Annual Report 2010, Helsinki

Proposals and accepted papers
This year we received 63 proposals – symposia, individual papers and posters. The reviewing process resulted in 42 papers (compared to last years 34) – an acceptance rate of 67 per cent. Of these applications 4 were papers organised as a symposium, 3 were posters and 38 were individual papers organised in 13 sessions of which 4 were parallel sessions. For the first time since 1997 the Net 14 convenor group was split attending parallel sessions. Despite this we tried to stick to our commitment from the start of Net 14 in 1997: the presenters not only present but also get critical comments and questions from the convenors of the network.

Presentations covered widely the main interest areas of network 14, which are:

• Schooling in rural and urban settings. Place based education – the community active school and environmental sustainability, 5 papers and 1 poster
• School related transitions within a life course perspective (between home and school, phases of school or school and community/ adult life), 4 papers
• Family education and parenting – cultural, technological and multicultural aspects of school, family community partnerships, 31 papers, 2 posters
• Policies and actions related to co-operation and dialogue among social actors to promote home-school-community links. 2 papers
• Methodological issues or innovations in how to study transitions, community-school relationships or family education in changed regional, societal or pedagogical situations is included in many papers (see Symposium NW14 SES11) and is commented upon across sessions – for example NW14 SES06C.

Pattern

As a whole within these themes international perspectives were actively reflected. The overview shows that we have an imbalance in the number of papers distributed between the subthemes.

Network descriptors

Three years ago we re-designed our network description. It may be, however, that the rural-urban dimension of schooling has been insufficiently visible, thus explaining the low number of papers on these subthemes. This is supported by the fact that small school themes were addressed in both Network 19 Ethnography, (see SES07A) and Network 26 School leadership, (See SES 11B). From a globalisation perspective it is important to keep track of and compare research on the local level in European countries. Two of the Net 14 convenors (Linda Hargreaves and Pedro Silva) have reviewed our network description (see the EERA/ECER web pages for Network 14) and our subthemes. They suggest that we stick to the description as it is now. We also keep the subthemes as they were formulated last year:

The subthemes were as follows:

1. Schooling in rural and urban settings.
2. Place based education – the community active school and environmental sustainability.
3. School related transitions within a life course perspective (between home and school, phases of school or school and community/ adult life)
4. Family education and parenting – cultural, technological and multicultural aspects of school, family community partnerships.
5. Policies and actions related to co-operation and dialogue among social actors to promote home-school-community links.

Joint network activities
Research on rural education and the international perspective of place-based education has been a longstanding objective and theme of Net 14. Despite this, and as noted above, two sessions on this theme were submitted to, and accepted by, other networks, possibly consequence of the changes to our network description. Perhaps the rural-urban dimension should be more explicitly described and balanced compared to the family-school dimension. The problem is that even if we would want to organise these sessions as joint activities we come to know the program details too late to turn such sessions into joint ones. Is there a solution to this challenge with which the EERA secretariat could help us? We had a short discussion with convenors of the Ethnography network (19) during ECER in Helsinki on joint activities and concluded that we will discuss announcement of a joint session for ECER Berlin – for example a session on rural or small school education. A second alternative discussed was to edit a joint special issue of an international journal.  We concluded that this would be too complicated as a first joint activity. A joint session would be more realistic if it is possible to organise.