Conference Agenda

This paper presents partial findings from an ongoing research project examining the place of international academic engagement in the careers of French education researchers. The project is conducted by members of the International Commission of the French Educational Research Association (AECSE), itself a member of the European Educational Research Association (EERA). It originated from a shared observation and a recurrent question within this research group: why are French researchers in educational sciences consistently under-represented at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER)?

This question is empirically grounded in participation data from recent ECER conferences, which reveal a persistent gap between French participation and overall attendance: 32 French participants at ECER 2025 in Belgrade (out of 2,498); 19 at ECER 2024 in Nicosia (out of 2,282); 43 at ECER 2023 in Glasgow (out of 3,309); 22 at ECER 2022 in Yerevan and ECER Plus (out of 1,876); and 54 at ECER 2021 in Geneva (online, out of 2,383). These figures raise questions about the structural and institutional conditions shaping international engagement among French education researchers, particularly within a European research space increasingly characterized by competition, mobility, performance indicators, and international collaboration.

The central research question guiding this paper is therefore: How do national academic career structures, disciplinary norms, and assessment mechanisms shape the international academic engagement of French researchers in educational sciences? Rather than approaching internationalization as a self-evident or homogeneous process, this study conceptualizes international academic engagement as a situated, differentiated, and career-dependent practice, embedded in specific institutional, temporal, and disciplinary configurations.

More specifically, the paper examines how international activities - such as participation in European conferences, international publications, research collaborations, and mobility programs - are variously encouraged, constrained, or unevenly valued across different stages of academic careers. These practices are analyzed in relation to national assessment frameworks, notably the role of the Conseil National des Universités (CNU), the national body responsible for qualification, promotion, and career advancement of lecturers (maîtres de conférences) and full professors (professeurs des universités). The CNU defines discipline-specific academic norms, including the use of journal lists that play a decisive role in career progression. While internationalization is increasingly promoted in policy discourse, its concrete recognition in evaluation procedures remains uneven and often implicit, particularly at early career stages.

This institutional analysis is situated within broader European and global debates on the transformation of education research. Recent calls to revitalize European educational research in times of global change (Sivesind & Ydesen, 2025) highlight how international engagement is increasingly shaped by competitive funding regimes, governance by numbers, and transnational policy agendas (Musselin, 2018). Research on policy brokerage and global governance (Steiner-Khamsi, Martens, & Ydesen, 2024) further shows how indicators such as publication metrics, international rankings, and participation in European programs redefine academic excellence while producing new hierarchies between disciplines and national research communities. In this context, educational sciences occupy an ambivalent position: expected to demonstrate international visibility, yet evaluated through national disciplinary norms that may not fully recognise European or global forms of engagement (Albero & Barthes, 2020).

Anchored in the thematic field “Internationalisation in Higher Education” of EERA Network 22, this paper adopts a sociological and institutional approach to internationalization. It conceptualizes international academic engagement both as a socially differentiated practice, shaped by national career regimes, disciplinary cultures, generational dynamics, and transnational research spaces and as a process unfolding across multiple career temporalities – doctoral training, early career stabilization, and senior leadership – each associated with distinct expectations, opportunities, and constraints. By focusing on educational sciences in France, this paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how internationalization processes operate unevenly across disciplines and national contexts within Europe.

This paper explores how students in internationalised higher education systems value the relevance and legitimacy of national disciplinary language, using Sweden as a high-internationalisation European case. Across Europe, the expansion of English-medium instruction (EMI) has become a central strategy for internationalisation, while universities are simultaneously expected to maintain national languages for academic and professional purposes. Although these tensions are well documented at policy and institutional levels, less is known about how they are experienced and interpreted by students across different disciplinary and degree contexts.

Drawing on research on internationalisation, disciplinary literacy, and higher education language policy, the paper conceptualises students’ language valuations as a latent orientation reflecting how national disciplinary language is positioned across four functional domains: learning and academic success, programme-level relevance, teaching practices, and future professional work. Theoretically, language is treated as a resource whose value is produced within institutional and disciplinary regimes rather than through individual preference alone. From this perspective, students’ valuations are understood as shaped by broader constellations of disciplinary traditions, programme structures, language-of-instruction arrangements, assessment practices, and professional expectations.

Empirically, the paper draws on survey data from university students in Sweden. Rather than presenting definitive results, the analysis focuses on identifying indicative patterns for how students’ valuations cohere and how they appear to vary across educational contexts, including study level, language of instruction, and disciplinary field.

The European relevance of the study is twofold. First, Sweden’s partial EMI landscape mirrors developments across the Nordic region and wider Europe, where commitments to national languages coexist with expanding English-medium provision. Second, disciplinary variation in language use – particularly between STEM, education and health, and humanities and social sciences – raises questions of broader relevance for European debates on parallel language use, governance, and how discipline- and profession-specific ecologies of practice produce language value.

By foregrounding student perspectives, the paper aims to contribute to discussions on how the conditions for learning, knowing, and acting in higher education are structured through disciplinary and institutional arrangements, and how language value is negotiated within these contexts, thus, highlighting the role of power relations through which certain languages acquire legitimacy and are rendered consequential as academic and professional resources.

International and cross-institutional forms of cooperation are widely promoted in policy discourse as key attributes of high-quality higher education. However, while these processes have been extensively studied in the higher education sector, teacher education constitutes a distinct institutional field. The teaching profession is particularly deeply embedded in national education systems, shaped by historically institutionalised forms of state regulation, professional expectations, and locally defined educational goals. Although modes of cooperation in teacher education draw on familiar higher education models, they are reworked through field-specific constraints and tensions, requiring negotiation among state, professional, and organisational actors across multiple institutional levels. In practice, this renders international and cross-institutional cooperation in teacher education more contingent and legitimacy-sensitive, and often more uneven than broader higher education debates suggest. Further complicating this picture, existing research on the internationalisation of teacher education has itself developed asymmetrically, with dominant analytical and empirical insights shaped mainly by Western contexts, leaving many other regions under-represented. Given this, there is a need for empirically grounded analyses of how such forms of cooperation are understood and enacted in teacher education across various contexts, including those that are often underrepresented.

This paper addresses this gap by examining cooperation not as a taken-for-granted policy good, but as an institutionally mediated and legitimacy-sensitive practice shaped by national context and actor positioning. It draws on an ongoing qualitative study conducted as part of a larger research project on national and international cooperation in teacher education. This study takes Lithuania and Finland as its empirical focus, exploring how key stakeholders at policy, organisational, and professional levels perceive, organise, and implement cooperation. Particular attention is given to how cooperation is framed as legitimate, translated into organisational practice, and mediated through competing institutional logics across institutional and national contexts. The analysis is informed by a neo-institutional framework centred on organisational legitimacy and institutional logics. These concepts are used to examine not only why cooperation is pursued, but also how and why it is limited, contested, or deprioritised under competing institutional rationalities in teacher education. By looking through this lens, we can better grasp the dynamics at play in these collaborative efforts.

Empirically, the study is based on semi-structured expert interviews with stakeholders involved in teacher education policy-making, coordination, and implementation in the two countries. The paper will present empirically grounded findings from the analysis of interview material, highlighting how cooperation-related expectations are translated into practice and how tensions and dilemmas emerge across policy, organisational, and professional levels.

This presentation explores the academic journeys of Indian and Chinese doctoral students in Germany (Boutiuc-Kaiser & Symeonidis, 2025), examining their perspectives on adapting to new learning methodologies, academic standards, and socio-cultural norms compared to their home countries. By analysing 10 biographical narrative interviews, the study highlights the challenges faced and strategies developed by these students during their transition to the German higher education system. Key themes, such as increased autonomy, independent decision-making, and potential psychological distress, highlight the importance of effective adaptation strategies and strong support systems for these students. This study contributes to understanding the experiences of Asian doctoral students, a growing demographic in German and international universities, and can inform universities in developing targeted support programmes to enhance international students’ academic success in Germany, Despite the growing interest in international doctoral students in Germany, few studies have explored the internationalisation of German higher education system and the impact of international doctoral students on German higher education (Zhu, 2012; Lihe, 2015).Against this background, the aim of this study is to address this gap by examining the experiences and perceptions of international PhD students who have moved to German HEIs, with particular attention to autonomy, learning practices, and socio-academic adjustment.