Annual Report 2016, Dublin
This year 87 proposals from all parts of Europe (including 19 from non-European countries) were submitted to Network 7. The procedure stipulates that each proposal is submitted to a double blind peer-review process with a minimum of two reviewers.
The conference programme comprised all in all 29 sessions and included an interactive poster session and 10 symposium sessions.
The paper sessions had the following topics: Teachers’, students' and parents' perspectives on social justice and intercultural education; Professionalisation, education and diversity; Multilingual education; Democratic citizenship; Social justice, migration and inclusion; Early school leaving in migrational societies; Refugees; Roma; Religious pluralism; Intersectional perspectives on gender.
Network 7 had 5 joint sessions which were organised together with Network 03 „Curriculum Innovation“, Network 23 „Policy Studies and Politics of Education“ and Network 26 „Educational Leadership“: During these sessions highly relevant and current topics were discussed such as “Educational Leadership and teaching Social Justice”, “Education for Citizenship and Social Justice”, “Emerging Paradigms and Practice in Leadership for Social Justice”, “Leading schools into embracing LGBTQ Reality in Curriculum and Practice” and “Compensatory Pathways for Early School Leaving”. We had lively discussions and through these joint sessions we could fasten ties with the networks mentioned above.
The other three symposia complemented the conference programme with focussed discussions on the following topics: “Global teaching: Southern Perspectives on working with diversity”, “Family practices and Orders of Migration” and “Gypsy, Roma, Traveller Education”.
One session was a network meeting.
The sessions of network 7 were very well attended, and provided in general sufficient time for interesting questions and points for discussion.
One of the highlights of network 7 during ECER 2016 was the session „Irish Research on Intercultural Education and Social Justice“, to which Dympna Devine from the University College Dublin had been invited as a lecturer of the host country. Under the objective of relating the audience to the local research community, this session was placed as an evening event on the first day of the conference programme of Network 7. It turned out that this kind of opening session was highly appreciated, mainly for two reasons. On the one hand, it was evident that intercultural research and international comparative research on social justice necessarily would have to take into account the specific national contexts of education. On the other, the high quality of the individual contributions in this session was very convincing and showed both methodological as well as theoretical innovations such as the importance of an intersectional and translocational frame as well as to analyse the inter-generational dynamics of care across home and school. All in all this session was met with strong interest.
Another highlight was the interactive poster session. This format of presentation gave room for a dynamic forum among the presenters and the audience and encouraged discussions and sharing of multiple perspectives. At the beginning the audience members viewed posters and interacted with the authors, similar to a 'traditional' poster session. Subsequently, the link convenor of Network 7, Yvonne Leeman, encouraged the audience and authors to engage in a more informal discussion of the posters and the broader subjects concerned such as political participation, citizenship education, diversity and violence in migrational societies and adequate research approaches.
Last but not least, the emergent researchers’ conference was another highlight of the conference on its whole. Network 7 cooperated with the emerging researchers’ network by participating in the reviewing process and also by the active participation of Eunice Macedo and Francesca Gobbo in some of the sessions.