ECER-2012, Kadiz

An essay by Evgeniy Varshaver on his trip to Cadiz

European Conference for Educational Research took place in Cadiz, Spain, from September 17th to September 21st. Evgeniy Varshaver, a research fellow at the LCSR, was among the participants of the Conference. He shared his impressions of his trip to Kadiz in an essay for the LCSR website.

The conference was hold by the European Educational Research Association. It was a really huge event - with more than 1000 participants mostly from Europe, but also from East Asian countries and the US. Moreover, the conference took place in Cadiz - one of the oldest cities in Europe with a huge catholic cathedral of gothic style. Also Cadiz was the main port where the adventurous journeys to the New World began. That's why the streets there are named after Cortes, Columbus and so on. I had a comparative fortune to stay in a hotel on the other side of the Cadiz bay - in a town of Rota, so every day I was entering Cadiz by sea and imagining as if I was a wanderer coming back from Americas.

The journey from Rota to Cadiz took 35 minutes by sea, so it was an excellent chance to go through the conference book and find important things to attend during the conference day. The first full day I was presenting at the "Emerging researchers" part of the conference. I got a substantial feedback from an American professor of Ukrainian descent - she came to our panel by mistake, but it was a useful mistake. We discussed the nature of self-enhancement and self-improvement and she argued that it shouldn't be regarded to as an opposition, and rather I should try to create a comprehensive index that describes both enhancing and improving cultures.

Other days of the conference gave me important encounters and acquaintances. Vibeke Ron Noer is a Danish researcher that does school ethnography and recently studied peer group dynamic in a class. She gave important clues in respect how such work should be done as I'm planning to do similar things. The group of Hungarian Roma was delivering results of a big project related to desegregation of Roma in terms of education. The first step, in their opinion, was to connect Roma settlements with the surrounding social environment by roads and electricity. I asked, whether it leads to integration. They answered that it is a necessary preliminary thing for any kind of integration. On the one hand, they are right, but after that I was told by some experts, that government could pursue such preliminary steps for years the money is spent, but nothing happens. 

Also I was attending every presentation related to integration and migration. A good paper was delivered about frames of schooling reference of North African, Balcan and Ukrainean students in Belgium. The research showed that Arabs try to be like their parents, children from Balcans compare themselves to locals and Ukraineans think about their friends in the native country. The research was problematic both in terms of methodology and "ethnic essentialism", but still interesting and important. Oleg Popov from Sweden was talking about problems that faces "unaccompanied migrants" from Afghanistan and Somalia in the Swedish school system - it was more practice-oriented project than scholarly research. A Spanish scholar compared a group of parents with children at school with the one with children at home or in native country in terms of different patterns of integration. He came to a conclusion that the only difference was in perceived discrimination - lower if children attended school. There were other interesting pieces of research on migration and education.

The conference was my first huge scholarly event abroad attended. It was very important and inspiring for me!

by Evgeniy Varshaver