Announcement and Registration
Annual Meeting 2008: University of Copenhagen May 15th till May 17th
What do we know about our graduates?
Graduate analyses for forest sciences and related curricula
On behalf of the SILVA Network the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of
Copenhagen, will host a conference on Forestry education.
Topic
Looking back we find that in many countries numbers of forestry graduates seem to have matched the needs of employment in the forestry sector for long time. Probably nobody can prove this, and surely the situation in different countries was very different.
The situation in the 1990s has been reviewed by Lewark, Pettenella & Saastamoinen (1998). The authors had experienced difficulties in doing this, as only in a few cases data were just ready to take, and definitely there was no standardized way of assessment and presentation. Also it is notable, that the available data have been collected by universities in some cases, associations in others. And there were few cases where real specialists did surveys of the whereabouts of graduates in a regular manner.
Meanwhile the methods of graduate analysis have been developed further and standardized procedures would be possible, but this would need cooperation and agreements between universities. The graduate surveys in the field of higher forestry education in Europe have been mostly stand-alone events, even if the advantages of comparable approaches and data are obvious. Presently in Silva Network we try to lay ground to coordinated approaches of graduate analyses in higher forestry education in Europe.
An important step on this way is the knowledge of what has been done and what is going on – what do we, the universities, know about our graduates? Let us at the annual conference in Copenhagen collect and present the experiences and discuss possible ways ahead.
Call for contributions
We invite you to prepare a presentation in closer or wider connection with the theme of the conference. Please send by E-mail an abstract of up to 300 words to the Organisation Committee till March 25 2008.
The organizing committee will decide on contributions; all applicants will be informed till March 28 2008.
Second Announcement (pdf)
Registration Form (pdf)