Marit Honerød Hoveid

You Have to Give of Yourself: Care and Love in Pedagogical Relations.

In this article we explore a notion of relationship which exists between humans. This notion of relationship takes as a point of departure that differences in human relations and interaction have to be safeguarded. Starting with the Irigarayan notion of ‘two’ as a gendered difference, opposed to an understanding of humans as one and same (gender), we elaborate an understanding of otherness which opens a space where both self and other are welcomed. This relational space cannot be appropriated by either one for it to exist. We continue by drawing from Harry G. Frankfurts discussion of care in order to understand human (inter)actions in this space. Through an elaboration of how love as a special form of care represents a motivational drive, a way in which a persons will is formed, we try to show how this attentiveness towards the other is possible. Our point of departure is two statements by female head teachers that prompted these theoretical inquiries into other possibilities for interpreting human (inter)action in leadership in education.

A ‘Moot’ for Educational Research in Europe?

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.

A space for ‘who’ – a culture of ‘two’: speculations related to an ‘in-between knowledge’

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 Arendts notion of action, so that Arendts 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.

The Dynamic and Changing Development of EERA Networks

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.