Network Activities

Our main cooperation continues to be the joint work with Network 4 (Inclusive Education) and Network 16 (ICT in Education and Training), which began with the joint special call in 2024 and ran through joint sessions, symposia and a panel discussion. Coordinating sessions across three networks is demanding for everyone involved, and we want to acknowledge the extra effort this asked of the EERA office in programme planning. It worked, and we would do it again — the cross-network format reaches colleagues who would not otherwise find their way into a media education session. 

A quieter but important activity has been building up the reviewer base. With submissions doubling, we have been actively recruiting reviewers and co-convenor candidates through a shared list, which also lets colleagues keep their contact details and affiliations up to date. We encourage participants to register as reviewers not only because we need them, but because reviewing is the most direct route into the network's work: reviewers are invited to the EERA Council reception, and returning reviewers are often asked to chair sessions. 

We also used the year to clarify governance questions with the EERA office, in particular how shadowing years count towards a link convenor's mandate. This mattered for planning our own succession and may be useful to other networks facing the same transition.

Network 6 has established working relationships with Diamond Open Access journals, which means publication without fees for authors or readers. Examples for those venues are seminar.net ([seminar.net](https://www.seminar.net)), or MedienPädagogik: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung ([medienpaed.com](https://www.medienpaed.com)); for work at the intersection with inclusive education we publish alongside the European Journal of Inclusive Education ([tidsskrift.dk/ejie](https://tidsskrift.dk/ejie)). 
We make regular use of these links: after each special call, the authors of papers actually presented at ECER are invited to submit full-text manuscripts. 

This year the joint special call on inclusion, media and education, launched in 2024 together with Network 4 and Network 16, reached its publication stage. The joint sessions were held at ECER 2025, full-text manuscripts have since been submitted, and they are currently under review. The results will appear as a special issue published in parallel in both journals, with MedienPädagogik as the primary venue. 

For the 2026 special call on educational spaces, the call for full-text manuscripts goes out to presenters shortly after the conference, with publication in MedienPädagogik planned for early 2027. 

We have now run this cycle — special call, joint sessions, special issue — several times since 2023, and we have learned that it takes patience: each round spans two to three years from the call to the published issue, with a substantial share of the work falling after the conference. We think it is worth it, because it gives presenters a route from a conference paper to a peer-reviewed article within our own community.

Our most immediate task is the election of co-convenors at ECER 2027 in Debrecen. Four of our eight co-convenor positions are effectively open, as two colleagues have retired and others could not travel, so we are actively looking for candidates and will pay attention to regional and gender balance in the slate we put forward. Candidates must attend the network meeting in person to be elected, and we would warmly encourage anyone considering it to get in touch with us beforehand rather than deciding on the day. 

The handover of the link convenorship will be completed at the same conference. Two pieces of development work follow from this. 

• The first is a revision of the network's description, which we will take on as a defined task for the co-convenors over the coming year. A clearer description should help submissions find the right network. 
• The second is network communication between conferences. This is a genuine open question for us: a mailing list has been proposed repeatedly over the years and declined each time, so we are looking for a format that colleagues will actually welcome. Suggestions are very much invited. 

On the publication side we expect to complete both special issues during the coming year, and we are considering a further special call oriented towards the 2027 conference theme.