Annual Report 2004. Crete

The annual conference is the main raison d'etre for the EERA Philosophy of Education Network. We have some contact during the year through the e-mail list, but this is the one occasion when we can meet face to face, formally in the paper sessions and informally in the bars and restaurants and in the excellent early evening social sessions which have become a feature of EERA conferences. So we feel under some pressure to make a success of the programme and to ensure that everyone feels that it is worthwhile.

This is not an easy task, because there are some conflicting demands. We want to be inclusive as possible, not least because some people can only come to the conference if they have had a paper accepted: on the other hand we owe it to our members to ensure that the papers presented are of high quality.
We like to be able to meet all together and to have some sense of an accumulating dialogue: but if we do not allow parallel sessions we shall seriously restrict the number of contributions.

We want to ensure that those attending sessions can understand what is being said: but we are embarrassed by the way the dominance of the English language in our conversations can exclude fellow Europeans for whom this may be their third or fourth language. So, we strike some compromises, and hope to please all of our members for at least some of the time.

One consequence of this has been our movement towards some variation in the format of the sessions in the conference --a mixture of plenary sessions (at the opening of the conference); parallel paper sessions, a roundtable discussion and, this year for the first time, a kind of poster session. In this, six contributors made a short two minute presentation outlining their paper and then occupied spaces around the room where other participants could come and talk to them about their work. This generated quite a buzz of conversation and both presenters and participants expressed their appreciation of the opportunity this type of session provided for some sustained discussion.

A total of 50 papers were presented at the conference this year which had been distributed into 16 partly parallel sessions dedicated to the following topics: On childhood, on learning, moral education, professional ethics, actual trends in theory of education, education and politics, methodological problems in educational research, fundamental issues of educational reflection, didactics and curriculum, education, citizenship and globalisation and transnational perspectives on educational science and sub-disciplines. Apart from these “regular” paper-sessions we continued with our tradition of the last years inviting a colleague from the host country (Prof. Petros Anastasiades / Rethymnon University) for a special opening session dedicated to “The disciplinary role of philosophy-of-education within the Greek educational science of today”.

Traditionally the closing session took place in the form of a “final round- table” dedicated this time to “The ‘grammar’ and the ‘languages’ of education across Europe”; regarding at the conference as a whole this astonishingly well frequented session was in some kind particular because there were no English-speaking colleagues attending (though everybody talked in English). The third special forms were two joint sessions with the History of Education Network and growing out of the discussions of the Leuven Educational Research Community. We hope to arrange more sessions like this in the future trying to engage with some of the other networks on the philosophical dimensions of their own themes and through this to interest a wider range of people in our own discipline. Attendance ranged between about 10-15 participants for some of the smaller parallel sessions to 40-50 for the plenary, bigger and joint sessions.

The philosophers of education enjoy, of course, a reputation for the intellectual seriousness of their contributions to the European educational research community. They are also developing a different reputation for the distinctly unserious nature of their annual dinner at the conference, for which, this year their numbers swelled to nearly seventy. A delightful sea-front venue was the setting for the final stages of the 2004 Olympic Games at which Italy just about pipped Greece for the gold medal in the song contest, notwithstanding the passionate efforts of our Cretan keynote speaker.

We look forward to meeting again in Dublin for further conversation, philosophical and musical