In the Hamburg conference we had 33 paper presentations distributed on 12 sessions. One session were run jointly with the Higher Education Network. We also had two sessions with invited lectures as well as one round table discussion. The sessions were categorised into different themes, the major one being the notion of Bildung, related to the German location of the conference. Other themes were Education for citizenship and Globalisation. Four sessions were devoted to the theme of Bildung, including one of the invited lectures. The other invited lecture dealt with the position of philosophy of education in Germany, especially its relations to other educational fields of research. Both of the invited lectures were highly appreciated.
We hope to be able to continue inviting speakers from the country hosting the conference, in order to have their views on 1) the position of philosophy of education in their country, and 2) some particular idea or concept that has developed within that country’s educational thinking, policy or practice. The round table discussion was a rather well visited session on the possibility of constructing cultural educational paradigms, introduced by one of the convenors. This theme was a development of our previous attempts to explore the different “languages of education” within the European community, as well as our possibility to overcome such differences and establish a common understanding of terms and concepts.
Apart from the conference the network’s activities during the year consisted mostly in email-communications with information on new books, other conferences etcetera. The email-list has presently around 200 members. If you are interested in joining the list, please write to <link>d.bridges@uea.ac.uk. The network welcomes anyone interested in the philosophical aspects of educational research and practice, including people dealing with empirical research.
