Being a founding member of SERA, John shares his reflections on his memories of SERA Conferences and what has made these experiences so memorable…
I must be the longest-serving member. I am probably the most ancient of them all!
I began in SERA when I started my MEd, and at that time, the University of Glasgow, Education Department, ran a colloquium. I think it would probably be Nigel Grant at that point who said, “Really, you should be a part of SERA”, and that was really how I got involved.
At that time, the conference was held at St Andrew’s, and we had two rooms, and it lasted for two days. Probably no more than sixteen papers. It was like a colloquium; it was more like someone who was an authority sharing that with other groups of people who either didn’t agree with them or were interested in what was going on. At that point, it was quite an exclusive club. Now, that has moved. It moved from that originally, I think to the important kind of leaders of SERA, bringing in their research students. So, it was still that very restricted membership and then of course it expanded from there.
I would say the Golden Years of the conference were when they were held at the George Hotel in Perth. They were very funny conferences. I mean, for example, we had a Salsa-Ceilidh evening. One of the members was very keen on Salsa. It was very much a very, very friendly organisation. Everyone in Scotland in educational research knew everybody else. A very small community, and at that time, we had expanded to about four or five rooms. Four or five parallel sessions. I think it went over about two days. Saturday was always a very difficult day because we couldn’t get practitioners from schools. At that time, it was a big family. As it grew, and it moved, it then expanded to near what it is now.
The way it is going, I think SERA has to watch what it does. My analogy is Lidl. Lidl started off as a supermarket that was quite small, sold things you never knew, and it was unique. SERA is a small, very friendly and unique. It’s got to watch that it doesn’t expand, like Lidl has done. SERA doesn’t want to be a ‘mini-BERA’. I have gone through the years when BERA wanted to have BERA (Scotland), and SERA had to, in a way, fight for its entity in those years. But BERA is different: it is a large, massive, pseudo-government organisation, funded by the government that has permanent staff. It is not like SERA; it never will be. SERA’s just got to be careful that it doesn’t outgrow being the friendly organisation that it is. That would be my hint for the future. It has already moved well away from even pre-COVID.
Pre-COVID, I am talking about conferences at this point. Pre-COVID, people arrived at conferences, we knew most of them, they were greeted, there was a social interaction, we had rolls and sausage and a lot of chat. But post-COVID, SERA was the first organisation to open up face-to-face. All these people who had been, frustratingly, not presenting anything, had decided that this was their opportunity. The first conference after COVID, we were overwhelmed by the number of entries, and it changed dramatically how SERA has gone after that. We now have large numbers of people. It’s not like the years of where you were dealing with when everyone knew each other. It has changed, whether it’s for the better or worse, I don’t know. It was the group that Angela Jaap was in that, in my personal opinion, that saved SERA. They coped with the technology, online Zoom meetings, the SERA Connects process, and the expansion of the networks on an electronic basis. I attribute the survival of SERA to that group. My impression is that people who come to SERA conferences go away going, ‘it’s a really good conference, it’s really friendly’. This is where the Irish Association connection was made; they particularly came to us in Edinburgh. They then asked SERA to help with their own conference, and that is a great connection.
The SERA Quiz came from the Golden Years at the George Hotel in Perth. It was partly a way of filling up the Thursday night. Friday night was the conference dinner. Thursday night was a social evening, people were looking for something to do instead of sitting there. We used to just sit there, have a few drinks, sort the world out. We had a trophy. It is a quiz that is not based on educational research or anything totally sensible. As I said earlier, my fear of SERA becoming anonymous, like an everyone-else conference, is partly eased by the fact that the quiz runs and there is still a social aspect that still goes on.
Over the past 50 years, we’ve had the good, the bad, and the ugly. We have had some particularly, really good people. One of the people back at the beginning was Ian Mentor. He ended up working in Oxbridge, and he was the person who I think elevated SERA in terms of its academic connections. In terms of what it was doing, I think he upped the refereeing level so that the items being presented at the conference, the standard increased quite a bit. But that also had a knock-on effect because it meant that SERA was publishing more erudite papers, that SERA were making connections into more academic organisations and events. So, I think he moved it from being Scottish and, I think, constrained by people who knew each other. It opened it up: we started to have delegates from other places, foreign places, and we even had delegates from India. They were lovely, lovely people who at one point said, ‘Could we take the bus to Ireland?’ because of the size of Scotland. They were really, really lovely. I think that came after we started to expand. That was era that led into George doing his work with Europe and started to make connections was the Nordic Association. That was an expansion point.
I’m now at the stage with SERA where I’ve been there, done that. It’s time for other people to do it; you can’t run an organisation on elderly memories. So, I now step back from a lot of the things I used to do. The secret of SERA is to keep it simple and to go with what you have in mind rather than be influenced too much by external forces. There is a tendency, once you get to the stage where you are dealing with lots of external organisations and lots of large events, that you start to be shaped by what you think other organisations want. SERA’s secret over the years: SERA has done what SERA likes to do, in the way it likes to do it. Now, you can’t just not evolve, but they are evolving. If you look at the conference, as it reflects what SERA does, if you look at the breadth of what goes on at the conference and look at the level of papers.
One thing that you probably do want to know is that SERA, in its early days, placed a lot of emphasis on quantitative research. People were commissioned by the Scottish Government to do quantitative research because what the Government wanted to know was if you reduced a class size from 32 to 29, what percentage increase in performance do you get. At that time, you would get things like ‘giving the students a drink of milk during the day would produce a 15.7% increase in academic achievement’. A lot of research reflected a cause-and-effect, numerical effect. You had to be able to say that there was a difference. Part of what SERA did, and it had connections with the Scottish Government at that time, was to try and persuade the Government of the benefits of moving onto qualitative research. Nowadays, there is much more qualitative research than quantitative research. Partly because these numbers don’t have the same influence that they had in the past, where people believed they meant more than they actually did.
It used to be that the SERA Executive met with the Government department which commissioned research. Part of SERA’s role in these meetings was to tell the Government what was being researched across the country. To try and persuade them that what SERA was looking at is important, and that it should be funded, and that this type of research should be expanded. Usually two meetings per year. We used to have delegates from the Scottish Government at the conference every year, and I think that this is one of the things that SERA needs to be re-established: a working connection with policymakers and policy funders.
One of the strengths of SERA is that it has a breadth of people. It is quite nice that people come to the conference who come from agencies that aren’t usually in that kind of conference environment. People come along to just hear what it is going on, not just the content in what is being presented. This year’s conference strands have slightly changed. The strands have been there for at least 8 years and have been more or less the same. Obviously, digital learning had to be added in. One of the early strands, philosophy of education, became a piece of research that just wasn’t very common anymore. So, it has to change, and it has been updated this year.
Remember, SERA is run by half a dozen men and a dog. Always, at SERA Executive meetings, I try to say how proud I am of what they do. How these people find any time in their day to do anything at all apart from get through tasks of work is very, very impressive. That’s what makes SERA different. There are no executives in offices that run it, it is run by the people who actually know what is going on. That is a strength in Scotland, because the size allows you to cope with it. Again, this is SERA’s strength: it is a welcoming organisation because it is geographically contained.
As universities move towards tighter funding, more demanding on staff, it becomes difficult to encourage and support emerging researchers. That is one area that SERA can work well with. It already has a lot of informal support if you look at the number of researchers that are in Networks. They are doing the job of nurturing and supporting emerging researchers where universities are not doing, to the same extent, to do with funding, pressure on staff, and resourcing. SERA has this as part of its constitutional aim. So, that is the area that it can work on: encourage emerging researchers. It already has the novelty of the Rapid Thesis and Poster Presentations, it has the Estelle Brisard Memorial Award which encourages people who might not have published or might not have realised how good they are, to be given that merit. I think that’s one of SERA’s main roles: to maintain an educational research community on a friendly and personal basis.
If you go back, historically, the networks at that time had their own one-day conference. But this is moving into this century of digital communication. What network people can now do is talk to each other and bounce ideas off each other easily. They can speak face-to-face without travelling and taking up time, they can exchange documents and host a whole range of activities. That’s where it’s different. I am so pleased that SERA has adapted to that. Networks flourish in the digital era. SERA flourishes too. It has taken it on board and developed it. It is miles away from the original, small group of important people talking about what they considered to be important things and what people were very happy to listen to.
The most important thing about SERA is not what you present, but the people you meet.