CALL FOR PAPERS

Aim: To publish a book for the IAMP community by the IAMP 2008 conference in Finland (=19th -22nd May 2008).

Main idea: The historical roots of the IAMP in general and the military pedagogical ones in particular need to be self-reflected by our experts both individually and collectively, in order to be prepared for the future challenges and expectations facing us. As it is said in the constitution of the IAMP we are “aiming at assisting, developing, improving, and establishing professional military institutions of advanced learning”.

This call for papers is directed both to our “old” and our “new/young” members, meaning that those feeling to be relatively experienced in our field are recommended to reflect on their personal “military pedagogical” contributions while writing a state-of-the-art revisited version of their main military pedagogical ideas and core interpretations to form an exemplary “ring in the chain” of the IAMP community. For those who feel that they belong to “newcomers” of the IAMP, we offer an opportunity to analyze, even critically, our canonical past/present while giving their contribution for us and for the future of the IAMP.

When we reflect on our past as an informal network of military scholars and then as a formal association, our roots in the discussions at the NTG WG IT&ED (=NATO Training Group, Working Group on Individual Training and Education Developments) already in 1999 (Toiskallio 2000) are worth recalling. Since those days, these conversations have been very interesting and enriching, although we have often experienced problems in understanding each other (Florian 2002). According to the now deceased Dr. Heinz Florian (cf. Florian 2002, 5), problems arose even when we used the same English words, due to the diversity of our historical, cultural, national, individual, and social backgrounds.

Despite of these kinds of challenges in the midst of us some holistic and uniting approaches have been elaborated by our colleagues. One such a holistic framework has been clarified by the professor, Dr., Jarmo Toiskallio by his hermeneutical military-pedagogical planning model
(cf. e.g. in Micewski 2003,119).

According to the survey for the members of the IAMP (Raviv 2007) the lack of shared and coherent conceptual framework is one of the main challenges of the IAMP. Figure 1 shows in an explicit form a proposal to such a coherent framework hopefully shared by the members of the IAMP and explained from a various national and individual perspectives and positions. It goes without saying that such a holistic framework can be shared by us despite of our position in the debates on the “pedagogy” (often used especially by Continental-Europeans) versus “training and education” (often used especially in other parts of the world) or then in the discussions ranging from “pedagogical-educational-training studies” versus for example leadership and behavioural studies.

Through the framework, such as drawn to the figure 1, we can give individually and collectively our own contribution to the conceptual level understanding of us but additionally in a practical manner closely linked to the practices of the teachers, the students and the researchers of our military educational institutions. Both of the educators and our students are coming from different kinds of societies and cultures having different kinds of expectations and competencies influencing inevitably to the outcome of our schooling. At the same time the changing nature of our areas of operations (i.e. peace-time; areas of crisis management operations; the nature of warfare) is rapidly changing. The tools (=the teaching methods and means to educate) available for us as the military educators are changing and our capabilities to use them effectively can be improved. In the midst of these turbulent features our understanding of the learning objectives and the intended outcomes of our schooling is changing or is it really? We seem to be living in such a situation that not only “a right and an appropriate answer” to one single question is needed but many aligned and balanced answers to all these kinds of questions and also in practice at our military educational institutions are inevitably needed.

Structure of the publication: Will be planned based on the contributions of the individual writers.

Deadline: By the end of August 2007 a personal agreement to write an article to this book including the title/heading of your article.

By the end of this year (2007) to write a draft of the article.

By the end of February in 2008 to write a final version of the article.

The chief editor of the publication and POC is LTCOL, Ph.D. Juha Mäkinen (juha.makinen@mil.fi).