Working as a European,Working as an EERA member

Abstract

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.

The focus of my presentation at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) Porto was about the identity and purpose of the European Educational Research Association (EERA), and the shifting nature of its membership. Initially, these were the practical and operational problems of an emergent EERA Council in the late 1990s, but today, they are crucial and central to the very purpose and continuation of the EERA. The question ‘what does it mean to be a European educational research association?’ was a vital question in the early years of the association, and so was the related question ‘who is or could be a member of the EERA?’. In fact, these questions have never gone away although different solutions have been made over the years, and that is because they are no longer operational questions but core questions about purpose. This short paper will discuss the past and present of these questions, and make suggestions as to their future

In 1996 I joined the very small EERA Council as a representative of the British Educational Research Association, replacing James Calderhead, who was also the first and retiring President of the EERA. At that time, the Council had representatives of the German, French and Nordic associations amongst others, and it was possible for us to meet in a small room. At the time there were many difficult or confusing discussions about every aspect of this new association. Our discussions about EERA finance were difficult [money seemed to be spent without our understanding why]: our single administrator was part time; an independent institute managed our little office; and the annual conferences struggled for a stable organization. Members of the Council did not know each other or the associations they represented, and trusting each other and the administration of the EERA took some time; indeed, it took years. This was probably no different from the early stages of any national association at that time, but national associations had real advantages over the EERA: members had a reasonable chance of being known to each other, and they worked across a shared policy and practice landscape with which they were familiar. They had bounded problems, existed within borders and systems of national education. This was not the case with the EERA Council. Research practices, key concepts and research training and locations were not shared, and translations were often attempted. However, the biggest problem in a weekly round of crises, in my opinion, was not really about management or finance, it was about our purpose as an association. Although agreement was easily managed about a conference or an office, for example, it was not clear what a group of national associations should be doing together in a more fundamental sense. So we developed an overarching research question to focus on this problem – ‘what does it mean to be a European educational research association?’. This was a very new question: there was no precedent for us in Europe. Copying the work of a national association could not solve it as they knew where they were. But what should a European association do? What should we be?

Like its members, in the Council and the networks, we had to start learning what it meant to be European, to find a way of talking about it, and in that process to confront our methodological nationalism, and create a transnational community. In the early years, it was suggested that what distinguished ourselves and our work should be an outwardly facing approach; that is, the new conference would be a place to engage in a community of shared discussions, and while quality was to be a key issue, so was the sense of creating a new shared European space of work. The idea of ‘Europeanness’, even though it was an idea without solid definition, aided our endeavours to locate our association work. So, we engaged with Brussels and spoke to programme leaders and network projects based in the Directorate of Education, about their intentions and funding. We developed a conference pedagogy – for example, a symposium had to have three countries represented within it [this would overcome single nation symposium entries]; each ECER proposal had to have a European dimension [it was argued that without it, the proposal should be sent to a national conference] and attempt to speak across borders and boundaries.

We gradually widened Council membership; originally, there was a restriction on membership, and there was supposed to be an election between countries for Council places. Instead, it was decided that each national association could have a Council seat by right. Of course, the serious discussions about being a European researcher, about understanding cross-border processes in education – in the past and the present – went on in the network meetings and in the conference cafes. In practice, it was the conference membership that drove this idea of a European association, and many networks forged distinctive cultures and identities of work. They created a ‘Europeanness’ of practice.

The second question, ‘who is a member?’ was not so easily managed. The early EERA Constitution had proposed three kinds of members, with the first two having votes – national associations; university departments or institutes; and individual members. Each of these categories had problems. For the small number of individuals who wished to support the association, there was little to offer: we could not contact them easily, and they were not able to vote on Council issues. University departments expected regular newsletters and cheaper ECER entry. At the time, national associations were not able to check their memberships and their addresses cheaply and swiftly; newsletters were not electronic and the association could not afford to print and post them to possible members. For various reasons, the situation was unworkable. National associations that attended the Council meeting decided that the situation could be resolved operationally and constitutionally if it was assumed that every researcher would be in their national association. The Three Estates description of the EERA [associations, departments and individuals] was overwritten by the Council’s practice of describing the EERA as ‘an association of associations’. Increasingly, the idea of a ‘European educational research space’ – a phrase constructed and taken to Brussels by EERA officers – would be created by national associations joined together in the EERA, a procedure by which individual researchers would be represented through national associational membership.

So where are we now? The EERA Council has expanded considerably with many associations, including some it helped to form, taking their seat at the table. The ECER has had many successes – it is nearly six times larger now than in our first meetings. Its journal, the European Educational Research Journal (EERJ), started 14 years ago, has thousands of researchers on its contact lists and the work of ECER presenters has been made available to a wide readership. In its first 20 years, the ECER has overcome many difficulties and it has done this through its professional communities of voluntary actors. As an historian, looking into archives to understand the relations between disciplines, institutes and associations in research in education and other scholarly areas, a pattern is often observed in which the ideas and arguments of the founding period – the early days – become lost in the overlay and sedimentation of meetings, actions and conferences of later years. The project becomes a business, and its ideas are buried under new projects. It is almost ‘natural’, although strangely unreflexive of a research association, that the foundation arguments become overlaid by layers of organizational sedimentation of business decisions, routines and new documentation. As Hartley said ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’ [LP Hartley in The Go-Between]. However, I would like to return now to those early questions about our purpose on this important anniversary: ‘what does a EUROPEAN educational research association mean, and who are its members?’.

Since the EERA began, globalization has rolled rapidly on. It is the global that often attracts attention, and sometimes a rather easy theorizing about it. However, Europeanization is still our big issue – it is our core research question, our basis of inquiry, even if it cannot be defined or settled. It is a process we are in. If we cannot work with it, or reject it, then we accept a hegemonic global Anglo-Saxonism, and we lose the distinctiveness of our location and space. Working with ideas, which we produce about the theories, policies and practices in the fields of education we study, we are trying to understand, analyse and explain the space we are in. We might no longer need the organizational regulations that we have carefully built up over the years – the rules for a symposium, the need to submit a proposal with a reflection on its European context – but if we replace them, it is because we are developing new ways we can study our condition in Europe, not because they are redundant.

I believe that it is more important than ever that we consider and confront what Europe means, especially in our contemporary context of economic, political and social crisis, which even calls into question our continuing unity and expansion [once taken for granted when the EERA started]. In the late 1990s, one damaging criticism of the ECER was that it was just a caravan of academic tourists taking advantage of cheaper flights across Europe. We countered this by a determination to build a transnational scientific community and accumulate our research evidence and insights from our common project. Publishing in the EERJ was a way for the networks and individual researchers to show how our knowledge was being constructed.

But who are members of these research communities? We resolved that in the early 2000s – it is the Council who are the members of the EERA and they are our representatives from our national associations. In the networks, a growing force within the ECER/EERA, membership is assumed to be the regular attenders and office holders in the work of the network. These are different but so far not conflicting versions of membership. Yet, this is not satisfactory. For a number of years, the majority of people who attended the ECER stated that they are not members of a national association, even though it is cheaper to attend the ECER if they are. In other words, they have probably chosen not to be members of a national association. They are not represented in the decision making of the Council and its executive group of officers. The Council is not accountable to them. The Council contains members who have very little connection with the ECER, have not presented in networks, and have not published in the EERJ. Sometimes it appears as if the EERA and ECER are two parallel organizations; neither threatens the other and they benignly observe each other at a distance.

In my opinion, we are a stage when we have to find a way to enfranchise the whole membership of our transnational community who come to the ECER. The operational problems of the early years are long gone. The EERA and ECER are efficient, they use social media to inform members, they have multiple websites and they cross-check membership databases. The technical and functional decision to exclude the Third Estate, the common people, and ignore the democratic deficit in the EERA should be overturned, and the association strengthened.