The following is part of the 2014 ECER conferference theme document. 

"What have been the major successes and failures of education research communities over the last decades? What can we learn from our past to help build our future in these turbulent times? Do the ways in which educational research has been used in practice and policy within Europe provide a good foundation for the future? Or do we need to develop different strategies? Can research be seen as a means to purpose radical alternatives? Can education research propose robust suggestions and solutions? How can we ensure that, within the climate of increasing Europeanization, respect for national and local research priorities and practices is balanced with the need to find shared research aims, themes and methods? And finally, would it matter if educational research as a distinctive field disappeared?"

With this symposium the attempt is undertaken to structure different purposes of research and how they are reflected in different research paradigms. Differences and commonalities of research on education for sustainable development with “traditional” educational research will be analysed and some of the distinctive characteristics of such research will be elaborated. The Symposium also aims at identifying challenges of research on ESD, elaborating existing gaps in current research activities and concluding with suggestions for future researchers and their activities.

Within the field, appropriate methodology has been an important, and perhaps the principal focus of debate for more than twenty years.  At the same time, and with some notable exceptions, the impact of research has been relatively slight. There tends to be a wider perception that resources targeted through education are rarely able to demonstrate policy impact, compared to other possible approaches drawing on inter alia economics, psychology, sociology or social marketing.  There is a fairly widespread view among policy makers that ESD specialists tend to spend all their time having conversations that only they can understand, in what is sometimes called the ‘educationalists secret garden’. 

In one important respect at least, this state of affairs is extremely curious, since much contemporary literature in a wide variety of other fields - ranging from neuroscience to natural history and philosophy - tends to suggest that education is in fact the crucial factor in the direction that is taken by those developmental processes that link human development to the natural environment.

The theme of ECER 2014 suggests that perhaps ESD specialists are not the only ones with this problem.  The Symposium will confront the issue at a European scale in relation to ESD asking,inter aliawhat the 'problem' actually is.  Is it a credibility gap?  Are we asking the right questions in the worng way, or the wrong questions in the right way?  Are are deliberations organised in the wrong way?

Most particularly, the Symposium will ask whether the field of ESD has the right methodological tools, and, in line with the Conference theme, how it might best justify its own continued, distinctive existence.