Interest in Higher Education continues to grow, and as usual, Network 22 was very fortunate to be able to host a large and exciting programme of approximately 120 papers at this year’s ECER Conference. These included 4 valuable Roundtables and 4 excellent Posters Spain, Portugal and Sweden. Again, as usual, we were pleased to hear and share contributions from a good range of countries, mainly from within Europe but also from a wider international constituency:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Iran, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Rwanda, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, The Netherlands, Turkey and the UK.
The subjects and issues presented on during the Network programme covered a wide scope of HE issues and interests. It is hard to do full justice to the full range and richness offered by the programme in a few sentences.
However, we can list the areas included this year:
- Internationalization and Globalization issues in HE Reform,
- Policy and Change in HE
- Higher Education Management and Governance
- Developing Quality in Higher Education
- Developing Employability, Skills and Competencies in HE
- Widening Participation and Equality Issues
- Technology and E-learning (including a valuable Roundtable on ‘E-Learning in Higher Education: Teaching and Learning Perspectives’ (Spain and Sweden))
- Gender Issues in HE
- Research and ‘Researching’ into Higher Education
- Studies in Transition – moving into and moving out of HE
- Teacher education (and Children’s services) in HE
In addition, there were a large number of interesting papers on students’ teaching and learning issues.
For example: assessment, motivation, identity, peer- learning, problem-based learning, pedagogy/methodology, changing curricula, supervision practices, the research/teaching relationship, civic engagement, student language diversity, student reflection and writing, etc, etc.
We welcomed an increased number of papers on ‘Student Inclusion and Student Well-Being’, and the area of ‘Academic Development and Academic Careers and Identity’ had a particularly high profile this year. In fact, the increase and the significance of academic development for university staff was one of the key themes in the programme.
There were many papers and two Roundtables presented on this theme. The paper ‘Becoming Scholars: Inside Professional Biographies’ presented by the University Barcelona, Spain was particularly fascinating and proved to be extremely popular. In addition to the individual papers, the two Roundtables ‘Developing quality in Higher Education: The Role, Significance and Impact of Academic Development Programmes’ (differing perspectives from Estonia, Sweden and the UK) and ‘Pathways into Academia: early career Development in Higher Education in a Comparative Perspective’ (from Germany and the UK) presented for discussion early research on many dimensions of this increasingly significant issue.
We look forward to more research on this at future conferences. And finally, it was good to welcome (again) a Roundtable on ‘Tuning Educational Structures in Europe – Education Services’ at the beginning of the programme. The long-term and wide-ranging project ‘Tuning Educational Structures in Europe’ focuses on the Bologna – Prague - Berlin- Bergen process, and links the political objectives set in the Bologna Declaration of 1999 to the higher education sector. Various members of the Tuning Project have presented at the Conference over the last few years, and it was valuable to hear about and discuss final phase of this project As in previous years, we would like to thank the people who Chaired the sessions so well. In addition to the Chairing done by the Network Convenors, thank you very much Julie Anderson, Graham Badley, Josephine Boland, Lars Gunnersson Chris Kubiak, Coral Pepper, Juana Sancho, Christine Teelken, Rodolf Tippelt, and Mary Thornton.