ECER 2018 - Educational Inclusion

The European Conference of Educational Research (ECER) was hosted this year in the beautiful town of Bolzano, Italy in the Dolomites at the crossroads between Italian, Austrian, and Swiss borders. The Free University of Bozen-Bolzano hosted us, and I was fascinated to learn that their degree programmes are all trilingual. This set the stage for gathering education researchers from all over the world.

At such a big conference with 33 parallel sessions running at the same time, of course each participant navigates their own course through the conference proceedings and events. In this post, I attempt to summarise some of the take-aways throughout my conference journey this week.

Space to Reflect, Learn, and Make New Connections

I enjoyed attending the presentation by Labake Fakunle and Joceline Alla-Mensah sharing Universas21-funded work looking at the benefits and barriers of doctoral students’ engagement at networking events and conferences. Their participants cited financial barriers and time constraints as challenges, but they also saw great value in networking at conferences. This was certainly the case for me in attending ECER and, thanks to the Moray House Graduate School’s financial support and my ability to take a week of annual leave from my work, I was supported to attend ECER. As with the AERA and JURE conferences, I found great benefits to taking the time to learn about a wide variety of educational research, reflect on and share my own work, and connect with individuals researching similar topics. This was particularly the case at the Universitas21 FINE networking event (which I will write about separately soon) and the ECER networking events in the town plaza and at the Mareccio Castle which was a fabulous experience.

Inclusion through Sharing Values

There were some fascinating keynote talks and symposia that highlighted and problematised the conference theme of inclusion. Brahm Norwich emphasised how inclusion is respectful to all participants or partners by valuing the contributions of all, but he also noted that inclusion has become a popularised term in the current society. For example, co-researching has become a popular method to include participants’ voices more actively in research design and direction. Kyriaki Messiou provided some rich examples of including children’s voices actively in school improvement projects and research when they draw ‘power maps’ of where decision-makers are located within the school, take photos of where they do and do not feel safe to improve the learning environment, and write a ‘message in a bottle’ to share their wish list of other improvements. Messiou shared how inclusive research that challenges traditional power dynamics can empower all participants, and I similarly found the experience extremely valuable when co-researching with undergraduate students. 

Both Messiou and, in his keynote, Thomas Popkewitz, highlighted that inclusion represents our values. Although power dynamics are always present, they are made more transparent in some ways by showing how decisions are made and creating spaces for shared ownership (as in benefits of co-creation of the curriculum). At the same time, though, including sometimes may mean excluding others who don’t share our values and we need to be attentive to this exclusion. This made me reflect on how whether co-creation practitioners may exclude traditionalists when challenging the status quo of the traditional university hierarchies, processes, and structures.

Inclusion through Creativity and Play

In some cases, inclusion can mean inviting other individuals into existing spaces to contribute to decision-making. For example, Manuela Raposo-Rivas and Kyriaki Messiou each showed in different research in the UK and Spain how children can be invited into adult spaces to contribute to decision-making and the learning of both new and experienced teachers. Furthermore, Demet Lukuslu showed in the Partispace project how youth were invited into adult-led spaces in youth councils in Turkey. While these forms of inclusion are positive, they are operating within existing structures.

Because of my interest in creativity and play in teaching outside the box, I enjoyed learning about other examples at ECER of creating new, creative spaces for inclusion. For example, Bernadette Mercieca showed how the framework of well-known children’s literature such as Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz, or Little Red Riding Hood could be used as metaphors in a doctoral thesis to make concepts more accessible or understood in different ways as they resonate with readers. I was fascinated by this idea! In a session on gamification, Lina Higueras-Rodriguez and Esra Demiray each shared interesting presentations about gamification of learning to promote new spaces for engagement. These presentations led to a fascinating discussion about how ‘game’ and ‘play’ are two distinct concepts in English but, in Spanish, one word is used for both. We discussed the distinctions, and what we felt were playful methodologies versus traditional methodologies which that promote engagement. There are interesting connections to be made between play, gamification, and engagement in learning.

Inclusion through Teaching Excellence

I enjoyed hearing a number of papers on teaching excellence. For example, Sofia Chanda-Gool presented on university teachers in England fostering learning environments that promote a wellbeing framework; she found that these inclusive environments increase students’ sense of belonging, as well as their confidence to engage in groupwork and take risks in learning. Similarly, Mercedes Inda-Caro presented on Spanish teachers’ ‘activating teaching’ methods that develop learning environments that foster student engagement. Salvador Reyes-de Cozar also presented on the importance of counselling and student support, and the need for teachers to recognise students who are struggling and to provide support. Each of these three research presentations had similar findings to my own research into student perceptions of excellence in teaching and student support.

Thinking back on Thomas Popkewitz’s fascinating keynote presentation, he suggested that curriculum outcomes reflect individuals’ hopes and what we want students to become in our society. He argued that educational work and research are based on these aims and values, even when purporting to be objective. I reflected on the many different stakeholders in education and their various perceptions of teaching excellence. 

However, throughout the massive conference programme of 3,000 presentations centred around the theme of inclusion, it was striking that seeing students as partners and/or working with them to co-create the curriculum within secondary and higher education was almost non-existent. For me, this speaks to the need for university teachers and researchers to not only listen to students’ feedback and use their data in research, but to become more inclusive by working with students as collaborators. After all, if partnerships with children are successful, secondary and undergraduate students are more than capable! Perhaps the bigger question is whether academics are willing? Hopefully we can have some blue-sky thinking.