European Higher Education Area. The theme is grounded in the theory of educational policy borrowing and focuses on how the borrowed patterns display themselves in the local Kazakhstan context and how they are “recontextualized” there. This article draws upon the analysis of interviews with teaching professionals conducted in four Kazakhstan higher education institutions. While the typical package of the standards of the Bologna Process to be implemented includes a wide range of norms, this article is limited by the analysis of the implementation of a testing system in Kazakhstan higher education.

Induction in enterprises is a crucial phase for each employee not only to become able to fulfil all relevant tasks but also to enable professional development as well as social and value-oriented integration into the new organisation. This is even more relevant for young people coming from initial vocational education and training with intermediate-level qualifications (European Qualification Framework 3 and 4). The research question of the presented doctoral thesis is to discover how induction processes are organised for these employees in two selected countries, and to interpret possible differences. Therefore, the author presents a mixed-method approach that focuses on qualitative case studies in selected enterprises in car service in France and Germany. This approach is complemented by an in-depth literature review of pedagogical literature and from other selected disciplines, for example Human Resources Development. This paper presents the conception and first results of the case studies. The focus therefore is on the description of induction processes. The few existing differences are interpreted by two aspects: Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and organisational differences between the cases.

Research conducted over recent decades show that parental involvement plays a significant role in children’s academic achievement as well as their cognitive, social and emotional development. For effective parental involvement, understanding the conceptualization of early childhood educators should be significant. This research investigated the views of Turkish early childhood educators on parental involvement and attitudes towards its types. Furthermore, it aims to find the reasons behind inefficient usage. A total of 113 educators provided a representative sample from Ankara. The results showed that Turkish early childhood educators have positive attitudes towards parental involvement and its types. In addition, the most popular type of parental involvement is home support. According to the results, the main reason for inefficient parental involvement is the unwillingness of parents to participate.

Romania’s integration into the European Union is fraught with cultural stereotypes. One dominant narrative is that the country creates ‘forms without substance’: meaningless institutions without adequate personnel or intellectual capital. In this paper, we investigate whether this popular stereotype adequately describes higher education reforms in recent years. We ask, ‘what is the meaning of “quality” in the reforms of Romanian universities?’ We present our findings based on an analysis of policy documents and 186 semi-structured interviews with administrators, professors and students in five universities. The results show that people in universities have engaged in a process of interpretation and negotiation with the new quality standards. They are ‘forms in search of substance’, as meaning is created within and around the new institutional structures. We argue that ‘quality’ has come to mean ‘scoring high in evaluations’. This is not without problems for the actors in universities; the evaluation standards contain many contradictions, while evaluations themselves have important limitations. Such findings reflect earlier studies on the ‘audit culture’ in university life.