EERA Sessions

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development confirmed lifelong learning’s status as a recognised ingredient of planning for sustainable and participatory development. Its 17 goals and 169 targets are intended to represent an integrated solution to urgent challenges, meaning that the key dimensions of sustainable development should be considered holistically as interconnected and of equal importance. In this context, the capacity of lifelong learning to build bridges between different types and levels of education and learning and, crucially, between different life spheres and policy contexts, becomes particularly relevant. Especially important are notions of adult learning, training, educating and awareness raising, which are embedded in many of the goals.

Open Access, Open Science, Open Educational Resources and Practices as well as other issues of "Openness" are controversially discussed and circulated within the European Educational Sciences communities. In this EERA session, we want to share our positive experiences but also discuss some problematic and hot issues. We feel that it is necessary to exchange ideas with interested colleagues from all networks in a relatively low-threshold way. To facilitate this exchange, we will adapt the BarCamp-format which allows participants to share their ideas and concerns actively and to have their issues discussed during the session.

This symposium will focus on the educationally relevant yet still largely unexplored issue of multiliteracies in multilingual societies. It will approach the complex phenomenon of multiliteracies from three perspectives: multiliteracy as a language repertoire in multilingual students, multiliteracy as digital resources, and school policies towards both.

The EERA mission statement affirms that: “High quality research not only acknowledges its own context but also recognises wider, transnational contexts with their social, cultural and political similarities and differences” (EERA). This has been a founding principle for an association that encompasses over 35 national and regional educational research associations, each with its own particular history and character. Against this background, this session has two objectives...

This joint WERA-EERA-session addresses the question of which structural requirements must be in place in order to facilitate sustainable change in the field of public education. It proceeds from the assumption that a more productive interplay between educational research and practice would be critical for the development of new solutions to current educational problems and future challenges. Our session thus aims at the development of a better and more nuanced understanding of those structural preconditions which are required for sustainable improvement to become possible in the first place.

In Germany, the structure of teacher education reflects the structure of each of the 16 German state’s school systems. Pre-service teacher education programs address primary and secondary school as well as vocational training. In the following we will focus on the example Hamburg with special emphasis on tracks in primary and secondary school teacher education as the structure of teacher education and its difficulties in Hamburg are reflecting general problems and challenges.

Building a research-based agenda for teacher education requires a broad basis of data. For an agenda focusing digital skills these data should cover a range of aspects: national or international specifications and standards for teacher education, pre-service teachers’ prior knowledge and characteristics of course concepts which are effective for the development of digital competencies. This symposium focusses on four different aspects related to the development of such a concept for a research-based agenda for science teacher education.

Linguistic diversity and its consequences for education is a highly significant topic for virtually all European countries. In-migration – the primary driver of increasing linguistic diversity in a national society – is no longer a feature faced by a selected group of North-Western European countries, but in the meantime also by European regions that traditionally functioned as source regions of migration rather than receiving regions. The proposed symposium strives to present German research results and discuss their validity, scope and generalizability in a European perspective.

As the ECER 2019 theme emphasizes, in an era increasingly perceived as unstable, unsustainable and at risk, educational processes, developments and capacity building become uncertain. Educational research (ER) is seen as having a pivotal role to play in generating answers to the many questions arising from this unstable landscape. However, ER itself is not exempt from risks that can hinder the ability to deal with this task. This workshop examines the types of risk that contemporary scholars struggle with and engage with different efforts to navigate such a landscape of risk in order to ensure the continued relevance and impact of ER.

This joint WERA-EERA-session brings together international research on the question if and in what ways the development of new technologies for teaching and learning affects (positive or negative) educational assessment. For the proposed symposium we ask the question whether new technologies will lead not only to innovations of the ‘how’ to test, but also of the ‘what’?

The session aims at being a forum to present and discuss latest research findings on teacher resilience under given social conditions. It brings together international research conducted in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. The session enriches relevant theory and research in the field of teacher professional development, teacher education and school leadership. The attention is paid to issue of structural processes that enable and constrain teacher resilience.

Uncertainty is a constitutive element of teaching and appears in different manifestations: in the choice of topics for teaching, which should be oriented towards an open future, in interactions in the classroom when a lesson content encounters more or less motivated students, in the unforeseeable dynamics of a school class, in non-guaranteed effects of impulses for learning and in school cultures which are determined by criteria beyond the planning capability of teachers. At the University of Hamburg, a research group has been established to discuss uncertainty in the context of Bildung in general, but also in the context of the subjects taught in schools.