April 2024
The 2024 Annual Meeting featured five thought-provoking lectures given by 2023 AERA Award recipients. The talks, by some of the most insightful and influential minds in the field of education research, addressed some of the most pressing issues in education, from equity in civic education to the unifying of research, practice, and policy to reinvent education.
James A. Banks (University of Washington) delivered the 2023 Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award Lecture. Banks’s lecture, titled “My Epistemological Journey: The Quest for Educational Equity in a National and Global Context,” described how his epistemological journey revealed the powerful ways in which race, class, and gender influence how knowledge is constructed, as well as how transformative knowledge can help students from diverse and marginalized groups become effective participants in their local, national, and global civic communities.
Banks described the differences between mainstream and transformative knowledge, noting that transformative academic knowledge often originates in marginalized communities.
“Transformative academic knowledge assumes that knowledge is not neutral but is influenced by human interests and that all knowledge reflects the power and social relationships within society,” said Banks. “The traditional assumption of the mainstream is that the biases of the researchers are not reflected, and transformative knowledge assumes that those biases do reflect the knowledge and they should be made explicit.”
Linda Darling-Hammond (Learning Policy Institute) delivered the 2023 Distinguished Public Service Award Lecture, titled “Transforming the System: The Urgent Need to Unify Research, Practice, and Policy to Reinvent Education.”
Darling-Hammond touched on how she has used research and collective knowledge to inform policy for education as a way to engage in public service.
“Policy is one of those largely invisible forces that act on our lives and our schools in ways that we often don’t see or understand,” said Darling-Hammond. “When policy is problematic, it is often teachers and principals who get the blame, even though they did not start the process.”
Darling-Hamond identified the three major issues she encountered when she began to study policy—inequality in funding, inadequate teacher preparation, and schools that were not designed to meet the needs of students—and how that informed her career in research in policy.
“The Learning Policy Institute was created to carry research to policy,” said Darling-Hammond. “When you publish in a journal, it does not travel to policy automatically. We really have to think about what we’re doing if we want evidence-based policy.”
The 2023 E. F. Lindquist Award Lecture was delivered by James W. Pellegrino (University of Illinois at Chicago). His lecture, “Fulfilling a Vision of Assessment in Support of Educational and Societal Good: Progress Made and Miles Still to Go,” noted important thoughts offered by E. F. Lindquist and Robert Glaser, two 20th-century intellectual giants and educational assessment pioneers, regarding the future of educational assessment and its capabilities for supporting educational and societal good, as well as some of the work remaining to be done.
Pellegrino discussed what has changed in educational assessment in over 20 years, stating: “Theories, models, and data are best represented by a broad sociocultural perspective. . . . Coherence among curriculum, instruction, and assessment is essential to achieve ambitious and equitable classroom learning environments.”
In the 2023 Early Career Award Lecture, “On Justice: The Realities and Possibilities of Higher Education Policy Research,” Dominique Baker (University of Delaware) talked about the purpose, duty, and legacy inherent within her research on higher education policy, given her aims of advancing justice.
Baker discussed her work about the burdens of undergraduate debt, as well as race conscious admissions, noting that in all aspects of these topics, her goal has been to think carefully about what research evidence says is a pathway toward racial justice.
“Ultimately, when we think about student loans, loans are culture,” said Baker. “Student loan debt is fundamentally intertwined with our larger society. It shows us what we value, who we think is deserving, and who is allowed abundance in our society.”
“Similarly, I think admissions are also culture. How students gain access to colleges and universities, and which institutions we think are worthy of having their admissions studied, is fundamentally intertwined with our larger society.”
Finally, Marc Lamont Hill (Graduate Center–CUNY) delivered the 2023 Social Justice in Education Award Lecture. His lecture dealt with the subject of schooling in the age of incarceration.
Leading with the fact that U.S. rates of incarceration have exponentially increased, disproportionately more so for Black and Latinx people, Hill acknowledged that while the initial ideology of the penitentiary system was rooted in time, education, and reflection, the system now does not reflect that.
“The modern prison has been emptied of any rehabilitative capacity,” said Hill. “Access to reading materials, affordable phone calls to family, college degree programs, and mental health resources—all of which have proven to reduce recidivism—they’ve all been stripped from American prisons.”
In discussing laws that were passed in which parents could be given jail time if their child missed a certain number of days of school, Lamont Hill argued that truancy laws were created out of concern for parents and students, but the current laws are undergirded by a logic of criminalization.
“Truant students are no longer viewed as vulnerable children losing educational opportunities, but as human embodiments of broken-windows theory, whose absence from school signifies community disorder and looming unsafety for the broader society.”
Recordings of these lectures will be available on the AERA website and YouTube channel.