Servicing the regional community through research

The Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Research (EMCER) is one of the more recently set up of the University's research centres. Building on the Faculty of Education's Comparative Education Programme, which was established in 1994, EMCER sets out to further one of the University's main goals - to become a pole of excellence in the interdisciplinary study of Mediterranean and European issues.

In pursuing this goal and in focusing specifically on the challenges that education systems in the Euro-Mediterranean region are facing, EMCER has made a number of contributions that highlight the way universities can be mobilised to support development goals of the wider regional and international community.

EMCER has adopted a three-pronged approach to its activities. First is the research aspect, particularly qualitative research that involves fieldwork in different Mediterranean and European societies to capture the lived realities of complex educational dynamics.

So far, fieldwork has been carried out in Syria, to document the way global education has been integrated in the basic school system; in the Occupied Territories, where an evaluation was carried out of the Education Management Information System set up by the Ministry of Education, as well as of the Distance Education Project in the beleaguered town of Hebron; and in Tunisia, where an in-depth study of the competency approach in the compulsory education cycle was carried out over a period of four years.

Most recently, EMCER has been involved in looking into the educational entitlement of Palestinian refugee children in the UNRWA schools in the camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and West Bank and Gaza.

In all these studies, field visits, first-hand observation, interviews and analysis of documents enabled the development of insights which feed into the policy-making process of different stakeholders.

Other projects, involving desk research, have looked at the lifelong career guidance policies and agendas as these are being articulated in the EU accession and candidate countries, and across 29 European states.

Secondly, EMCER has a strong research dissemination agenda. The different studies referred to above have all been published in international academic journals and were presented in conferences the world over. EMCER also services educational needs in Malta.

EMCER is directed by Professor Ronald G. Sultana, who is Professor of Educational Sociology and Comparative Education. His research interests include analysis of European and Mediterranean education and training systems, focusing particularly on the links between education and the world of work and teacher education.

He leads courses in critical pedagogy, educational history and comparative education studies. His e-mail address is: ronald.sultana @um.edu.mt.