Report from the network sessions and the network meeting 2007

In the NERA conference at the University of Turku in Finland, 2007, the network had five paper sessions in which 12 paper presentations in total were conducted (according to the planned programme, there should be 13 papers presentations but one was cancelled).  In the sessions there were about 15-30 listeners. Everything worked out well, even though this network is quite new (this was the second year with paper sessions).

In the network meeting there were about ten participants present. The co-ordinator was re-elected at the beginning of the meeting. One participant was worried about the access to the network meeting, i.e., who are allowed to participate in these meetings. Hence, information clearness concerning the network meetings is still an important issue to discuss and work with.

The knowledge interest of the network was also discussed. We agreed that the network should not be confined to explicit values education but include a broader knowledge domain, as the name of the network indicates, Empirical research on value issues in education, which in addition to explicit values education (moral education, character education, ethical education, citizenship education, democratic education), also includes issues such as school democracy and pupil participation, professional ethics, school rules and discipline, values or morality expressed in everyday school or classroom life, bullying and peer harassment, children's rights, moral development and ethical learning, peer conflicts, and conflict management.

Furthermore, we discussed an idea of developing a specific web page for the network with the purpose of making it easier for the members of the network to get information from and communicate with each other. We all agreed that this was a good idea and the co-ordinator will developed this further.

Robert Thornberg

Co-ordinator for the network Empirical Research on Value Issues in Education