School Education Gateway selected EDiTE as an example of good practice in this month’s editorial. In her congratulation email, Ismini Georgiadi, Editorial Officer and Webmaster, writes: ‘We are impressed with your project, and thought it is a good fit for this month’s topic, Researching school education.’
On the 9th of October 2019 at 14.00, our EDiTE ESR Vasileios Symeonidis was awarded the “Annerkungspreis der Jury der Landeshauptstadt Innsbruck 2019“ for his doctoral dissertation. The award was given by the Vice-Rector for Research at the University of Innsbruck during a ceremony in which selected participants presented in short their dissertations. The award is provided annually by the municipality of Innsbruck and aims to recognise research projects conducted at the University of Innsbruck. Together with a certificate, the award includes a sum of Euro 500 that can be used for scientific activities. More information about the awarding ceremony can be found here: https://www.uibk.ac.at/newsroom/zum-jubilaeum-verdiente-persoenlichkeiten-geehrt.html.de
European Education Policy Network (EEPN) recently published a Desk research report on ten most relevant European Commission funded projects for teachers’ and school leaders’ more attractive career paths. The focus of the report was the question around making career paths for teachers and school leaders more attractive and in attempt to answer this question the EEPN organised a meeting in Amsterdam in February 2019. The meeting opened up a conversation about diverse topics concerning realities of schools, including health of teachers and school leaders, professional development, social and national demands, and the need for further support. After getting the input from conversations early this year, EEPN conducted a desk research of the Tempus database for projects funded by the European Commission and identified 10 most relevant projects for teachers and school leaders.
Among the top ten, EDiTE appeared as a “first ever transnational doctoral degree for professionals in the field of teacher education” and was commented on the potentials of the project for developing teacher education together with a project called Education for Future – Partnership Development for a joint and sustainable International Master’s Level Programme for Education Professionals.
Being identified as one of the top programmes for school teacher sand leaders is a quite significant recognition and provides a powerful boost for upcoming meeting of EDiTE where the future direction and actions will be discussed. Current and new partners across the continent who are interested in joining the conversation about how EDiTE can grow are going to meet in Amsterdam, 4-6 October, led by Anja Sweden, Vasilis Symeonidis and Michael Schratz.
Read the entire EENP Report here:
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The doctoral defense of Lucie Bucharová (Marie Curie Skłodowska Research Fellow and doctoral researcher within the prestigious EU-funded Horizon 2020 European Doctorate in Teacher Education Program) took part on June 18, 2019. The event was hosted by the University of Lower Silesia and attended by the EDiTE community members from all over the Europe. Members of the Doctoral Committee constituted from professors from ULS and University of Lisbon, where Lucie pursued her doctoral research and study during her mobility phase in Portugal.
The dissertation entitled “Grammars of Schooling in the Post Authoritarian Context. Comparative Study of Changing Teaching Practices in Elementary Education in Czech, Polish and Portuguese Schools”, includes metaphor, which explains, how firmly rooted rules, tradition and bias are in our schools. Through her transnational research, Bucharová presented a phenomenographic analysis of how elementary teachers in this three countries did or did not change their teaching practices in response to the transformation of their culture and society.
Lucie´s dissertation was supervised by Prof. Maria Czerepaniak-Walczak (University of Szczecin), Prof. Maria Jaoa Mogarro (University of Lisbon), and dr. Anna Babicka-Wirkus (Pomeranian University in Słupsk). Her reviewers – Prof. Dorota Gołębniak of the Collegium Da Vinci and António Gomes Ferreira from the University of Coimbra both asked for her dissertation to be awarded with distinction. On the same day, the Scientific Council of the Faculty of Education of ULS awarded doctoral degree and bestowed distinction on Bucharová. As a part of the EDiTE co-tutelle agreement, Dr. Bucharova will also receive a doctoral degree from the University of Lisbon.
The doctoral defence of Monika Rusnak (Self-Funded Researcher within the EDiTE Programme) was held on June 17th in the University of Lower Silesia. Rusnak’s dissertation entitled, Learning to Trust. Teacher Research in Support of Democratic Collaboration among Parents and Teachers, reveals the various dimensions of distrust in education. Her action research conducted with parents, teachers and students offers rich insight into structural, relational and contextual barriers to meaningful educational partnerships. Monika’s dissertation was supervised by Prof. DSW dr hab. Hana Červinková and co-supervised by Prof. Luis Tinoca from the University of Lisbon. Dr hab. Anna Wirkus-Babicka was the auxilary supervisor. The dissertation was reviewed by Prof. dr hab. Maria Czerepaniak-Walczak (University of Szczecin) and Prof. dr hab. Maria Mendel (University of Gdańsk). On June 18, 2019, the Scientific Council of the Faculty of Education of ULS awarded her with doctoral degree and bestowed her with distinction. As an EDiTE researcher, Monika Rusnak also received the European Doctorate in Teacher Education.
Six Myanmar doctoral students of the Faculty of Education and Psychology from Eötvös Loránd University held an event “Myanmar Day” on 16 May, 2019.
The Presenters were five first year PhD students of the international doctoral programme in European Teacher Education and Higher Education research, the continuation of EDiTE at ELTE and the sixth person was an adult education student from the faculty. The event covered such topics as Education in Myanmar including both Basic Education and Higher Education, with special focus on Higher Education and its reform strategy, implementations, current tasks, vocational training and teacher education of Myanmar as well as school university partnership.
Honourable special guests such as professors, directors, associate processors, assistant professors, project managers, teacher educators, senior lecturers, administrators, officers, doctoral students and master students from Eötvös Loránd University, Central European University, Corvinus University Budapest and University of Szeged attended the event.
Professor Gabor, Head and Doctoral School of Education and the Ambassador of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar in Belgrade, Serbia
H E U Myo Aye, the Ambassador of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar from Belgrade, Serbia, also attended “Myanmar Day” and expressed his high appreciation of the event and gave a traditional handmade painting of Myanmar to Dr Gábor Halász, Professor and Head of the Doctoral School of Education from ELTE PPK, showing the significance of educational cooperation between Myanmar and Hungary.
The event received a lot of extremely positive feedbacks from the other honourable guests who were attending the event. The programme clearly demonstrated the impact of EDiTE on internationalizing doctoral education and opening the doctoral school of ELTE and the EDiTE network to Easter Asia.
The third and final European Virtual Joint Seminar 2019 entitled “Career Perspectives of EDiTE Graduates” took place on Thursday, May 16, between 14:00 and 16:00 CEST. It was hosted by the University of Lower Silesia with a technical support from the University of Innsbruck.
During the seminar we were honoured and proud to host Professor Marilyn Cochran-Smith (Boston College, USA) who gave an inspiring lecture entitled “Reflections on Teacher Education: Looking Forward, Looking Back” and shared with us reflections on her career path.
The seminar was offered after graduation of most of the EDiTE Early Stage Researchers and EDiTE Self-Funded Researchers. The focus was on monitoring and supporting the career trajectory of researchers in the scientific community and non‐academic Teacher Education. The event aimed to support summative evaluation of the EDiTE‐EJD programme, taking into account the experiences and personal professional development of graduates thus far.
The aim of the conference was to bring together doctoral researchers from the University of Innsbruck and the University of Lower Silesia to share knowledge and practices in teacher education and school research. Our focus was on spanning the continuum of theoretical, methodological and practical knowledge and competencies of researchers from different contexts in order to develop deeper understanding of the realities and discourses of teacher education and school research in contemporary Europe.
The conference was a collaborative international venture that developed based on the European Doctorate in Teacher Education (EDiTE), a Horizon 2020 multinational EU project. The intention was to build on the established expertise and network and create the opportunity for a larger network of emerging researchers to think and work together in developing their projects in the European dimension. More
Wrocław, Poland, May 13-15, 2019
From April 5-9, 2019 the annual meeting of the largest North American research conference on education, AERA, took place in Toronto under this year’s theme Leveraging Education Research in a ‘Post-Truth’ Era: Multimodal Narratives to Democratize Evidence. EDiTE researcher Josefine Wagner was present and participated in Division K’s conference seminar on Theorizing Teacher Education and Teacher Learningwhich was aimed at teacher educators exploring how theory and practice could be better intertwined when teaching teacher students. Before each session commenced many scholars acknowledged that this conference took place in the lands of indigenous people past and present and that they fought with them for a decolonized future. In a similar vein, EDiTE supervisory board member and vice-president of Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education), Kathy Schultz greeted her listeners when she gave the Vice-Presidential Address, entitled What Kind of Teacher Education Do We Need in These Turbulent Times?She drew on her recently published book on Distrust and Educational Change: Overcoming Barriers to Just and Lasting Reformto suggest five principles that might guide the work of teacher educators: 1) Begin with love and compassion, 2) Recognize teachers and students’ enormous capacities for learning, their dignities and histories, 3) Think queerly, 4) Expand who we count as teacher educators, and 5) Nurture teacher activism.
Another unique experience among many was a moving debate chaired by Alfredo Artilles on Contested Citizenship: Knowledge, Race and Politics within the Educational Context, during which critical education scholars Eve Tuck, Nolan L. Cabrera, Michael Apple, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Zeus Leonardo engaged in questions, such as: What does citizenship mean in the context of public policy seeking to provide narrow and racialized definitions of American citizens? and: What can schools do to challenge the hegemonic practices of citizens making reflected within the current political discourse?
“The purpose of the session was,” as organizer Anthony Brown summarized, “to deconstruct various notions of citizenship as they are taken up through the discourses of national identity, nationality, civil and human rights.”
Furthermore, Division G’s (Social Context of Education) award session was an extraordinary occasion to witness. Nominated by Thea Abu El-Haj, Ariana Mangual Figueroa, and Rosalie Rolon Dow, Pauline Lipman of the University of Illinois at Chicago (The New Political Economy of Urban Education) received the Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education. With kind permission from Prof. Lipman, please enjoy her remarkable acceptance speech that EDiTE scholars should keep in their hearts and minds as they continue on their academic career paths.
“I want to use my couple of minutes to also trouble the idea of research changing the context of education. Or how research might contribute to that. […] I think that we need to approach our task with humility. So I want to reiterate what I think we know which is that scholars engaged in the context of education that that kind of scholarship is powerful when the voices of the researchers are in dialogue with parents, and teachers, and young people, and communities. In which our multiple knowledges, and epistemologies, and standpoints are brought together to try to understand the context of schooling and how we can transform not just schools but the society as a whole. […] What does it mean that we do research that contributes to the transformation of the social context, when in fact it is only through our collective knowledge that we develop that understanding in the first place. Our understanding of the social world and theorizing about it is rooted in social practice, and in particular, I think through participating in community and education struggles for justice. It is in the process of participating in them, through praxis that we come to more deeply understand our social realities.
I think research contributes to the transformation of the social context of education when it is linked to organizing through social movements. We are contributing as researchers when we address the real questions of those who want “to move forward,” as Maisha Winn said, and when we work side by side, together, in ways that are empirically and theoretically useful to struggles for social justice, and in relation to the visions of developing social movements. And sometimes this means moving tables, and cleaning up afterwards, and taking care of children so that other people can speak. It’s social movements that change the world – not research. It is only when research is in collaboration with social movements, when it is taken up by social movements, that we transform our present conditions.
I want to end by situating our work in the present moment. I want to say some of what I said on Friday in our symposium on Neoliberalism, race, and disability. We are in a moment of immense suffering– economic, political, social suffering. But we are also in a moment in which racial neoliberal capitalism is reeling from multiple crises: economic, social, political. Suffering and the crises of the system are in dialectical relationship. The legitimacy of the neoliberal order is in crisis globally. Although it seems hegemonic, it is actually in crisis. I want to draw on Stuart Hall here. Stuart Hall reminds us that although crises are moments of opportunity because they signal a rupture of the existing order, a rupture of the existing social conjuncture, the outcome of a crisis is not guaranteed. They could resolve in various ways. And that’s the moment that we are in. So on one side we have a resurgence of explicit, explicit because it has always been there but is now blatant and overt, white, nationalist, misogynist, pro-fascist right wing politics. And on the other side, and we need to recognize this, we see resistance and resurgence and a surfacing or a foregrounding of new visions from native water protectors, the Movement for Black Lives, teacher strikes that are not only against neoliberal education policies, they are against the gendered crisis of care, the crisis of social reproduction that Nancy Fraser illuminates. We have the immigrant justice movement, feminist and climate justice movements, and more that are challenging hetero-patriarchy and racial capitalism and white supremacy. That’s the moment we are in. And, you know number 45, felt compelled to actually explicitly attack Socialism in his State of the Union address so that’s an indication of that moment and of the possibilities for social transformation.
I want to share an anecdote from Chicago as I end. We just had municipal elections, and there is a lot of talk about the mayoral election, but what you need to know about is the city council election. At the City Council level what happened is that grassroots people who have been on the frontlines, many of them have been fighting for education justice and against racist neoliberal policies, were elected to the City Council of Chicago. If you know anything about Chicago, you know it has a long history of entrenched Democratic Party machine politics controlling every aspect of city government, so this is astounding. One of the newly elected City Council representatives is Jeanette Taylor. Jeanette was a Dyett High School hunger striker. She has been on her local school council for 23 years, she is a mother and a grandmother. She is a grassroots person who rose up because her school was being closed and became a leader in the education movement in Chicago, and she was just elected to the City Council in Chicago. That is actually very, very significant and an indication of the possibilities of the moment that we are in. It is definitely a potent marker of the crisis of legitimacy of the racial neoliberal order in Chicago. So this is a moment to engage in struggles for a different future, for us to play some small role by joining our research with social movements.
I want to close with a question that was posed by scholar-activist Andrea Smith. She asked: “Why should academics be any less responsible for taking part in activist work than florists, garbage collectors and bee keepers?”
Prof. Pauline Lipman
The next AERA annual meetingwill take place in San Francisco from April 17-21, 2020, under the guiding theme: The Power and Possibilities for the Public Good: When Researchers and Organizational Stakeholders Collaborate. The call for submissions starts on May 10, 2019.
The International Conference on Interculturalism and Multiculturalism took place between 28-30 March in Porto, organised by the Polytechnic of Porto (Centre for Intercultural Studies, ISCAP – P. Porto). One of the main themes of the conference was to rethink and move forward the debates in conceptualising interculturalism and multiculturalism, to which EDiTE researcher Nikolett Szelei contributed with perspectives from school research. Her presentation ´What is ´interculturality´ and ´multiculturalism´ in schools? A critical view on school practitioners´ conceptualisations´problematised that in everyday life these terminologies are often used as tools for Othering rather than justice-oriented understandings.
