A good evening in the Fens, I thought, as ECER's first PhD conference began last night in Cambridge with a thoughtful and probing introduction by Marcia McKenzie who was on splendid form despite having to cross both Canada and the Atlantic to get here. I was worn out just crossing England, but I put this down to a break in the journey at Bicester Village to see how the other half shops. I contented myself with an espresso amidst the swirl of conspicuous consumption around me. A visit to the Village is recommended for all those who think that buying stuff you don't really need in large amounts is somehow falling out of fashion.
Marcia's talk was titled: Future Trends in ESE research: where to from here? My first thought was to wonder where here actually was, and whether we'd all agree about that. My second was that the focus and construction of the talk, and the gentle participation required of us, was rather well-judged, given the nature of the audience. It was, to ECER's credit a splendidly international audience.
We were asked to think (in threes) about Ganz's ideas around Challenge, Choice, Outcome and Moral, which proved a good means of helping people who'd just met to talk about how they saw their work, and what they wanted from it.
I suggested that perhaps an academic’s main challenge is that hardly anyone will ever know about what they do, given how hard it seems for research to percolate through into the mainstream media. It follows that identifying your key audience early on is important for a researcher. Marcia was kind enough to quote the question I posed at the Durban WEEC conference in 2007:
Given all the difficulties the world now faces in relation to development and the environment – and the importance of education in addressing such challenges – what insights does environmental education research provide that will help us?
It still seems a good question ...
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