The first day started with an opening lecture on democracy by Prof. Dr. Anton Pelinka (Central European University Budapest, Hungary) who stated that freedom is a precondition for research and academic teaching. In a key note by Dr. Zsuzsanna Mirnics (Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem, Hungary) the issue on methodical and practical research of supervision was raised which is like in coaching mainly consisting on in-case studies. The strong need of evidence based studies was highlighted. Prof. Dr. Brigitte Schigl (Danube-University Krems, Austria) presented results from her and her students works on supervision and stated that there can be unwanted side effects and risks by supervision. This is also a very important issue for coaching: Katrin Oellerichs (University of Kassel) made that quite clear, when she presented the “dark side of coaching”. A lot of impact have expectations or the mental image of coaching how results of coaching are accepted or seen as negative effect. A big issue that makes research in coaching more difficult was mentioned by Prof. Dr. Heidi Möller (University of Kassel) on why coaches do (not) participate in coaching research. In an online-study she found out that one among other reasons why coaches do not participate in coaching research is the fear of being in a bad position afterwards.
Positive effects of supervision were shown in Brigita Rupar’s (National Education Institute, Ljubljana) presentation. The group of elementary school teachers who underwent a supervision process showed higher level of reflexivity and the understanding of their core tasks as teachers. The difference from the control group considering stress coping skills was not significant. We found Frank Austermann lecture very intriguing. He explained good coaching criteria in the scope of Foucault’s philosophy. The challenges for coaches are the acceleration and boundless work in the modern labour market. Coaching offers the chance to reflect on the acceleration and boundless work, but it can also serve as a tool to adapt to both and take the tem as granted. In order to prevent accelerated and boundless coaching, Austermann suggests following Foucault`s conception of “practice of freedom”, meaning to care for oneself, to have the courage for the truth and criticism.
Altogether we believe that EmployID is ahead of time concerning the transfer of coaching into virtual worlds and just in time to provide important research material for a rising need of foundation.
The participants at the conference discussed the topics very diverse. Proceedings on the conference will be published by the end of this year.
For more information on the conference: http://www.anse.eu/news.html
