From Teaching to Learning?
News: Jun 17, 2008
When the 2008 European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) is held in Gothenburg between 8th and 12th September, there will be at least 1,200 European educational researchers gathered at the Campus Pedagogen.
The Department of Education (IPD) and the Faculty of Education are hosting the conference.
"A good opportunity, not least for our own workforce, to take part in both the formal and informal parts of the conference. It can be extremely important to enter into new forums and to establish cooperation," says Professor Sverker Lindblad, Head of Research at the Department of Education.
Former president
From 1998 and 2001, he was President of EERA - the European Educational Research Association - whose annual research conference is now being launched at Pedagogen, at the University of Gothenburg.
The theme of the conference is "From Teaching to Learning?", and the theme also provides the content for the networks' sessions.
The EERA was formed in 1994 through the federation of a number of research organisations in Europe.
Equivalent to the EU
The EERA became one way of getting researchers to meet in Europe instead of travelling to the USA.
"The point was that we were forming an equivalent to the EU in the research community, an organ for joint working for European organisations' and institutions' educational research," says Sverker Lindblad, who will be taking part in a round table discussion at ECER 2008 about research driven universities, and in a symposium about comparative education in other countries.
The Question Mark
The theme for the conference ends with a question mark.
"One ongoing discussion in the world of research is about whether we are generally moving from teaching to learning, where there is more focus on the individual person's learning, and away from teacher-led supervision. At its deepest, it is about the complex questions of how, where and when we acquire knowledge," says Mikael Holmquist, lecturer at the Department of Education and secretary of the local organising committee for ECER 2008, which is working under the leadership of the Department of Education's coordinator, Biörn Hasselgren.
ECER 2008 will be a working conference. The EERA has 24 networks and it is in these that a lot will be happening during the conference.
1,100 papers
"The majority of the participants will be presenting their own papers. At the moment, 1,100 papers have been submitted, which are bound for the different networks. ECER 2008 will actually present an opportunity to grasp what is going on within educational research in Europe," says Mikael Holmquist.
The four keynote speakers at the conference have been confirmed. They are Professor Benõ Csapó, University of Szeged, Professor Hannele Niemi, University of Helsinki, Professor Ference Marton, University of Gothenburg and, finally, Professor Sharon Gewirtz, King's College, London.
In 2006, the EERA's annual research conference was held in Geneva, and held in Ghent the year after.
ECER 2008's pre-conference fringe event for postgraduate students and young research will be held on 8th and 9th September, with the main conference taking place between 10th and 12th September.
To the programme, application and other current information about ECER 2008>>