American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting
The American Educational Research Association (AERA), a national research society, strives to advance knowledge about education, to encourage scholarly inquiry related to education, and to promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good.
The 2019 Annual Meeting is an opportunity to explore how the work of educational researchers can help overcome the challenges of our time by becoming more relevant to communities, practitioners, and policy makers who believe in democratic principles and the public schools that should sustain those principles.
The theme of the 2019 Annual Meeting is Leveraging Education Research in a “Post-Truth” Era:
Multimodal Narratives to Democratize Evidence. Multiple subthemes can be derived from this year’s theme and include:
- The relationship between a “post-truth” politics and the exacerbation of racial, class, and gender inequality in education policy and practice from pre-K through higher education.
- Strategies to address the marginalization of the empirical research and knowledge of our field to ensure that it informs the development of professionals and their practice.
- The relationship between the measures used to evaluate students, educators, schools, universities and workforce development in a standardized-test-driven system and the evidence on developmental psychology, culturally relevant ways of knowing, and the racial hierarchy that too often defines our field.
The question for education researchers is how, in a so-called “post-truth” political era when evidence is shunted and emotion is exploited, can we make our research matter to lessen inequality and increase educational opportunities? How do we have an impact when our most conscientious methodology—measuring, understanding, and communicating material and experiential “realities”—is increasingly discredited by those who construct alternate truths to serve their agendas? Furthermore, how can our findings speak to and of emotions such as fear and anxiety, which are regularly scapegoated onto the most marginalized individuals rather than attributed to their economic and social causes?
IMPACTS director Dr. Shaheen Shariff and research assistants Chloe Garcia, Milka Nyariro, Andrea Velghe, Shannon Hutcheson, Sarah Lewington, and Christopher Dietzel are presenting at the 2019 AERA Annual Meeting. Dr. Shariff, Chloe, Shannon, Sarah, and Chris are presenting in a session titled, "Rape Culture in Public Education and Online: Exploring Current Realities and Solutions". Chloe, Milka, and Andrea are presenting in a session titled, "Studying the Use of Arts-Based Toolkits in Anti-Oppression Training to Address Campus-Based Sexual Violence."
More information about the conference is available on the 2019 AERA Annual Meeting webpage.
