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The formation of the EERA has taken place over the last twenty years and it has accumulated practices and organizational procedures. The core principles of the Association were about inclusivity, represented through membership of national associations in the Council, and European identity, safeguarded by ECER regulations and the EERJ. The founding question of the Association, and a constant and useful heuristic device. was’ what does it mean to be a European educational research association’ and a related question question, ‘who are its members? The paper suggest that these questions should be used to review the work of the EERA again as they are in danger of becoming lost. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Transnational collaboration by educational researchers in Europe has grown fast since the mid-1990s and the means to support it have become more easily accessible. A study of the growth of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) since its foundation in the mid-1990s shows how transnational research in European education began, and how it overcame organisational problems and created opportunities for new research identities and subjects to be constructed. Overcoming confusing mobilities, creating ‘homes' or nests inside the EERA in networks, and building necessary forms of sociality are explored in this article by means of interviews undertaken with a range of experienced and engaged researchers who have worked within the European Conference of Educational Research (ECER) since its early years. These researchers are clear that a stable European space for education research has been formed, and offer ideas about the association's role in relation to its function and value. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The starting point for this article is a film about Scottish education, Children's Story. Children's Story was one of a group of seven documentaries made for the 1938 British Empire Exhibition in Glasgow, under the supervision of John Grierson. The film was an official entry into the Exhibition and is a formal display of key ideas and elements of Scottish education - past, present and (especially) future. The film will be used to raise questions for researchers in the histories of education about using moving film as research data, or within the research process. Questions related to the use-value of film in educational research are central to our article. The article is organised in three parts, and followed by a conclusion; they are the film as a record, the documentary film movement and the visual as the object of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses evidence for a unique vision to involve teachers in educational research in Scotland by the Educational Institute of Scotland in the 1920s through the work of its Research Committee. Led by William Boyd, the Committee thought that involvement in research was a crucial stepping stone towards achieving professional status for teachers. They conducted a number of detailed investigations involving teachers, thereby introducing research into the consciousness of teachers and paving the way for Scotland to make significant contributions to educational research on the international stage. Although Boyd himself was an educationist and did not call himself a psychologist, he was essentially working in the field of educational psychology and the co-opted membership of the Research Committee included James Drever, David Kennedy Fraser, William McClelland and others. This paper will explore something of the circumstances, substance and influence of this movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational research was established in the early decades of the twentieth century in many parts of Europe. The early years were the crucial years as they established dominant forms of inquiry, pioneer sites, and related artefacts, the tools and texts. This paper focuses on the early growth of research culture in education in Scotland, its subjects of study, and its key workers, texts and innovations, to illuminate one site of research development and, in doing so, to engage with a limited but developing field, the histories of educational research. Scotland had an inventive and novel approach to research as well as an urgency to its tasks. It was shaped by close connections with the USA, but its style of work was its own, reflecting local cultures of cooperation and meritocracy. Its culture was organic and systematic, network based, non-hierarchical, public and national. It was a leading site of empirical and psychologically based large- and small-scale research, outside North America. It was an exporter and importer of techniques, data and people, and was both national and international at the same time. The Scottish case, and its North American scientific links, illuminates the ways in which the national and the international begin to be closely interwoven in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the ways in which space, politics and science converge to create a unique cultural event in education in Europe. It highlights the formation of a European cultural identity which was incorporated into the day-today expectations of educators and educational researchers working in European education. According to the article, the availability of frameworks for measuring and coordinating education across the region create a Europeanized culture that enhances those established in government and trade.

The coincident arrival of a European policy space in education and a European Educational Research Association [EERA], and their subsequent relation, will be the subject of this paper. EERA is a hybrid organization—it supports scientific networking, it is a social partner in EU policy, it is a first level social space for networking, and increasingly it is faced with acting in policy forums. It is scientific, public and professional but most of all, like most associations, especially those working across borders, it is unstable and voluntaristic. Establishing itself in a new policy landscape, a European Policy space rapidly emerging in higher education and research around it, and burdened with the pasts of its members—and its diversity of traditions and languages—is difficult enough. Yet it has to be examined against new theories of governance and the role of networks, which place associations in Europe in a very interesting role. The paper tends to the conclusion that either EERA or the theory fails to meet the task required of it—so far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established in the late 1920s, the Scottish Council for Research in Education (SCRE) was a highly significant and influential institute for educational research, in both the scope and the methodology of its work, in Scotland and abroad. It was one of the first of a new kind of institution; it signalled the rise of specialized research institutes, outside the university yet closely connected to academic work and to the governing of education, across the Western world. Research Institutes are a flexible way of managing tasks and influencing policy: they appear to conform to disciplinary procedures and yet they are free to inquire and suggest policy directions. SCRE did not have a specialized staff of researchers but it did work cooperatively, as a prototype knowledge network, linking together in projects a wide range of Scottish academics, teachers and education managers. Together, they were bound in a movement for reform and experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of education research has grown enormously in England over the last 25 years -- in size, complexity, forms of production and purpose. It has been shaped by governmental, market and production changes, and it appears to be moving outside the university sector as well. The British Educational Research Association is trying to map the field and to make sense of its development. This article begins with a search for relevant data about the key elements in the field -- personnel, institutions, output, etc. -- and tries to draw conclusions about the next steps in the inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]