Conference Agenda

The roundtable is part of the initiatives for the 30th Anniversary of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) and aims to provide Emerging Researchers with information and tools useful for navigating the dynamic landscape of educational research. The roundtable will spotlight inspiring success stories of researchers who have navigated challenges and carved their paths in the field of educational research. Thanks to the sharing of the experiences of accomplished members of EERA, the session aims to foster community, collaboration, and enthusiasm among the future/next generation of scholars dedicated to advancing education.

Emerging researchers will be engaged and empowered at this participative discussion, exploring key themes such as the importance of effective networking, the advantages of joining international associations, and the art of conducting research. Specifically, previous ERG Convenors will share their perspectives and provide insights into their experiences.

During the session, Emerging Researchers will be offered practical tips and strategies to enhance the quality and impact of their research. The discussion will focus on how networking can facilitate collaborative projects, and interdisciplinary research, thus shaping successful careers in research.

Moreover, the advantages and opportunities associated with being a member of an international association, i.e., EERA, will be discussed.

To ensure an interactive and dynamic session, space will be allocated for audience participation, allowing attendees to pose questions, share their experiences, and engage in fruitful discussions with experienced researchers. The current ERG Link Convenor and Co-Convenors will ignite the dialogue and actively facilitate the exchange, creating an inclusive environment.

The talk involves three sections. We first summarize psychological, brain, and genetic research about the architecture of the mind, specifying the fundamental processes enabling understanding, problem-solving, and decision-making. We then summarize research on the development of the human mind, from infancy through early adulthood. We show that development advances through a several levels of mastering control of the person’s interactions with the world, going from interaction control in infancy to executive and representational control in preschool, to inferential and resource management control in primary school to truth control and life options control in adolescence. In the second section we outline the educational implications of this model. We show how each level of control frames what can and what cannot be learned at each school level, from preschool to university. We then point to weaknesses in European education caused by divergences between this knowledge and dominant educational practices coming from the past, taking examples from current curricula. The third section discusses deep societal and political changes taking place in our times and focuses on changes in tools delivering knowledge, enabling evaluation of information, and problem solving, such as search engines, data bases, and artificial intelligence. We then discuss how these possibilities may be used from preschool through adulthood. Examples are given for student evaluation, empowering problem-solving and decision making, and dealing with learning difficulties. We discuss why our schools, trapped in the world of the early 20^th century, cannot cope with the knowledge emerging in the mind sciences or the technological advances in knowledge and knowledge handling. Finally, we suggest changes needed in education to educate the citizens of the second half of the 21st century. We can have hope for the future only if we allow the future to shape our present.

The thematic description of this forthcoming ECER conference emphasizes the responsiveness of educational research to societal change and turbulent times across the world. We are invited to acknowledge epochal “challenges and uncertainties” and to rethink prospects for a future of better promise and hope. We are summoned to understand ourselves as inhabitants of a new age. The theme of this conference sets the “age of uncertainty” as the ultimate context of educational theory and practice. This reflects a broader tendency of educational studies in our times to use temporal metaphors that predicate our circumstances as exceptional: “critical times”, “pandemic age”, “precarious times”, “times of shipwreck”, “years of upheaval”, etc. However, most educational research employs such metaphors without exploring the politics of doing so. Lack of meta-theoretical, self-reflective attention to the operations of “the age of uncertainty” rhetoric reproduces the use of this metaphor as a stopgap, a cliché, or a modish slogan with possibly pernicious political effects. This keynote lecture aims to retrieve the neglected educational-philosophical task of disclosing the ambiguous politics of the “age of uncertainty” metaphor. More awareness of, or vigilance about, such politics is needed for: giving historical memory its due; noticing deeper connections of education with diverse causalities of adversities related to “our current realities”; and avoiding some risks that accompany the uncritical overuse of “crisis” and “uncertainty” epochal metaphors.

Teaching has always been considered a crucial aspect of the quality of school and students’ academic achievements. As the grammar of schooling and its forms are increasing in complexity, substantial restructuring of the work of teachers is required. Teaching is a dynamic and partly unpredictable work, but its dynamism has accelerated. New educational reforms, the need to expand the work outside the classroom, and the heterogeneity of the demands on teachers translate into a new working landscape.

While teaching is usually described as human-to-human interaction, the success of generative artificial intelligence has provoked a new impulse to accelerate further changes to the profession. The release of ChatGPT in 2022 by Open AI has led to the prediction of a new disruption in education in which teaching and learning are destined to be profoundly reconfigured. ChaptGPT has shown a capacity to generate human text-like by drawing on Large Language Models, such that may mean the instigation of new scenarios for teaching, testing and education more widely. While for some AI is destined to change education profoundly, others raise concerns about the risks of an uncritical acceptance of this tendency.

By focusing on these current transformations, this Moot intends to provoke a debate among educational scholars on these new frontiers of change in teaching as a profession. After an introduction to the theme, the Moot will invite participants to address the following questions:

1. Do we need to reconsider the teaching profession as a balance between data, technologies (including many forms of artificial intelligence), and the body in teaching?
2. Is this new orchestration destined to fail? In other words, are we witnessing an inevitable standardisation and automation of teaching, and there is little to do except slow down or contrast it? Or are we merely being technophobes, resistant to technological advances that are inevitable and may disrupt education in positive ways?