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Following the launch of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, scholarship has not yet addressed the role of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in this context. This paper asks: What is the political role of the EHEA as an institution and the instrumentalisation of its higher education (HE) cooperation initiatives in the context of the invasion? To investigate this, the paper thematically analyses interviews with representatives from key HE stakeholders in three EHEA members -- Germany, France and Italy, as well as key recent international communications related to the EHEA's response to the war. The thematic analysis revealed two overarching themes leading us to consider that: (1) the EHEA has been regaining its lost significance through shaping and disseminating its response as an institution to the invasion of Ukraine; and (2) HE cooperation in the EHEA in the context of this war has been acquiring a new meaning. These themes lead us to conclude that the war has prompted the EHEA to re-establish its purpose, following the ebbing interest in standardising HE structures. Most importantly, the EHEA has begun to emerge as a platform for political cooperation beyond HE for the promotion of peace in the European region.

Applying qualitative methods, this paper examines the burgeoning of quality assurance databases, processes and networks of actors in the field of higher education in Europe. Our main argument is that there has been a move from the Bologna Process being the near singular focus for European-level coordination and harmonisation of higher education, towards the making of a much more diverse and complex quality assurance and evaluation infrastructure. This infrastructure involves a range of distinct but interdependent actors and processes and contains explicit and implicit interlinkages with the production of wider policy agendas, such as the rise of the European Education Area. The aim of this paper is to analyse the growth and complexity of Quality Assurance (QA) in higher education (HE) in Europe, as a way of understanding the multifaceted and continuously developing process of Europeanisation.

The article seeks to advance understanding of the involvement of transnational student associations in European governance of higher education policies within the European Union (EU) and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Specifically, the article explores the mechanisms for interest intermediation that exist for transnational student associations in both policy arenas. Three transnational student associations stand out in terms of their involvement: European Students' Union (ESU), Erasmus Student Network (ESN) and European Students' Forum (AEGEE). The findings point to two distinct models of student interest intermediation in European policy-making. Within the EU, the European Commission interacts with all three transnational student associations; however, ESU and ESN participate in more expert and working groups. The roles afforded to each association in relation to the European Commission are demarcated and functionally differentiated. Within EHEA, in neo-corporatist fashion, ESU, as a representative platform of national student unions, holds representational monopoly. In the EHEA and the EU, the involvement of transnational student associations in policy-making can be attributed to the evolving nature of transnational governance regimes in which participation of transnational student associations not only brings expertise to but also aids the legitimacy of the policy processes and outcomes.

This paper was inspired by empirical encounters with students and teacher-administrators who engaged with an online European education initiative, which raised questions about whether and how their practices were situated as local, transnational, or national(ist) endeavors. The conceptual, theoretical, and methodological resources of social topology and critical border studies guided our inquiry by a focus on bordering practices and how these generate spatiotemporal forms and movements, and evoked a "typical national form" which is characterized as a singular, stable, linear, and flat "topography." An innovative methodology is deployed to scrutinize how practices with this online, European initiative continue, challenge or complement that typical national form. The findings demonstrate how the use of topographical indexes and tropes (re-)materialized characteristics of these typical national forms, while the combination with topological relations introduced multiplicities and "levels" in these forms. Moreover, spherical forms, bouncing movements, and tunneling movements challenged the singularity, stability, linearity, and flatness of the typical national form. Building on these findings, the paper sets forth the argument that this online European education initiative mainly challenges the enactment of nationalism in classrooms by encouraging learning and thinking through "translocalities," which accentuates distances and differences that are being crossed without appealing to the typical imaginary of the "nation" with linear, stable, flat borders.

This paper theorizes the affective and moral grounding of "best practice" policymaking, particularly how best practice operates as an affective regime that encourages certain affective norms. To illustrate this, the author takes up the example of best practices promoted by the CoE's "Digital Citizenship Education Handbook" for the acquisition of digital citizenship competences. It is shown that the distribution of best practices creates a set of affective conditions--especially through cultivating certain affective skills/competences and ethics/morals--that govern the ways in/though which best practices ought to be appropriately materialized. The paper discusses two implications of this analysis for education policymaking and policymakers. The first implication suggests that there needs to be work informing policymakers how affect works to create regimes of best practice; the second implication emphasizes the importance of working with policymakers to explore how they could challenge affective regimes of best practice.

European countries differ widely in terms of vocational education and training (VET) tradition and the delivery of VET at the upper secondary level. A statistical approach to build a classification of VET systems in Europe is presented in the present article on the grounds of the size of the vocational enrollment, on the one hand, and the percentage of vocational enrollment in programs in which work and school are combined, on the other hand. Twenty-two European countries with full available information are considered in the study: 18 European Union (EU) countries, three Schengen Area (non-EU) countries (Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland), and the UK (non-EU state outside Schengen). Cluster analysis is a quantitative form of classification. The country groupings emerging from the K-means analysis performed in this paper allow us to distinguish mainly between vocational-oriented countries with high vocational specificity (e.g. Germany, Switzerland, and Austria), highly vocational-oriented countries with traditionally school-based VET programs (e.g. the Czech Republic and Slovakia), and less vocationally-oriented countries (general education-oriented countries such as Estonia and Spain).

This paper provides an account of the topological and its description of contemporary culture and use as a research methodology, a topological lens, generally, and in education research specifically. Some commentary is proffered on the relationships between the topological and the topographical, between relations and locations. A critical account is then provided on each of the papers in the special issue on the topological in education research and the specific contributions of each. The editors of the special issue make the important point that the topological is a spatio-temporal phenomenon, not just a spatial one. The topological does not exist in time and space, but rather constructs both and they change in a conjoint manner. As such, a topological lens rejects a construction of space as static and of time (and the temporal) as simply linear and chronological. The topological has been facilitated and articulated by and through practices of commensuration, datafication and digitalisation, flows and scapes, global connectivities and new relations, mobilities of various kinds and multiple networks. The paper argues that much greater emphasis has been given to the spatial in topological research; that is, there has been some neglect of the temporal in the spatio-temporal character of topologies.

In times of globalisation of higher education, alternative theoretical and methodological approaches were introduced in the field of comparative higher education research. To stimulate the debate on this issue, this paper firstly addresses them theoretically by combining the concept of institutional isomorphism and the 'glonacal' analytical heuristic. On this basis, it discusses arguments in favour of convergence and diversity from the perspective of the internationalisation of higher education and also points to the limits of institutional isomorphism resulting from 'glonacal' influences of agencies and agency on the development of (internationalisation of) higher education. Secondly, the paper also draws attention to the influence of globalisation on the selection of methodology in comparative higher education research by exposing the limits of methodological nationalism. Along these lines, it portrays the reversed pyramid model of different horizontal and vertical levels of comparisons with which it establishes the (missing) link between the selected theoretical and methodological framework of comparative (higher education) research. In conclusion, it acknowledges the need to integrate the contextual element into the comparative framework which allows thorough analysis of complex relationships between globalisation and higher education both theoretically and methodologically.

This exploratory paper presents insights from a qualitative interview-based study of the academic identity-building among a group of early career researchers working in the field of education across the European higher education space. Set against a policy background framed by the initiatives in European higher education and research policy, geared towards a production of a mobile, entrepreneurial researcher in pursuit of 'valuable' knowledge, the respondents' narratives reveal individual complexity, but also emerging patterns of professional identification. We identify the traditional academic values of creating and sharing knowledge validated by an epistemic community, and pursuing autonomy and collegiality in research, as still dominant, however, find these interacting with the demonstration of a strong proactive, entrepreneurial spirit, and a lack of institutional attachment. The narratives indicate the availability of supportive, encouraging communities as being of high significance, and contest the notions of Europeanisation and the utility of geographic mobility in researchers' identities. The paper discusses different types of academic identification driven by value orientation and social attachment that emerged from the early career researchers' interviews, alongside pervasive issues around mobility raised in most narratives, and concludes with suggestions for further study.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, children with disabilities were confronted with ableist discourses that justified unfair policy measures. This study is concerned with the discourses recorded in a range of education documents, published during the pandemic within the Republic of Cyprus. It employs an interdisciplinary framework, informed by Critical Discourse Analysis, Inclusive Education, and Critical Disability Studies, to examine the powerful actors and the ideologies that influenced the formation of discourses. The paper undertakes a critical interpretation of the disability discourses developed in Cyprus during the pandemic, links this with other relevant research conducted in other European countries prior to and during the pandemic, and suggests policy actions/measures that value children with disabilities and their families.

With schools and universities closing across Europe, the COVID-19 lockdown left actors in the field of education battling with the unprecedented challenge of finding a meaningful way to keep the wheels of education turning online. The sudden need for digital solutions across the field of education resulted in the emergence of a variety of digital networks and collaborative online platforms. In this joint article from scholars around Europe, we explore the COVID-19 lockdowns of physical education across the European region, and the different processes of emergency digitalization that followed in their wake. Spanning perspectives from Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, the article's five cases provide a glimpse of how these processes have at the same time accelerated and consolidated the involvement of various commercial and non-commercial actors in public education infrastructures. By gathering documentation, registering dynamics, and making intimations of the crisis as it unfolded, the aim of the joint paper is to provide an opportunity for considering the implications of these accelerations and consolidations for the heterogeneous futures of European education.

Educational research, and research in the Social Sciences more generally, has experienced a growth in the introduction of ethical review boards since the 1990s. Increasingly, universities have set up ethics review procedures that require researchers to submit applications seeking approval to conduct research. Review boards and the rules and conditions under which they operate have been criticised as obstructive, unnecessarily bureaucratic, and even unethical. At the same time, review boards and their procedures have been acknowledged as contributing to consideration of the ethical conduct of research. This paper explores the issues related to ethical review and examines the wider ethical considerations that may arise during the research process. The paper concludes that a purely administrative process of review is inadequate to ensure the ethical conduct of research, especially qualitative research. Rather, it is argued that ethical research entails the resolution of a potential series of ethical dilemmas as they arise during research. As such, the ethical conduct of research is a matter of researcher formation and development.

In 2015, the European Educational Research Association (EERA) initiated a study to examine education researchers' experiences with and attitudes towards research ethics reviews. This paper is not a result of this study; nevertheless, it is related to it while critically reflecting upon the issue of research ethics reviews. It starts with an analysis of observations and comments provided by the interviewees in their questionnaire replies. In them, some key dilemmas can be identified, which have been discussed in various academic circles in recent decades. The main part of the paper is intended to review these discussions and to determine their relevance for the debate in the specific field of education research. In the conclusion, attention is drawn to a gradual shift from the sphere of legitimacy to the sphere of legality, resulting from the current attempts of regulating research ethics, while pointing to a potential conflict between the two key research principles, which are also key academic values: ethical conduct in research and academic freedom.

This paper considers the role and responsibilities of a scientific association in promoting and supporting high quality research, particularly with regard to providing guidance on research ethics. The paper reports on a survey-based study commissioned by the European Educational Research Association in 2015 which focused on educational researchers' experiences with, and attitudes toward, the research ethics review scope and practice. The study provides insight into the role and activities of the European Educational Research Association in fostering high quality educational research. The analysis reveals the perception of academics that the European Educational Research Association might further high quality educational research for the benefit of education and society in the following ways: (i) leading the development of guidelines on ethical education research that are applicable across Europe whilst recognizing varied transnational contexts; (ii) promoting free, open dialogue and critical discussion on ethics in educational research; (iii) taking a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to ethics in educational research; (iv) informing the public about current developments in educational research; (v) developing practices of reviewing educational research in the context of research ethics; and (vi) promoting debate on ethics in the academic field of educational research. The paper concludes with some recommendations for the European Educational Research Association related to its role and responsibilities in fostering quality research.

In comparison to a vast literature on Soviet education little is known about Ukrainian pedagogical sciences apart from a mounting critique about the issues of academic dishonesty and plagiarism, which relates to all higher education disciplines, the absence of an empirical tradition in education research, a poor record of publication in peer-reviewed journals, and the dominance of a positivist approach, which seeks to discover 'laws' rather than reach 'understanding'. This paper offers a thematic analysis of four 'Pedagogy' textbooks -- three textbooks for under-graduate studies and one textbook for post-graduate study. The textbook analysis demonstrates that Ukrainian pedagogical sciences as a research tradition is deeply rooted in its own conceptual apparatus with no apparent relation to the current debates about teaching and learning in a wider Europe. The key proposition of the paper is that Ukrainian pedagogical sciences represent a mixture of Herbatianism and dialectical materialism, with more recent developments that emphasise 'acme' or 'perfectionism' that could be compared to debates on virtue ethics in education. Alongside these narratives the discourse of 'Kozak pedagogy' contributes to the nation-building narrative in education. The paper calls for a review of the content of 'pedagogy' textbooks currently used in higher education institutions in Ukraine and envisages that the newly established Ukrainian Educational Research Association can provide a platform for this important undertaking.

This paper addresses three central themes that run through the contributions to this special issue. The first of these is what it argues to be an inescapable connection between research and what might in some sense be regarded as the pursuit of truth, or at least of beliefs that are more deserving of belief and our confidence than others. Even forms of research like ethnography and phenomenography, those for which the pursuit of justice is the primary concern and those that seek to deconstruct the texts and discourses promoted by others -- all rest on forms of inquiry driven in one way or another by this same commitment. The second theme is the relationship between research and discipline where discipline is seen as the set of rules and principles that serve to make a community of arguers possible, but also to support the processes that thought and experience indicate provide the best assurance of opinions deserving our belief. And since there is clearly available to us in the academy and elsewhere more than one way of providing such assurance, each with some distinctive logical and procedural features, we need to consider the disciplines that might serve such purpose, not just the generic principle of discipline. Finally, the paper engages with the terrain of 'alternative epistemologies' -- terrain rendered more complex because, as described here, the term seems to encompass some rather different claims of a more or less problematic nature.

In European post-socialistic countries or more commonly known as Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries, regardless of their differences and specifics, the common communist and post-communist legacies in the field of educational sciences are still recognisable. The aim of this article is to explore research activity in the educational sciences in 15 CEE countries: 11 EU member states and 4 from the former Yugoslav Republic in the period from 1996 to 2013. The purpose of this research is to recognise the specificity and dynamics of subject and content issues, and development of methodological approaches in the educational science research. The sample consists of abstracts of 2,395 papers by CEE authors published in 265 journals indexed in Scopus between 1996 and 2013. Content analysis was applied, where the abstracts were grouped into specifically created categories describing the content and methods of the paper and analysed on the basis of two criterion variables -- CEE and non-CEE or international journals. The ?[superscript 2] test showed that the field of educational sciences in 15 European post-socialist countries changed over time in terms of quantity, content and methods, becoming more expansive and diverse, which is recognisable in papers published both in international and in CEE journals.

Teachers trained in one country are often not allowed to serve as teachers in another country because their teacher's license is not recognised as equivalent. The barriers these teachers have to overcome in order to work in their profession again are high and often require further (full) teacher training at the university. The paper provides insights into the conditions for teachers who participate in (re-)qualification programmes in Germany and Europe. By linking the theoretical concepts of a biographical approach to teacher professionalisation and transnationalisation in education, the results of an interview study with teachers who have participated in a programme for refugee teachers at a university in Germany are presented. The Grounded Theory analysis reconstructs the strategies of internationally educated teachers managing to keep up their hope to be able to work as teachers again and thus counter the formal de-professionalisation they are facing.

This paper addresses convergence as a political issue stemming from the political coordination of the European Higher Education Area. From the perspective of cultural theory, this issue relies on the fact that the influence of ways of life are not evenly influential in the political coordination of the European Higher Education Area. Convening the results of previous studies on the progress of Bologna, this paper underlines how goal displacement is challenging convergence in the ambit of the broader European Union political project. Additionally, the paper concludes that education within the European Higher Education Area is being configured by the prominence of the individualist and the fatalist ways of life.

Within the process of harmonizing and strengthening Europe as a competitive knowledge economy education is presented as a basic pillar of economic growth in a multitude of European policy papers. But how do individuals respond to incentives coming from European education politics? (How) are they appropriating given targets and how do they engage in making sense of them -- or not? This paper addresses the difference between the programme and the experience of European education politics. Based on a selected case study of experiences with European Social Fund project work, the model of an 'education entrepreneur', situated in the context of the German education system, will serve to reconstruct what happens with the European policy programme when it meets concrete lived experiences and will provide an insight into the gap between programme and practice of European education politics.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments worldwide to produce solutions to the abruptly interrupted work in education. School systems appear to have responded rapidly, creating home schooling and online educational environments, where teachers and students would interact with safety. In this paper, we attempt a synthesis of Sen's capability approach, Bourdieu's theory of capital and Bernstein's framework in order to theorize the relationships between home and school conditions and practices, and to analyse the data of the 2nd Survey of Schools: ICT in Education (a survey conducted in 2019 on behalf of the European Commission collecting data regarding digitalization in education and digital technologies in learning in the European Union). The survey is complemented by a second set of indicators provided by Eurostat to further investigate the availability and functionality of household space per family in selected European countries. We find significant differences in important social and environmental conversion factors, likely limiting children's capability to benefit from digital schooling. The most important differences are found in regard to parents' familiarity with information and communications technology use, while inequalities in environmental factors, such as overcrowded housing, are also existent. Overall, there are large inequalities within and between countries in Europe, which need to be addressed by policymakers.

This special issue of the "European Educational Research Journal" presents a series of research papers reflecting the trends and evolutions in conceptual frameworks that took place within the EERA 27 "Didactics--Learning and Teaching" network during its first ten years of existence. Most conceptual tools used in this field were elaborated in different socio-historical contexts for education and schooling delineated by nations and/or linguistic regions in Europe. This issue suggests possible integrative paths between certain frameworks debated in the Network 27 through co-authored papers. Crossed perspectives on the papers highlight certain important foci in the study of learning and teaching processes: (i) "Bildung" discussed within didactics as a European research field; (ii) Educational goals, content and teaching methods expressed in curricula; (iii) Curriculum making processes; (iv) Teaching qualities, teaching (joint) actions and classroom discourses; and (v) Collaborative practices in teacher professional development. Finally, two strands of comparative research in didactics are sketched for increasing synergies in the field.

Education policies can be understood as discursive strategies often used to foreground political ideologies and shape pedagogic practice. This chapter focuses on the ways in which the notion of 'teaching excellence' has received a renewed focus in the context of the introduction of a Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework for higher education in England. The study adopted a hybrid approach to Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the interplay of discourses underpinning teaching excellence in the context of a policy purporting to assess the standard of teaching in higher education. Drawing on the English case, textual data comprised a White Paper and two policy announcements outlining the introduction of the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework alongside 22 written submissions to the 'Assessing Quality in Higher Education' inquiry. Findings revealed four competing discourses: quality enhancement, quality assurance, widening participation and graduate employability. A disjuncture between policy claims and institutional practice was highlighted, with discursive silences regarding access, participation and employability. It is argued that the performative culture generated by such a policy inadvertently encourages institutions to focus on accountability and reputational concerns at the expense of processes which reflect the broader value of establishing teaching excellence in higher education.

The starting point for this inductive study is to determine, through a search of studies, what critical viewpoints in terms of research are delivered, based on experiences, observations and evaluation, concerning the Bologna Process over time? The aim is to present a description using a thematic analysis based on data from 38 papers (2004-2016) that reveal the critical reasoning behind the research. The reasoning is critical in the sense that various authors have elaborated on and problematized aspects of the Bologna Process in terms of what to avoid and/or have characterized aspects related to the Bologna Process that are not desirable. Based on the outcome of the thematic analysis, theorists were selected in order to deepen the reasoning and meaning highlighted in three themes. The findings are further discussed in terms of knowledge and curriculum development for the future and the advancement of European higher education policy and beyond on equal terms. The article suggests that there are causes for concern regarding unwanted consequences in the aftermath of the Bologna Process.

Studies of europeanisation have made a significant contribution to knowledge about education and how it has respatialised since the turn of the 21st century. This line of inquiry initially historicised the 1990s as a means of researching the emerging European space of education, but then morphed into studies of governing through the field of comparative policy studies. The research on governing Europe made the space of education visible in particular ways, which raises questions about the space of experiencing Europe: specifically, about how education is seen by professionals and with what effects. This paper uses the concept of 'space-time' to investigate the respatialisation of education. We review three case studies that historicise the europeanisation of education to problematise the space of governing, conceptualise the space of experience at three scales and illustrate how these entangled transnational topologies, analytic borderlands and spaces of orientation re-made the space of visual education in the 1920s.

This paper assumes that there has been a discourse shift in the understanding of internationalization from an idealistic view on overcoming national narrow-mindedness to an economic view of effectiveness and self-improvement, which also affects the discourse on Europeanization and building Europe by education. Against this background, the question of which consequences this discourse shift has for education and professionalization, is asked. In the end, two contradictions are pointed out as boundaries of professionalizing European education: the first lies in the opposed understanding of Europe and education for Europe; and the second in the replacement of politics by education (understood not only as bottom up control of political aims by education but also as a specific idea of humanity).

Several university alliances have been established in Europe in an attempt to influence the development of policies in research and education. As such, these alliances can be seen as being new players in the increasingly complex multi-actor, multi-level governance in this policy domain. The paper compares two key university alliances in Europe; in particular, how membership differences are related to their positions in the policy arena, their policy agendas and their policy formation and lobbying practices. The study contributes to understanding of, first, the role of university alliances in European level policy processes concerning higher education and research; and, second, the implications their involvement might have for future shaping of European initiatives in the knowledge domain.

The starting point of this study is the argument that not only rankings of higher education institutions (HEIs) are inescapable, but so is the constant criticism to which they are subjected. Against this background, the paper discusses how HEIs from Central and Eastern Europe countries (CEECs) are (non)represented in the main global university rankings. The analysis adopts two perspectives: 1) From the point of view of higher education in CEECs--what are the specificity, basic problems and perspectives of higher education in CEECs as seen through the prism of the global ranking systems? 2) From the point of view of the ranking systems--what strengths and weaknesses of the global ranking systems can be identified through the prism of higher education in CEECs? The study shows that most of the HEIs from CEECs remain invisible in the international and European academic world and tries to identify the main reasons for their (non)appearance in global rankings. It is argued that although global rankings are an important instrument for measuring and comparing the achievements of HEIs by certain indicators, they are only one of the mechanisms--and not a perfect one--for assessing the quality of higher education.