This year for Network 17. Histories of Education has been the first where Geert Thyssen organised the ECER as link convenor. He hopes to continue invigorating, expanding, and strengthening NW17 following on from Iveta Kestere and Helena Ribeiro de Castro, who both did an excellent job, with the latter being awarded honorary membership of the network for her long-time commitment to it.
Some of the highlights of this year's conference were NW17’s targeted contributions to the general ECER 2023 theme overall, to which no doubt NW17’s excellently crafted Special Call for submissions contributed. The number of received submissions again reached that of years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is encouraging. In addition, NW17’s sessions this year alternated traditional, paper-format sessions with panel discussions and symposia. This included well-attended and well-received panel discussions on “History of Education as a Diversified Field of Historiography” and “The World as a Laboratory: The Torsten Husén Research Archive and the Reconstruction of Transnational Research in Education 1950s-1990s” and a perhaps slightly less historically informed discussion panel on “The Reputation and Discussion of Waldorf Education in Academia and the Public”, as well as high quality symposia on “Children Outside the ‘Norm’: ‘Standards’ of Schooling Over Time” and “Contested Identities in Europe – Historical Insights into the Construction of Citizenship Education from the Bottom up”.
Network 17 has meanwhile further improved its conference reviewing process, increasing the chance at continued attraction of high-quality contributions.
The network has furthermore continued to work on a cross.network collaborative book project in the frame of the EERA-supported transdisciplinary Springer book series. Relatdedly, it hopes to submit a collaborative cross-network EERA network funding bid geared at attracting and bringing into dialogue through a workshop cutting edge temporally inflected transdisciplinary scholarship from across a variety of situated areas and contexts and from across the entire career spectrum.
Finally, NW17’s exchange scheme with the U.K. History of Education Society, aimed at encouraging mutual exchange and expansion in a more formalised manner, this year has come into effect and has seen Maria Lucenti being accepted as a candidate willing to act as a bridge between both entities involved in the field of history of education. One of NW17’s convenors has further been elected into the board of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education, with which the network hopes to establish new, stronger ties following the election of a new president of this organisation.