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For many years the EERJ Roundtable has been a standing event within the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER). In a discursive style it addresses issues related to contemporary relationships between educational research and educational policy in Europe. The changing educational landscape, together with shifting practices and discourses of educational research, prompted researchers to discuss the need for increased self-governance. It was taken up as the topic for the 2013 EERJ Roundtable and couched as a question: What is the possibility of a "moot" for educational research in Europe? This article reports on the 2013 Roundtable. Its three short presentations and subsequent audience discussion have been summarised and reflected upon to make a case for a moot: a self-governing space for educational research. It reveals ECER, and particularly the EERJ Roundtable, as a scholarly and a political arena where the interplay between research, policy and larger patterns of social change can be reviewed, interrogated and appropriated critically into the disciplinary logics of educational research.

In this article the authors use two EERA networks as a case for a discussion on the development of research networks within the European Educational Research Association (EERA). They contend that EERA networks through their way of working create a European research space. As their case shows, the development of networks is diverse. The emergence of networks and the current group of thirty-one networks do not display a coherent and unified system. Thus they argue that EERA networks have to be studied as an open complex system in order to comprehend the multiplicity and creative and innovative space that these networks represent. They create a space for knowledge production in a European context, enabling educational researchers to see and experience their research in a more diverse setting.

Our western conceptions of knowledge still do not seem to have fully realised what Descartes had already stated in the seventeenth century, that we can no longer acquire full certainty. In education, knowledge is very often connected to that which we possess--what we know for certain. In this paper, my starting point is the argument put forward by Joseph Dunne that there is no action-guiding knowledge left in Arendt's notion of action, so that Arendt's notion of action lacks the kind of action-guiding knowledge that is phronesis. I am going to elaborate on two different aspects of human relations related to uncertainty and wonder as central aspects of human interaction. My two guides in this exploration are Hannah Arendt and Luce Irigaray. My speculations around knowledge are concerned with the possibility of opening up spaces where an in-between knowledge can emerge. My idea of an in-between knowledge is not meant to exclude other forms of knowledge, rather to discuss if humans in action, where they appear for each other as unique--as two--represent a space where knowledge can emerge without an appropriation into sameness. This relates to basic human conditions in education, since education is concerned as much with relations between humans as with content. (Contains 5 notes.)

What the author has argued in this talk is that the answers to the question posed to this panel--"what counts as useful knowledge in educational research?"--are something which will be framed by what researchers care about as researchers. It requires a collective undertaking where a space in between them is cherished for the sake of the many strands of educational research. This is how the solidity of a diverse identity will survive. What they care about is framed by the words they use. Hence, both as a consolation and a challenge for educational research, the author ends by paraphrasing Paul Ricoeur: There is no such thing as a last word in educational research, and if there is any, one calls that violence. (Contains 1 note.)

When you enrol as a student you are assigned a "place" in education. This assignment will gradually imply an assessment of you as a human being. We argue that these are processes taking place in educational practice. In our orientation in educational research an orientation towards a theory of action has been inspired by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. In our search for an educational practice that could describe what it is that makes the student a capable human being we continue in the spirit of Ricoeur. The text is divided in two parts. In the first part, Basic Capabilities in Education, we are asking: Who is the student if education is the process where the student learns to be a capable human being? We try to answer this with the help of Ricoeur's phenomenology of the capable human being which is structured around the capacity to speak, to act, to tell and finally to impute. In the second part, Institutional Mediations of Capabilities in Education, we try to show how the transmission of the human capacities to an actualization through education at an institutional level, represented by the teacher, is necessary. If the student shall become a capable human being s/he has to have conditions for actualizations of her capacities. A paradigm for this is found in the process of assigning and assessing in education.

In this paper we try, by drawing on some insights from practical knowledge, to bridge a gap between common conceptions of teaching on the one hand, and of learning on the other. In Western traditions of educational thought and discourse, practical knowledge--i.e. the dynamics of thinking, speaking, acting, and personal writing--is frequently separated from disciplinary knowledge: i.e. the knowledge of academic disciplines. But this separation often fails to recognize an inherent dialectic in teaching and learning. Through fresh explorations of human capacities to act and think, to speak and write, we try to illuminate different aspects of a teacher's identity, including the teacher's individuality and the teacher as an agent of an educational institution. The teacher has to present and represent knowledge in education, both as an agent of an institution and as a person. By examining the disclosure and transformation of the self in light of understandings of identity as sameness (i.e. that which doesn't change with time), or as selfhood (i.e. that which is confronted by successive challenges), we hope to draw some productive conclusions about the teacher's self-understanding as the source for personal learning in education. We aim to explore the importance of transformation of the teachers' self for the quality of learning relationships between the teacher and the always Other student.

Education is working with language. As teacher educators, this is the authors' main theory. They present one way of working with language through language-games. The article is constructed in three sections. The first part presents the method, stating what concepts are essential in order to understand both this way of working with student teachers and the structure of the article. Two concepts are brought to the fore, that is; teacher identity and teacher knowledge. In the second section the authors introduce their way of working with cases. They briefly present what they mean by case-work, how cases are constructed and how they work with them. In the final section they theorise about some key aspects of education. They present two concepts for understanding individual learning processes. These concepts are embedded in the philosophy of ethics. Thus, their theoretical outline moves the origin of learning from the knowledge of subjects to the learning self. (Contains 7 notes.)