Membership info

Being an ETEN member

The rights and responsibilities of a full partnership in ETEN (European Teacher Education Network) includes the right and duty to send a voting delegate to the two annual ECO and TIG leader meetings (ETEN Co-ordinator and Thematic Interest Group leader meetings). The delegates are informally allowed to bring one ore more colleagues who can take part in and speak at the meetings. The idea of this informal opening of the meetings is to meet the need of internationally interested staff from the partner universities to become familiar to being part of an international educational environment and the possibilities that can involve. Also it is a way to give staff from the partner universities a platform to meet and get personally acquainted to colleagues from universities from other nations. In other words ETEN is not only a network of universities educating teachers and social educators. It is as much a network of staff members with special reference to support them - individually and in common - to develop their professional skills and methods through mutual, personal relations. These informal possibilities are in good agreement with the aims of ETEN expressed in the Statutes.
Furthermore a full ETEN partnership gives partners an unlimited possibility to send staff to the annual TIG based Conferences where a wide range of academic seminars offers reports or presentations of papers introducing national or international projects of interest for staff involved in teacher and educator education.
Thus ETEN offers membership of one ore more Thematic Interest Groups (TIGs). A TIG membership demands a certain degree of participation and will from the participating university to give staff member engaged in a TIG a financial and moral back up. Under the right conditions ETEN is able to provide an exceptional possibility to work across borders with research and development on an academic level in favour of both the participating university and it's educational efforts and the staff member in charge of the TIG membership. Students can profit of the TIGs through international courses generated as one of the results of the research and development work of a TIG.

Regarding student and staff exchange, a partnership in ETEN provides the partners with an easy way of making agreements about exchange. The personal relation between ECOs and the confidence, which is a product of that relation, makes exchange agreements or programmes function very smoothely and individually - also regarding exchange between Europe and USA.

In order to meet the cost of administering the Network each partner has to contribute an annual membership fee of 600 Euros, to be fixed each September meeting. The fee is calculated according to a scale based on the GDP of the country that the member belongs to. The scale refers to the statistics of Human Development's annual report. There are three levels of fee: Full fee 600 Euros (number 1-39), half fee 300 Euros (number 40-78) and one sixth fee 100 Euros (number 79-177).
The Board is to recommend to ECO Meeting the fees for the coming financial year.
The fee pays the expenses of the Secretariat, IT support, and part of Board expenses. Each year at the April meeting an annual financial audit is presented to the ECO and TIG leader meeting. An annual budget is presented and passed at the September meeting.

Without drawing any rash conclusions one could state that ETEN is a network with many examples of so called "good practice". The following sections tries to make plain how ETEN in a mutual proces could share good practice with universities and staff also working with teacher and educator education, but not in a financial situation which allow them to take part in the network under the same conditions that regular ETEN partners do.