Network 10 received 65 proposals for the ECER conference in Hamburg of which 44 were accepted as meeting the criteria published on the website.
We said last year that for 2003 we would put our energies into improving the quality of the conference. With this in mind the Network convenors, Professor Pat Mahony (University of Surrey Roehampton) and Dr Petra Ponte (University of Leiden) met in Amsterdam for a day to organise the programme.
Our plan was perfection in terms of elegance and coherence! Unfortunately, it collapsed somewhat because a few papers had to be moved into sessions when the presenters were available. However, the feedback we got suggests that the overall programme was improved, with papers of high quality that did (more or less) fit together.
Our plans to establish a stable membership for the network were partly achieved and some good conversations were carried over from Lisbon to Hamburg. However, difficulties in funding meant that some people could not come to the conference in 2003. Also the large number of excellent proposals from people submitting to Network 10 for the first time, meant that there were many new faces.
This has led us to conclude that we should continue to put our energies into trying to make a good conference and accept that Network 10 is a loose and maybe temporary association of people interested in Teacher Education Research.
As we undertook to do last year, we considered the benefits and disadvantages of defining the concluding session of the Network programme as a one where we would review the papers presented, draw out the themes discussed and present an overview of the emerging research agenda for teacher education in Europe. In the event we decided against this – there were too many good papers to fit in and problems of timetabling would have prevented people from attending.
We look forward to Crete.
Pat Mahony and Petra Ponte
