Our 10th anniversary BarCamp within Network 32: Organizational Education will start looking from the presence and into the future: After reflecting on the roots and sources of organizational education in the first step we reflect on current and future challenges and perspectives for organizational education. The BarCamp explores how research in the field of organizational education can relate to and shape uncertain futures. The BarCamp research workshop introduces core topics through initial short cut impulses that contribute to open up the session for a collective collection of issues and ideas to be discussed in smaller breakout spaces.

What might be topics to address? The so-called VUCA world (Bennett & Lemoine 2014) has been identified as a challenge for organizations – not least for organizations in the education sector. On the other hand, educational organizations, in particular, should help to tackle the challenges and uncertainties of our time – from sustainable development to digitalization and the defence of our democracies. This is why educational science-based organizational research, as it has been conducted in Network 32: Organizational Education for ten years now, is of inestimable importance in the debate about the increasingly uncertain social futures and the educational organizations that deal with and co-produce them. However, this approach places high demands on the reflection of the future readiness of research perspectives, methods, and practices.

We want to address this demand at ECER 2024 in the form of a BarCamp in which we will discuss organizational education research perspectives (1), methodological approaches to organizational education research (2), and concrete research practices in organizational education (3) about the challenges and potentials of uncertain futures:

• Uncertain futures as topics for organizational education research perspectives: Topics to be addressed here may include education for sustainable development, the digitalization of the education system, and the organization of future formats of democracy as central lines of development in society. What challenges do digital forms of organizing pose for organizational educational research perspectives? How can an organizational educational perspective address the potential organizational polarization of contested futures, such as sustainability transformation or the modernization of democratic structures? How can an organizational education research perspective catch up with the conditions of post-truth politics?
• Methodological considerations in dealing with uncertain futures as a subject and condition of research: Not only does research on uncertain future horizons pose specific methodological challenges, digitalization, sustainability transformation, post-truth policies, etc., also directly affect and modify methodologies. What effects does artificial intelligence have on the methodological approach and the analysis of data material in organizational education? How can a critical and reflective approach to temporal analyses, such as time series comparisons or prognostic methods, be guaranteed against the background of uncertain future developments?
• Reflection on the effects of uncertain futures on concrete practices in everyday research: We are experiencing massive transformations in all areas of everyday life, which also have an impact on the everyday techniques embedded in the research process and can, therefore, ultimately have a far-reaching influence on the results of research. Against the backdrop of digitalized media use, how must scientific publication cultures, in particular publication cycles and formats, but also scientific communication, change? How do sustainability strategies in everyday research ultimately affect the forms of data processing (data minimization) or the conference culture (air travel)? In increasingly uncertain times, can medium-term project logics in research and the associated qualification paths of emerging researchers continue to exist?

The workshop is structured as a BarCamp. Firstly, there will be three short initial impulses of 5 minutes each, each relating to the three thematic complexes of research perspectives, methodologies, and research practices. The short intros focus on the organizational educational perspective, provide a very brief introduction to the topics, and open up the horizon of the future of organizational education research. In a second step, participants bring in their thematic interests to refer to these topics and go beyond them. Self-organized interest groups may sign up according to their expertise and interest. The theme-giver and thematic host will facilitate each reflection and discussion team. Each self-organized reflection and discussion group will identify and outline the most relevant future potentials in their respective subject area. Secondly, they will discuss possible approaches to address these potentials through further theory building, methodological developments, or research infrastructures. In addition, the participants may wish to go into the next steps of network development and to organize further work on the identified approaches and topics. In the final third step of the research workshop, the results from self-organized small group discussion teams will be systematically summarized. Space will be created for short one-minute presentations of achieved results and conclusions.

The research workshop proposed here is intended to conclude the 10th-anniversary thematic events by focusing on the future of organizational education research. Since highly uncertain futures and the already foreseeable transformation requirements in the area of, for example, digitalization, sustainability transformation and the preservation of democracy, are giving rise to a variety of new challenges for empirical research in organizational education, these are to be discussed prospectively and elaborated as a basis for reflective research practice. The methodological format of the BarCamp proposed here will ensure that the global dimensions of future issues are taken into account in the international exchange of Network 32. This workshop, which is aimed at participation, networking, and the international expansion of the network, transforms researchers in organizational education from those affected by uncertainty into participants in its reflexive processing. Reflecting on potentials for further development of organizational education, we might move such discussions forward – interested co-creating groups may wish to contribute to the 10th-anniversary book. Signing in to contribute with a five pager to the book, the reflections will enter into the 10th anniversary book of organizational education. By this, we will support the documentation of the reflections for future research.

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