Mari Elken
(NIFU / Hedda)
Higher education as a research field is expanding and in recent years, an increasing number of early career researchers have become active in the field. The Consortium for Higher Education Researchers (CHER) recently included Mari Elken as a representative for early career researchers to the Board of Governors. Currently, Mari works as a researcher at NIFU, and is in the last stages of her doctoral work at the University of Oslo. Mari is also a graduate of the Hedda master Programme in Higher Education and is the editor of the Hedda blog. This means that this time we turned the tables and the rest of the Hedda team put her into the spot of being interviewed about her new position.
First of all, congratulations on your new task, how did you end up in this position?
The debates about early career researchers’ role and position in the field have been going on for some time. This led to a small group of early career researchers at the CHER conference in Reykjavik in 2011 to establish ECHER – Early Career Higher Education Researchers. While ECHER is an independent network, this development was noted by CHER and last year in Belgrade, ECHER got the task to nominate someone for the CHER Board of Governors to highlight the voice of early career researchers.
This is what ECHER did this year in Lausanne at the 2013 CHER conference. I am very grateful and humbled that the ECHER group put me up for nomination and that CHER members supported ECHERs suggestion. I think this is an important development and shows that CHER takes the voice of early career researchers seriously. There are a number of issues that are common for many early career researchers in Europe and beyond, so it is wonderful that there is now an opportunity to discuss these in the wider context of higher education research and explore how the next generation can contribute to developing the field in a fruitful manner. So, I think this is really exciting!
So what exactly is ECHER?
As I mentioned, ECHER stands for Early Career Higher Education Researchers. It is a rather loose network in the sense that there is no membership fees or a heavy governance structure. We believe this is most appropriate as it assures an inclusive approach and a mentality that what you get from the network is based on what you put into it. There is a group of very driven and competent coordinators who assure that everything runs smoothly and that there are events at larger higher education conferences, but other than that the network is rather member driven on a volunteer basis. We have a mailing list to share calls for papers for conferences and journals/books and other relevant information, a website with an open member database to find potential collaborators. For instance, the website also has an overview of relevant publication channels that anyone can view. We think openness of information is important since we now live in a much more closely connected world where sharing information is key – in order to assure relevance we have to show usefulness.
While ECHER is independent, there is also an emerging tradition for cooperation both with CHER and EAIR for organizing pre-conference events for early career researchers, and this has been a rather successful practice. We have had seminars where well respected journal editors come in to share some tips and tricks on how to publish, and other renowned senior researchers sharing their experiences on how to navigate in this world of higher education research. And of course, it is a fantastic arena for informal networking for us which is likely to lead to many interesting collaborations in the future. Personally, I firmly believe that the ties you establish with other researchers early in your career are really important.
There are some places in Europe that have a higher concentration of higher education researchers, and I can consider myself lucky to be in Oslo where there is a rather large group of people working on higher education both at the University of Oslo and at NIFU. So in that sense it is pure luxury to have so much expertise around me. However, in many cases people doing higher education research might be rather alone in their departments and even countries. This can be a rather difficult situation, especially when you are an early career researcher, and then the kind of networks like ECHER can be very important.
The network has been growing very fast so I believe this is also evidence that it fills a particular need. I also think it would be important that there is synergy with CHER that then functions as a more formalised arena for higher education researchers, bringing together both early career and more senior researchers.
So what will be your task at the CHER board?
CHER stands for the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers, and in recent years it has had a rather stable membership with around 160 members from more than 30 countries. The consortium is behind the CHER conference, which is considered probably one of the more important research focused higher education conferences in Europe. It has a secretariat which is now hosted by CIPES in Portugal that attends to the daily management of the consortium.
We have discussed the views of ECHER members regarding CHER on our email list already. I would summarise that there is an overarching question about the future of the research field, and the role that CHER and CHER conference has and will have in the future. The field as it is now is marked by a number researchers that really have defined higher education as a research field from its infancy (and lots of respect to all of the mothers and fathers of the field!). However, there have also been some changes in recent years in the field of higher education research – in terms of its focus, structure and scope. So there is a question on what does this mean for CHER and CHER conferences – the answer might just be that it does not mean anything, but I think it is important to discuss this.
The debate in ECHER indicated that there are some common concerns amongst early career researchers. There is broad recognition that the conferences this far have been extremely valuable but there are also a number of quite good ideas on how to continue improving. I believe it is also important to not become too static, so one needs to find a good balance between tradition and change. So I think some of the suggestions that were raised in the ECHER debate really deserve attention – in terms of the timing of the conference and its structure.
Associations like CHER exist for their members, this is something the early career group is quite conscious about. Many of the early career researchers live on limited scholarships and do not get their membership fees reimbursed by default, so for them the question of added value is really central when they consider membership and whether they choose CHER conference over any of the other conferences on higher education.
One should keep in mind that those who are in their early career stage now are likely to be the future of the field in 10-20-30 years, so it is important also to assure that CHER conference would become their key professional arena. I think this is something CHER should take very seriously. If significant groups of young researchers in the future find other professional arenas instead of the CHER conference, this might have some quite adverse consequences in long term. However, we do believe that CHER showed a strong signal that they are taking the voice of early career researchers seriously by introducing an early career researcher representative to the board. So I very much hope we will have some excellent discussions coming up! Really excited about that!
