Announcements of events hosted by Division K will be added throughout the annual meeting. Check back daily for the latest, and check us out on social media. 

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Released in Advance of Annual Meeting: 4/03/2023

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Division K Members,

I continue to be deeply honored to serve as Vice President of AERA’s Division K. When I began my tenure, I shared with you my commitment to working toward a more just future. This means expanding the current politics of belonging, which ‘others’ and relegates those who do not abide to restrictive expectations of what counts as learning; and which decides who is ascribed ‘belonging’ and who is expected to perform ‘belonging’ at their own detriment.

My vision for the work of Division K is that we cultivate and sustain a future where ‘belonging’ is expanded, where borders are abolished, and where we are each valued for who we are.

This means doing away with the obfuscation that prevents access—to schools, to theories, to research—as well as a future where any pretense of inclusion is denounced and abolished—doing away with problematic notions of marginal inclusion, which in effect justify the maintenance of marginalization and exclusion.

But as we know, the path to justice is fraught with challenges that are baked into the design of our existing education, economic, healthcare, childcare, housing, and judicial systems. Some would say that these systems, centered on whiteness and privilege, are designed to obfuscate the inequity harm and uphold historical trauma.

Evidence of how hard it is to change systemic inequities continues to be seen today. Many states are deliberately erasing histories and cultures through policies that silence people’s voices, from “anti-woke” legislative agendas and “don’t say gay” policies in public schools, to advancing anti-voting efforts designed to disproportionately prevent Black, Indigenous, and other people of color from voting, and stripping the most fundamental teachings, concepts, and voices from A.P. African American Studies courses. One such concept is this co-naturalization of  ‘American’ and ‘whiteness.’ as Toni Morrison (1992) explained, “American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate”(p. 47). Such restrictive and restricting conceptualization of ‘Americanness’ needs to be abolished. 

Cultivating transformative justice demands a more expansive politics of belonging—expanding what is taught and who is ascribed ‘belonging’ in schools and schooling and reconciling whose practices are overvalued and whose are undervalued. It would be easy to excuse ourselves from the responsibility of building a better future. It is not enough to name our intentions of creating inclusive classrooms, for intention without action can inflict far greater harm than ignoring the injustice being committed.

This is, as we know, a future that does not yet exist but one that is urgently needed. We need to move beyond probability and toward possibility, beyond expectability and toward potentiality. Such a future is possible if we are willing to heed James Baldwin’s words and “go for broke.”  This starts with establishing a moratorium on damage-centered teaching and teacher education, suspending “the mis-education of teachers of color” (The Teacher of Color Collective & Souto-Manning, 2022), and collectively “envisioning a more just future for our profession” (Souto-Manning, 2022). I believe that together we can develop and enact “a compelling path toward more just goals, approaches, and norms for our profession – toward a future in which... teachers and teacher educators collectively revisit and problematize the past while committing to the active pursuit of more equitable and just futures” (p. 213).

As members of Division K—as teachers, teacher educators, education researchers, and human beings who are part of a relational web of interconnections — we are uniquely positioned to recognize and interrupt how Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color have been divested and harmed by education research, teaching practices, policies, and curricula over time, and to interrupt and abolish such injustices. This is imperative for building a future where justice and freedom are constants. 

As always, in the pursuit of justice,

Mariana Souto-Manning, Ph.D.

Vice-President, AERA (American Educational Research Association)

Division K (2022-2025)

President, Erikson Institute

Twitter @SoutoManning

Dear Division K Members,

It is a true honor to serve as Vice President of AERA’s Division K. As I start my tenure, I recommit to the much-needed work and movement toward a more just future. To do so, I believe that we need to re-envision the required transformations in our field to be more than practices of personal resistance. Instead, transformation demands the collective, purposeful, and proactive centering of the voices, values, practices, epistemologies, and paradigms of Black, Indigenous, and other people of Color. Only then may we start to undertake the much-needed work and provision of collective liberation. 

Our field is at a crossroads. COVID-19 made it impossible to ignore inequities and harms in schooling, yet the discourse has quickly shifted from reimagining schooling to repairing and remediating what has been called the “learning loss.” These reparative narratives of crises and racial capitalistic paradigms pathologically shape teaching and teacher education. It is in times like this when we don’t know what to do or how to deal with our anger, fear, and the sense of uncertainty, that the field can benefit from being guided by what Savannah Shange called “a North Star logic” in the book Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (2019). A North Star logic is predicated on designing, envisioning, and bringing to life futures that do not yet exist and in most cases, have never existed. 

This means that as a field, we must firmly reject tendencies to continue to do what is expected and respected as established research agendas, policies, and practices in teaching and teacher education. Collectively, we need to focus on the potentiality of teaching and teacher education. Now, let’s not be naïve; no focus on potentiality is without obstacles. There has been and will continue to be the kind of resistance and “friction produced in the encounter between racialized futures and pasts” (Shange, 2019, p. 65). The days of teaching and teacher education research, policies, and practices centered on whiteness are far from gone. As a field, we can no longer ignore the harm teaching, and teacher education has inflicted. 

To address and repair such harm, as a collective, we must enact robust commitments towards racial justice, social transformation, and truly just teaching and teacher education. Despite frictions and tensions between the past and future, the future of teaching and teacher education must be marked by a movement toward freedom and emancipation as a matter of justice. I am committed to expanding the stories, ways, and systems of knowing, perspectives, paradigms, and experiences delineating research, policy, and practice in teaching and teacher education. 

This expansion and revisioning is necessary if we are to bring closure to a past (and present) of oppression and envision futures of possibility. If we want to imagine possible futures in the pursuit of justice, we need to recognize that there is more expertise distributed across professions than in any one profession. That is, even if teacher educators have more advanced degrees than teachers, we must commit to prioritizing the voices, values, and perspectives of teachers—especially those historically marginalized and minoritized—to forge a future of potentialities. 

Christine Sleeter, among others, has long documented as the overwhelming whiteness of teaching and teacher education and its problematics. It is essential that we learn from and with the stories of potentiality being brought to life day in and day out by Black, Indigenous, and other communities of Color who have been divested and harmed by teaching and teacher education research, policies, and practices over time. We must attend to the pervasiveness of intersectional systems of oppression in teaching and teacher education. This means learning from teachers and teacher educators in countries typically excluded or marginalized in teaching and teacher education scholarship, deliberately moving beyond the longstanding focus on Anglophone countries. Importantly, a North Star logic can guide us to abolish imposed borders and conditions that exclude and “other” the individuals and communities most harmed in and by teaching and teacher education globally. 

This requires embracing approaches to teaching and learning that honor, cultivate, extend, and sustain multiple ways to read, write, talk, and more broadly communicate the brilliance of Black children, Indigenous communities’ epistemologies and ontologies, the sophistication of multilingual children, and so much more. As Division K (re)commits to bringing teachers and teacher educators together across sociopolitical borders and professional fields in the pursuit of justice, my hope is that we can forge a powerful collective that can disrupt the status quo while reimagining our professional priorities in ways that are answerable to Black, Indigenous, and other communities of Color. Although we have a lot of work ahead of us, I want to reaffirm my steadfast commitment to more equitable and just futures in teaching and teacher education. Yet, I want to underscore that this is not “other people’s work.” It is everyone’s work. As part of the teaching and teacher education profession, as a collective, we must work toward, embody, and enact the transformation we hope to see. 

I—along with Program Co-Chairs Drs. Mildred Boveda and Tia Madkins and the community serving Division K (see below image)—am energized, hopeful, and ready to work together with you. 

Together, let’s ensure that teaching and teacher education—research, policy, practice—move toward a more just and transformative future. It is up to us!

As always, committed to the pursuit of justice,

Mariana Souto-Manning, Ph.D.

Vice-President, AERA Division K (2022-2025)

President, Erikson Institute

Twitter: @SoutoManning

Registration Link: www.dissertationwebinar.com

Graduate Student Pre-Conference Seminar  

Wednesday, April 12, 2023. Final dates will be confirmed in late February 2023.   

The deadline for all applications is February 7, 2022, 11:59 PM PST.  Graduate Student Pre-Conference Seminar 

This seminar focuses on developing graduate students’ understandings of their emerging roles as teacher educators who engage in educational research leading to changes in teaching and teacher education theory and practice. It also allows opportunities for participants to meet and talk with other emerging and established scholars in the field of teacher education research about key aspects of transitioning to the academy, including publishing, navigating the job market, and different career trajectories.   To be eligible to apply, the applicant must be a paid member of Division K AND at least in their 3rd year of their Ed.D. or Ph.D. program. Applicants who have taken their qualifying exam or are working towards the dissertation (e.g., working on or defending a proposal, collecting dissertation data, etc.) are strongly encouraged to apply. Please submit to the chair a letter of application (no more than two single-spaced pages) that includes a description of: (a) a summary of the applicant’s research interests or dissertation research, including the problems/questions the applicant is interested in studying; (b) why the applicant’s  research interests are important to teaching and teacher education, (c) how does the applicant’s interests connect to existing theory and other research; (d) what stage in the dissertation process will the applicant be by the 2023 AERA Annual Meeting in April (e.g., qualifying exams, preparing dissertation proposal,  data collection, data analysis, or writing) and the name/email address of your advisor or dissertation chair; and (e) how the pre-conference seminar can support your work/what you hope the seminar can provide specific to your doctoral research project(s). 

Email application materials to the Chair: Nicol R. Howard, Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, University of Redlands (nicol_howard@redlands.edu) with the following subject line: Graduate Student Pre-Conference Seminar: Last Name First Name.

Announcement :

Read on... 

Announcement - Division K Actions Toward Racial Justice and Equity

Dear Division K members:

Professor Miriam Ben-Peretz passed away in July, 2020 in Israel. 

Miriam was a long time invaluable member of Division K. She was the recipient for the 2012 AERA Division K Legacy Award for Teaching and Teacher Education. 

Professor F. Michael Connelly has composed a thoughtful and beautiful piece to remember Professor Miriam Ben-Peretz.