23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Paper
Politics of Time in Higher Education: An Example of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System
Jarkko Impola
University of Oulu, Finland
Presenting Author: Impola, Jarkko
In late-modern societies, haste seems to have become a defining feature of people's lives. We regulate our activities and use of time from waking up to going to bed according to clocks. In economic terms, time is a resource that we allocate to commodities (De Serpa, 1971), and according to the principle of economic optimisation, a rational individual is expected to maximise his utility for a given unit of time.
Closely linked to this phenomenon are two social processes central to the late modern era, namely acceleration processes and colonization of the future. By acceleration, Hartmut Rosa (2013) refers to the increased tempo of social life that emerges from the self-feeding cycle of technological and social acceleration, as well as the acceleration of the pace of life. On the other hand, Barbara Adam and Chris Groves (2007) describe colonisation of the future as the way in which we increasingly seek to control the future from the present by subordinating it to our current needs and wants.
This study explores the problems of time in higher education theory, policy and practice, in particular from the perspective of the aforementioned processes. Acceleration processes have proven to be relevant in the context of education (Gibbs et al., 2014), with universities racing against the clock and each other to produce more research, degrees and other key performance outputs within increasingly tight timeframes. This materializes in increased time pressures as experienced by both higher education employees (Berg & Seeber, 2016) and students (Mahon, 2021). The value and processual uncertainty of academic work and learning seems to be reduced to the fastest possible realisation of the productivity and utility dreams we have invested in the future for the benefit of the present.
These temporal challenges of higher education have many symptomatic consequences for late-modern societies. Firstly, the need to achieve more in less time can endorse corrupted working cultures and damage academic virtues (Kidd, 2023). Moreover, they place higher education students in an unequal position in relation to the completion of their studies, considering their diverse backgrounds and life circumstances (Bennett & Burke, 2018). Solutions to these problems have been proposed through a critical deconstruction and redefinition of the Western linear conception of time (i.e., Bennett & Burke, 2018) and also through temporal resistance movements, like slow scholarship (Berg & Seeber, 2016; Mountz et al., 2015) and slow education (Wear et al., 2015), which emphasise the sufficient allocation of time for academic activities.
In the context of the current presentation, the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) is investigated as an important case example of educational policy instruments with accelerative tendencies. Being the main academic credit system of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), ECTS credits tie the achievement of learning outcomes to a certain amount of study time spent, and thus serve as a key instrument for educational acceleration (Sarauw, 2023). As such, credits represent a time-based learning currency that strictly links the workload of studying and successful learning to the time spent studying. In relation to this setting, the current research project specifically addresses two questions: 1) What is the role of time in education in relation to the contemporary time pressures of higher education, and 2) what the contribution of academic credit systems like the ECTS to these temporal challenges is. The project involves both theoretical research and an empirical phase. The current presentation concerns the matter mainly from the perspectives of educational and time theory.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe first phase of this project focused on the relationship of a linear time conception to time pressures in higher education and to education as an activity (Impola, 2023). Drawing on both philosophy of time and education, the main argument was that, although education is by nature an uncertain and open activity, it nevertheless takes place in a linear-temporal framework: In education we are oriented towards some future aims in terms of growth and learning, the possibility of which is built on past experiences and can only be realised through goal-oriented action in the present. Instead of alternative, nonlinear theorisations of time, this project outlines ways to alleviate the speeding-up tendencies of contemporary higher education systems by development of such temporal structures for education that enable finding a suitable pace for studies in respect to this linear framework. This could be achieved for example by rethinking and developing more reasonable and equitable workload determination practices in higher education.
In respect to this framework, ECTS plays a key role, because it is based on the idea of estimating the time-based workload of studies in the degree plans. Officially, one ECTS credit corresponds to 25-30 hours and 60 credits to 1500-1800 hours of student work per year (European Commission, 2015; Wagenaar, 2019). In the second phase of this project this rationale is deconstructed to point out both practical and theoretical challenges that are present in ECTS. The practical challenges stem from the difficulty of measuring students' time uses across different life situations and education contexts uniformly, especially as students' real study time does not directly correspond to the study time as estimated in ECTS (Souto-Iglesias & Baeza Romero, 2018). Moreover, time spent studying and students’ perceived workload are different things, and they affect academic performance differently (Barbosa et al., 2018). These challenges contribute also to theory-level problems, which relate to the nature of ECTS as an academic currency that defines a time-based value for studies. This study demonstrates some key problems related to this analogy, which have to do especially with the highly context-specific regulation practices of the value of this key educational currency of EHEA. The diversity of higher education programs is not only difficult to be coherently represented by a single temporal formula, but different educational-political motives can also encourage differing regulatory strategies, like overloading the credits to preserve educational excellence or underloading them to promote faster credit accumulation.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsIf successful, this research can present ways to navigate the time pressures of globalizing educational marketplace, which stem from both acceleration processes and the desires to realise our future-oriented needs in the present. In contrast to the late-modern social scientific criticism, the current project operates from the viewpoint that these strategies do not necessarily have to involve total deconstruction and reformulation of the linear time consciousness which seems to be the basis of nearly all socially coordinated processes of the late-modern societies (Impola, 2023). Instead, we should be able to embrace the slowness, uncertainty and risk present in education (Biesta, 2015) and learn to find an appropriate rhythm for education, which means sufficient speed and slowing down at each moment, rather than overprioritizing either over the other (Kidd, 2023; Wear et al., 2015).
At the level of educational policy, we need to rethink our practices on credit systems such as ECTS. To this end, the research project has produced a new model of student workload, which is divided into externally determined and student’s internal experience of workload and the factors that influence these (Publication under review). The model allows us to better understand the tensions between the estimated and actual student workloads and to relate them appropriately to each other. One of the main implications of the model is that it clarifies the role of ECTS as a supportive educational planning tool for course and curriculum design work, instead of a becoming a temporal-normative framework for judging progression in studies. At best, credits can be used to design degrees with relatively evenly distributed workloads that ensure that students have sufficient time to complete their studies, while student’s experience of workload and learning are each measured according to their own suitable measures, instead of credit accumulation being used as their proxy.
ReferencesAdam, B., & Groves, C. (2007). Future matters: Action, knowledge, ethics (Vol. 3). Brill.
Barbosa, J., Silva, Á., Ferreira, M. A., & Severo, M. (2018). Do reciprocal relationships between academic workload and self-regulated learning predict medical freshmen’s achievement? A longitudinal study on the educational transition from secondary school to medical school. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 23, 733-748. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-018-9825-2
Bennett, A., & Burke, P. J. (2018). Re/conceptualising time and temporality: an exploration of time in higher education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39(6), 913-925. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2017.1312285
Berg, M., & Seeber, B. K. (2016). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy. University of Toronto Press.
Biesta, G. J. (2015). Beautiful risk of education. Routledge.
DeSerpa, A. C. (1971). A theory of the economics of time. The economic journal, 81(324), 828-846. https://doi.org/10.2307/2230320
European Commission, Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, (2015). ECTS users' guide 2015, Publications Office of the European Union. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2766/87192
Gibbs, P., Ylijoki, O. H., Guzmán-Valenzuela, C., & Barnett, R. (Eds.). (2014). Universities in the flux of time: An exploration of time and temporality in university life. Routledge.
Impola, J. T. (2023). Reconsidering Newtonian Temporality in the Context of Time Pressures of Higher Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-023-09879-3
Kidd, I. J. (2023). Corrupted temporalities,‘cultures of speed’, and the possibility of collegiality. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55(3), 330-342. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.2017883
Mahon, Á. (2021). Towards a Higher Education: Contemplation, Compassion, and the Ethics of Slowing Down. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(5), 448-458. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2019.1683826
Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-Roberts, M., ... & Curran, W. (2015). For slow scholarship: A feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(4), 1235-1259. Retrieved 30.1.2024 from https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058
Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity. Columbia University Press.
Sarauw, L. L. (2023). Time Matters in Higher Education: How the ECTS Changes Ideas of Desired Student Conduct. Higher Education Policy, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-023-00302-7
Souto-Iglesias, A., & Baeza_Romero, M. T. (2018). A probabilistic approach to student workload: empirical distributions and ECTS. Higher Education, 76(6), 1007-1025. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0244-3
Wagenaar, R. (2019). A History of ECTS, 1989-2019: Developing a World Standard for Credit Transfer and Accumulation in Higher Education. Retrieved 30.1.2024 from https://hdl.handle.net/11370/f7d5a0e2-3218-4c66-b11d-b4d106c039c5
Wear, D., Zarconi, J., Kumagai, A., & Cole-Kelly, K. (2015). Slow medical education. Academic Medicine, 90(3), 289-293. DOI: 10.1097/ACM.0000000000000581
23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Paper
The Contemporary Revival of Social Democracy: Was Danish Education Policy Ever Neoliberal?
Miriam Madsen1, Ronni Laursen2
1Danish School of Education, Aarhus University; 2Aalborg University, Denmark
Presenting Author: Madsen, Miriam;
Laursen, Ronni
Over the previous decades, education policy research has built up a narrative of the proliferation of neoliberalism across most parts of the world (Cannella & Koro-Ljungberg, 2017; Krejsler & Moos, 2021; Marginson, 2006; Mintz, 2021). The narrative has gained so much strength that neoliberalism is often referred to as a self-evident phenomenon. However, in the process, neoliberalism as an ideological category sometimes appear to have become more an obstacle than an analytically fruitful category. In some cases, it is unclear how the concept of neoliberalism is defined, and in particular how it is delineated from other categories. In other cases, the strong narrative implies blind spots concerning empirical changes that cannot be sufficiently described with the category of neoliberalism.
In this paper, we ask whether this narrative holds: To what extend is education policy across the Western world distinctively neoliberal? We approach this question by presenting three separate cases of contemporary education policy from Denmark, ranging from primary and lower secondary school to upper secondary school and higher education, thus encompassing the most central educational institutions in the Danish context. We analyze the three policies in terms of the policy ideologies embedded in them by drawing on various conceptualizations of neoliberalism and social democracy. Based on our analysis, we raise a discussion of whether Danish education policy is neoliberal after all.
By asking this question, we open up two alternatives to the narrative of the spread proliferation of neoliberalism. The first alternative is that neoliberalism never spread as widely and deeply as education policy research has indicated, thus implying that education policy research has drawn stronger conclusions of neoliberalism in policy than what the empirical reality warrants. This alternative could be enforced by the conflation of neoliberalism and New Public Management, as empirical signs of the latter are also often interpreted as signs of the spread of neoliberalism, and much more widespread. The second alternative is that neoliberalism has spread, but is currently diminishing, thus implying that neoliberalism has proven itself more fragile than previously assumed. This alternative stresses the need for a renewed policy research that explores whether this trend is more widespread than what can be concluded based on our study. We use these discussions to raise a research agenda of analyzing policy ideologies in contemporary education policy in contextually sensitive ways.
In the paper, we outline the policy ideologies through which we analyze our cases of contemporary education policy, including a conceptualization of social democracy as a theory of justice (Platz, 2022), as well as three conceptualizations of neoliberalism, encompassing a governmentality conceptualization (Ball & Grimaldi, 2021; Foucault, 2009; Rose, 1999), a Marxist conceptualization (Harvey, 2011), and a conceptualization based on intellectual streams (Cahill & Konings, 2017). We juggle these three conceptualizations alongside each other in our analysis in order to accommodate the diversity in understandings of neoliberalism characterizing previous policy analysis. With our inclusion of three policy cases, we aim to study indications of cross-cutting trends rather than analyzing each policy in depth on its own terms. After the analysis, we discuss the shared trends across the three policies and their implications for education policy research.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Usedmethodology of reading and categorizing case examples of policies through these concepts. The Theory of justice concept of social democracy (Platz, 2022) entails that we categorize policy elements as social democratic if they promote an equal distribution of both rights and work. The Foucauldian concept of neoliberalism (Foucault, 2009; Rose, 1999) entails that we categorize policy elements as neoliberal if they encourage a competitive or entrepreneurial self of the governed subjects. The Marxist concept of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2011) entails that we categorize policy elements as neoliberal if they produce inequality (or maintain existing inequalities) in society. The Intellectual streams concept of neoliberalism (Cahill & Konings, 2017) entails that we categorize policy elements as neoliberal if they promote a minimization of the state and markets as a dominant organizational principle of society.
In our analysis, we are cautious not to interpret empirical signs of ‘new public management’ instruments and/or human capital thinking as signs of neoliberalism per se. While some of the principles behind new public management overlap with intellectual streams found in neoliberalism (for example the promotion of market-type mechanisms) as well as subjectivizing discourses, others cannot be ascribed neoliberal thinking per se. Furthermore, we argue against the idea that the commodification and capitalization of education captured in the term ‘human capital’ necessarily is neoliberal. We can merely look back in time to when national governments first and foremost prioritized a general increase in the educational level of their populations (Henry et al., 2001: 99) to see how human capital theory has not always been about commodification and individualization, but instead has been configured as a highly collective effort to strengthen the nation in a geopolitical race related to security (Bürgi & Tröhler, 2018). Human capital can thus both be adapted to neoliberal and social democratic ideologies (and probably many more).
The policy cases selected for analysis represent three different sectors of the Danish education system: Primary school, upper secondary school, and higher education. The cases were selected to display different aspects of the social democratic ideology currently permeating Danish education policy. The policies all represent recent policies, proposed between 2021 and 2023. They represent a combination of policy proposals made by the government and adopted policies.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe three policies are mainly shaped by social democratic influences, including: a desire for social, occupational, and geographical equality; a glorification of vocational work; an approach to the distribution of students in educational tracks as a collective state issue; corrections of the market mechanisms; and a centralized economic engineering aimed at adjusting higher education provision in line with the needs of society. The social democratic influences are however complemented by traces of neoliberalism, such as a liberation of schools from state regulation and the promotion of private actors in the public school system.
The analysis thus underscores that neoliberal elements, such as allowing private operators to play a role in schools, are incorporated into the system, but within the constraints of not conflicting with overarching social democratic values. Importantly, schools are viewed as crucial institutions for fulfilling state objectives, prioritizing economic regulation, promoting a vocational labor ethos, cultivating social justice, and addressing inequality over market-driven dynamics and potential disparities.
ReferencesBall, S. J., & Grimaldi, E. (2021). Neoliberal education and the neoliberal digital classroom. Learning, Media and Technology, , 1-15. 10.1080/17439884.2021.1963980
Bürgi, R., & Tröhler, D. (2018). Producing the 'Right Kind of People'. The OECD Education Indicators in the 1960s. In S. Lindblad, D. Pettersson, & T. S. Popkewitz (Eds.), Education by the Numbers and the Making of Society: the expertise of international assessments (pp. 75-91). Routledge.
Cahill, D., & Konings, M. (2017). Neoliberalism. Polity.
Cannella, G. S., & Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2017). Neoliberalism in Higher Education: Can We Understand? Can We Resist and Survive? Can We Become Without Neoliberalism? Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, 17(3), 155-162. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708617706117
Foucault, M. (2009). Biopolitikkens fødsel : forelæsninger på Collège De France, 1978-1979 (1. udgave. ed.). Hans Reitzel.
Harvey, D. (2011). A brief history of neoliberalism (Reprint. ed.). Oxford University Press.
Henry, M., Lingard, B., Rizvi, F., & Taylor, S. (2001). The OECD, globalisation and education policy. IAU.
Krejsler, J. B., & Moos, L. (2021). Danish – and Nordic – School Policy: Its Anglo-American Connections and Influences. Springer International Publishing. 10.1007/978-3-030-66629-3_7
Marginson, S. (2006). Dynamics of national and global competition in higher education. Higher Education, 52(1), 1-39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-004-7649-x
Mintz, B. (2021). Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology. The American journal of economics and sociology, 80(1), 79-112. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12370
Platz, J. v. (2022). Social Democracy. In C. M. Melenovsky (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (pp. 300-313). Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367808983-29
Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom : reframing political thought. Cambridge University Press.
23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Paper
From Qualifications To Skills In European VET Policy
Isabelle Le Mouillour
BIBB, Germany
Presenting Author: Le Mouillour, Isabelle
For many decades the vocational education and training sector has profoundly evolved. Research-based scenarios on its past and further development oscilliate its anchoring between educational system and labour market and requirements(Cedefop 2023; Mottweiler; Le Mouillour, Annen 2022). At the crossroads of both perspectives lie qualifications and skills. Individual learning paths and professional careers are less and less linear, and digital, energy and environmental transformations are calling for greater efforts in terms of training and its flexibility. Those arguments and furthermore are mirrored in the European VET policy. The increase in the number of decisions and agreements reached at European level since the Treaty of Rome and the development of European instruments for vocational education and training (European Qualifications Framework, ESCO classification, recommendation on micro-certifications, to name but three) are all signs of change.
This on-going research work sets out to trace how European decisions, recommendations and declarations have shaped the understanding of qualifications at European level, to the point of making them an almost marginal element in favour of a European discourse moving from competences to skills. The European discourse on qualifications has shifted over the course of European programmes, European agendas (Education and Training 2010, Education and Training 2020, Education and Training 2030) and recommendations from the sphere of governance by the national or regional competent authorities to the individualisation and flexibilisation of pathways, methods of acquiring skills and qualifications. At the level of Member States their initiating power illustrated with the declarations issued during the respective Council Presidency testifies the shif: While lifelong learning in the Copenhagen Declaration (2002) was focusing on the removal of systemic barriers in the vocational education and training systems of the Member States. The Bruges Communiqué (2010) calls for the learners to be able to transfer their learning outcomes (and no longer their qualifications). The 2020 Osnabrück Declaration focuses on individuals and organisations. The European strategic frame set up with the Barcelona European Council, back in 2002, also acknowledges the shift and pushes it further. The 2009 strategic framework for European cooperation in education and Training (council 2009) focuses on qualifications, meanwhile the newest strategic framework for European cooperation in VET « Education and Training 2030 » (council 2021) barely mentions qualifications, employability and personal development are at the forefront of the European agenda. It therefore seems legitimate to open up the debate on the issues associated with qualifications and skills, an aspect that has so far received very little attention.
Using a discursive institutionalism approach (Schmidt 2010) as an analysis frame, the paper traces and identifies the evolution of ideas and discourses at the macro-policy level of the European level. It examines how the discourse has shifted from qualifications to skills and which challenges are arising. The challenges will be further analysed and exemplified in the context of two systems of vocational education and training (Germany, France) and their policy in-take of the European initiative on micro-credentials. Both systems are enshrined in different traditions in terms of governance and understanding of education and training (Rözer/van de Werfhorst 2020; Pilz 2016; Möbius/Verdier 1997).
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedMethodologically, this paper is based on two different methods of analysis: firstly, a document analyses of documents published by the European Commission, the Council and the European agency for VET (decisions, resolutions, communications, recommendations) which form the macro-policy framework and those defining the instruments. Secondly, documents by national VET stakeholders issued either during European consultation processes or issued as opinion are evaluated.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe lifelong learning approach is not new to the discourse on VET, but it is undergoing a revival in the European context, particularly to meet the challenges of digital, technological and environmental change. VET is thus faced with expectations in terms of ambivalent functionality between flexibility and stability, qualifications between legitimacy and legibility. Since the 1970s, education policies and, by the same token, vocational training have been seen as an instrument of economic development at both national and European level, if we recall the Lisbon Declaration (2000). It would seem, then, that qualifications linked to regulated professions appear to be anachronistic in a new world in constant need of adaptation. Private certification providers, particularly in CVET, would be able to offer alternative, often digital, qualifications that meet immediate economic needs. The European discourse has moved on from the transparency of qualifications, to the transparency of learning outcomes, to the transparency of competences and, more recently, to the transparency of skills, to a degree of disaggregation that seems difficult to reconcile with the functions of qualifications.
It may seem surprising that the European Union refer to the learning outcomes approach while overlooking the concept of qualifications. This might be explained partly by the legal limitations on the European Union's action in the field of vocational training and partly by the regulatory nature of qualifications. Until now, education and training systems, as well as their content and adjustment, have remained under the authority of national states. However, collective decisions taken at European level are becoming increasingly important. A new aspect completes this picture. The range of training courses on offer is being digitised, and instruments such as ESCO, Europass and micro-certifications are being driven by the need to be interoperable and digital.
ReferencesCEDEFOP (2023): The future of vocational education and training in Europe: synthesis report. Luxembourg.
Brockmann, M.; Clarke, L.; Winch, C. (Hg.) (2011): Knowledge, skills and competence in the European Labour Market. London: Routledge.
Council (2021): Council Resolution on a strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training towards the European Education Area and beyond (2021-2030). ET 2021-2030, C 66/1 - C 66/21
Council (2009): Council conclusions of 12 May 2009 on a strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training (‘ET 2020’). ET 2020. In: Official Journal of the European Union, C 119/2 - C 119/10
Council (2022): Council Recommendation of 16 June 2022 on a European approach to micro-credentials for lifelong learning and employability. In: Official Journal of the European Union, C 243/10 - C 243/25
Möbius, M.; Verdier, E. (1997): La construction des diplômes professionnels en Allemagne et en France: des dispositifs institutionnels de coordination. In: Martine Möbius und Eric Verdier (Hg.): Les diplômes professionnels en Allemagne et en France. Conception et jeux d'acteurs. Paris: L'Harmattan, S. 277–304.
Mottweiler, H.; Le Mouillour, I.; Annen, S. (2022): New forms of European VET governance in the interplay between the European Labour Market and VET Policy? A governance analysis of the EU-ropean taxonomy of skills, competences, qualifications and occupations (ESCO). In: Nägele, C.; Kersh, N.; Stalder, B. E. (Hrsg.): Trends in vocational education and training research, Vol. V. Proceedings of the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER), Vocational Education and Training Network (VETNET), S. 121-132
Pilz, M. (2016): Typologies in Comparative Vocational Education: Existing Models and a New Approach. In: Vocations and Learning 9, S. 295-314
Schmidt, V. A. (2010): Taking ideas and discourse seriously: explain change through discursive institutionalism as the fourth ‘new institutionalism’. In: European Political Science Review (2), S. 1–25.
Rözer, J.; Van de Werfhorst, H. G.: Three Worlds of Vocational Education: Specialized and General Craftsmanship in France, Germany, and The Netherlands. In: European Sociological Review 36 (2020) 5, S. 780-797
23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Paper
Organising a European Educational Research Area by Research Conversations: Research Fronts and Intellectual Traditions in the European Educational Research Journal.
Sverker Lindblad
/University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Presenting Author: Lindblad, Sverker
The purpose is to describe and analyse research publications to capture nodes and nets in conversations that are part in organizing the European Educational Research Area. After a broad mapping of research publications, the focus is on analysing articles in the European Educational Research Journal. EERJ has Europeanization of educational research as – collaboration and sharing thoughts – been a main theme for over 20 years (Lawn, 2002; 2009). Given this, which research fronts and intellectual traditions are at work in the EERJ publications and how are these publications organising themselves in nodes and nets? Answers to such questions are vital in order to understand different tendencies in European Educational research and as a basis for international research cooperation.
This research is based on analyses of the interplay between intellectual traditions and the societal structuring of research (c.f. Whitley, 2000) and actor—network theory (Callon et al, 1991) and an understanding of research referencing as ways of organising research fields (Czarniawska, 2022). A combination of bibliometric (Garfield, 1979) and interpretative analyses are used in empirical analyses of e.g. teacher education (Lindblad et al, 2023) and international comparisons of research organizing (Gross et al, in print) in terms of links between publications in the making of research networks.
First a broad overview: By means of Harzing’s Publish or Perish (Harzing.com) search engine we identified (2024-01-15) almost one thousand EERJ papers published 2002-2023 who in sum were cited more than 38 000 times.
Then, we turned to Web of Science (https://webofscience.help.clarivate.com/en-us) for more specific information about the EERJ publications 2017-2023. Analyses of links between publications are carried out by means of VosViewer (Van Eck & Waltman, 2000) in order to understand how these publications are organised by, and organising, this research field. EERJ is included in WoS since 2017 and so far 350 publications are part of the WoS database. Explorative analyses identified different networks with central nodes in terms of research fronts as well as intellectual traditions.
Cooperation in research over geopolitical contexts was also identified and discussed in relation to matters of Europeanization and research communication. Intellectual traditions were structured in different dimensions – referring to for instance from cultural sociology to actor-network theory, and from curriculum theory to systems theory.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe study is based on bibliometric resources and different ways of relating publications to each other (Garfield, 1979). Data sources were obtained by Web of Science. At the WoS there were (Jan 15, 2024) identified 278703 publications categorised as educational research presented in 946 sources such as scientific journals. The development of this research field is described over national affiliations of researchers and over time. The EERJ was included in the WoS in 2017 which contains 350 articles with 10830 cited sources.
Data from WoS were transformed into text-files and further analysed in VosViewer where links between publications are in focus for cluster analysis to explore how the EERJ publications are organized by and organising educational research.
Intellectual traditions are identified by co-citation of different references and research fronts by bibliographic coupling between publications. How the research is organized over space is analysed by clustering intellectual traditions and research fronts over countries and regions.
A selection of central nodes is subject to narrative analyses of texts in order to understand the dynamics of referencing in the making of recognized contributions in the EERJ field of study,
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsAs expected by previous studies the overall educational research field is in Web of Science dominated by Anglo-Saxon research in terms of research affiliation, publication sources, and language. However, the EERJ differs to this with larger shares of publications outside the Anglo-Saxon context and in terms of cooperation in publishing activities.
A set of eight research front networks are identified and presented by the explorative analyses in two dimensions. These are interpreted by induction as follows with central nodes in the networks as follows:
- One from studies of internationalization and globalisation (for instance Dobbins & Kwiek, 2017) to matters of education and Bildung (Smeyers, 2019) as examples of distant networks and nodes)
- One from studies of higher education (Cotton et al, 2017) to analyses of communication systems. (Vanderstraetern, 2021)
These two dimensions and their four networks are structuring the field of research fronts. The other four networks are operating in the space given by these structuring dimensions.
The cluster analyses of intellectual traditions did also result in eight clusters in two dimensions, but structured in three different ways:
- One from organization theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977) to curriculum theory and didactics (Klafki, 1985)
To this vertical dimension is added two horizontal slopes with different directions:
- One from cultural sociology (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) to history (Lawn, 2012) and actor-network theory (Latour, 2007)
- One from sociology of education (Bernstein, 2000) to systems theory (Luhmann & Schorr, 2002)
By means of these analyses we see how this research is organising itself in different kinds of intellectual traditions. A general conclusion is that the EERJ is in practice moving towards Europeanization of educational research in terms of recognition of and cooperation in research. Implications of this in terms of research conversations over world regions are discussed.
ReferencesBernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control, and identity: Theory, research, critique (Vol. 5). Rowman & Littlefield.
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture (Vol. 4). Sage.
Callon, M., Courtial, J. P., & Laville, F. (1991). Co-word analysis as a tool for describing the network of interactions between basic and technological research: The case of polymer chemsitry. Scientometrics, 22, 155-205.
Czarniawska, B. (2022): On reflective referencing. In How to Write Differently (pp. 108-118). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Gross, B., Keiner, E., Lindblad, S., Samuelsson, K., & Popkewitz, T. (in print): Nodes and Nets in Educational Research Communication and Organization – an International Mapping of Educational Research Publication. To be published in Global Perspectives on Educational Research.
Dobbins, M., & Kwiek, M. (2017). Europeanisation and globalisation in higher education in Central and Eastern Europe: 25 years of changes revisited (1990–2015). European Educational Research Journal, 16(5), 519-528
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