As you are no doubt aware, the AARE is committed to the promotion of educational research in ways that comprise the whole range of research endeavours in education from pre-school right through to lifelong learning, work based learning, neighbourhood houses and further education. While much of our initiatives are taken up with standard areas of curriculum and school based learning provision, there has been an increasing awareness in the need for educational research into the creative and performing arts. In many respects these areas constitute a new frontier in educational endeavour as their operations transcend the limits of classroom and school and enter into educational provision in the wider community. It is indeed timely that this conference at Newcastle has consciously focussed on these areas in educational research and has thereby taken a first step in welcoming researchers whose work to date has largely gone unrecognised in the annals of educational research. I am confident that after this mini conference the boundaries of educational research will have been pushed further than before and that we will need to recognise the potential of these new areas as part of our mainstream research endeavour. The related attention to defining the doctorate is building in importance as the range of research degrees in education is growing rapidly, along with student numbers. This exciting collection of papers contains much scholarly reflection on our own task as educators in terms of supervision and assessment of doctoral study.
Another central AARE commitment is to the idea of generating links between researchers and research centres, groups and organisations throughout the country. At times, because of the logistics of large conference organisation we have tended to locate our major conferences in the large cities along the eastern border. Even as we do this we are aware that we run the risk of disenfranchising our members who work in regional centres and whose cultural isolation is overlooked in the need to find large conference halls and to attract numbers of attendees such as will come to a big city centre. We hope in future to involve members in ICT based communications as one means of getting past the problems of geography in running a national event. Meanwhile our effort is to generate regional workshops and mini conferences to maintain member interest and to stimulate research endeavours.
For these reasons we are particularly delighted to auspice the Newcastle mini - conference as it comprises both the new and timely research directions and the regional focus that we have been hoping to generate. AARE would like to thank the energetic group of conference organisers and in particular Dr Robert Cantwell whose energy and commitment has brought the conference into life. May it be a rich and rewarding event for all who attend.
Judith Gill PhD
Associate Professor in Education
President AARE 2003