WERA 2021 Virtual Focal Meeting
On 7th, 8th and 9th July the WERA 2021 Congress was held: Networking Education, Diverse Realities, Common Horizons.
This edition in entirely virtual format was held in parallel to the XVII Ibero-American Conference on Ibero-American Education, organized by the Spanish Pedagogical Society (SEP) and the University of Santiago de Compostela. The main theme of both congresses was Networked Education: diverse realities, common horizons.
The World Education Research Association (WERA) is one of the leading national, regional and research associations in specialized education dedicated to sharing scholarships, developing networks and supporting each other in capacity building. Every year, WERA holds a congress together with an association that is a member, and this year it has done so with the SEP. The WERA congress seeks to present research that includes more than one country or that is comparative, intercultural, international or transnational in its conceptualization, scope or design.
Dr. Georgeta Ion participated in WERA 2021 coordinating, together with Chris Brown (UK), the symposium entitled "Maximizing the impact of educational research in practice: role of researchers - practitioners collaboration". The symposium started from the wide variety of studies that identify the relationship between research and practice and the emergence of practices based on research evidence. Along these lines, metaphors such as "gap" (Vanderlinde and Braak, 2010) or "research and practice bridge" were used to identify both barriers and facilitators of a successful implementation of evidence-based practice (Cain, 2018) .
Local initiatives or government programs in various countries promote the use of research evidence by professionals from different sectors as a way to maximize the social impact of educational research (Brown and Poortmans, 2017 among others). Collaboration between universities and professionals is seen as a useful tool to improve the research-practice nexus. Although much academic attention has been devoted to school networks and collaborations (Zeichner, 2010, McLaughlin & Black-Hawkins, 2007, Smedley, 2001), less attention has been paid to the means by which practitioners and researchers work together.
The symposium included the results of research conducted in five countries (United Kingdom, Spain, Slovenia, Romania and the Netherlands) based on a comparative and international conceptualization of researchers and practitioners working together. Our goal is to better understand the mechanics of this collaboration and the conditions that maximize the impact of educational research in practice. The five papers presented offer an ecological perspective, focusing on the role of museum researchers, teachers, policy makers and educators in building effective collaboration.
All the information about the Congress here.
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