#ESERA2018: A European Summer School for Science Education Doctoral Students from Around the Globe

By Lindsay Lightner & Christa Haverly

            We are Lindsay (@LK_Lightner) and Christa (@haverlycm), and we are writing this blog to share about our experiences attending the ESERA Summer School last June as NARSTInternational Committee Scholarship recipients. Lindsay is a PhD candidate at Washington State University studying preservice elementary teachers’ science teaching self-efficacy.  Christa is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University studying urban elementary teachers’ responsive science teaching practices. We had an amazing time at the Summer School, both professionally and personally, and we highly recommend that NARST grads apply to a summer research school in the future!

  

            ESERA Summer School is run by the European Science Education Research Association every summer. If you’re familiar with NARST’s Sandra K. Abell Institute, it’s a similar kind of experience. Designed for doctoral students, 49 of us junior scholars convene in a European city for one week. We are split into seven groups of seven PhD students and two faculty mentors.  Our groups bonded over the week as we met for several hours per day, and many strong professional friendships grew through the week and beyond.  Lindsay’s group keeps in touch now through a group chat, and many participants have been keeping up new global professional and personal contacts through social media and email.

            With English as our common language, we had multiple opportunities to share our research with one another and receive feedback. Participants are selected for the summer school in part because they have scholarly work in progress, so we brought questions we hoped to get input on from the varied perspectives represented at the Summer School. We all brought posters to display some part of our work. These hung up all week, so in addition to one dedicated poster session, we also had informal conversations with one another about our work during soft times in the schedule each day (featuring Finnish coffee and pastries!).

           We also presented our research as a more formal talk in our small groups. After each presentation, the presenter received individual feedback from the group’s coaches, and then received feedback from peers who had discussed the talk while the presenter met with the coaches. We both found the feedback we received on our research to be invaluable.  Our teammates shared perspectives from different scholarly, social and cultural contexts while finding commonalities. 

           In addition to these opportunities to share our own research, the Summer School offered lectures and workshops throughout the week to develop our skills and expose us to new, international perspectives and ideas. Senior scholars presented workshops and plenary sessions on a wide range of topics in science education. Some lecture topics included science identity (pictured with Lucy Avraamidou), the need for critical realism in science education (with Ralph Levinson), and STEM education (with NARST faculty liaison Gillian Roehrig). Workshops often had a more applied focus and covered helpful topics such as preparing dissertation segments for publication, video analysis, and mixed research methods.

            Finally, we had time during the week for cultural experiences. Since our Summer School was hosted very generously by the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, our cultural experiences involved eating lots of Scandinavian food, touring a local elementary school, enjoying daily walks through a Finnish forest, roasting in a traditional Finnish smoke sauna (with a dip in a cold lake [pictured] right afterwards), visiting the Alvar Aalto museum, and enjoying adult beverages up to midnight when it was still light outside. All in all, our time in the Summer School let us meet many new colleagues and make new friends from all over the world while making progress on our research. The ESERA community is fun and generous, and we both appreciated the opportunity to attend.

            Which brings us to our final point. We had the privilege of attending the ESERA Summer School because of the generosity of the NARST International Committee. Each year, the committee offers two scholarships to NARST doctoral students to attend an international summer school. They alternate between giving scholarships to the ESERA Summer School (2018) and the SouthernAfrican Association for Research in Mathematics, Science, and TechnologyEducation Research School (2019). Each scholarship is worth up to $2,500 to cover travel and registration expenses. This investment by NARST in us is huge! Thank you so much to Henriette Tolstrup Holmegaard and Lucy Avraamidou, co-chairs of the committee that awarded our scholarships. If you’re not already, make sure to sign up for the NARST listserv so you stay in the loop about upcoming opportunities!

From left, Christa Haverly, NARST Scholarship Recipient; Gillian Roehrig, NARST Faculty Representative; Lindsay Lightner, NARST Scholarship Recipient; Lucy Avraamidou, NARST International Committee Co-chair