April 2026
2025–2026 President Maisha T. Winn delivered her Presidential Address, “The Future Is Here: Historical Signals in Education Research,” to an engaged audience on Friday, April 10, at the 2026 Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. In her lecture, Winn argued that historical signals from the decade following the Civil Rights Movement offer enduring lessons for how we imagine and enact the future of education.
Winn began her talk by describing Alvin Toffler’s concept of future shock, which he defined as distress caused by too much change in too short a time. She noted that the education community has been grappling with this condition amid political and societal turmoil since the last Annual Meeting.
“In the throes of our collective and very personal experiences of future shock, educators and education researchers were expected to react to everything, everywhere, all at once, with little time and few mechanisms to imagine, plan, or create conditions and practices for the future systems and dynamics we want to prioritize and pursue,” said Winn.
Instead of imagining the future as something to be created anew, Winn argued that it is already present—living in our archives and histories of people-led movements. She invited attendees to consider how historical inquiry can inform contemporary thinking about what comes next.
“The first step in the foresight process is looking back to prepare to look ahead,” said Winn. “Such processes allow us to examine the practices, learnings, and strategies, for example, of everyday people who have worked collectively to transform their communities and community-serving institutions.”
Winn referenced her concept of “futuring,” an expansive approach to engaging with the past and present to shape collective pathways forward. She also described her work in “Historiography for the Future,” which repositions historical contributions to education as world-building innovations.
“Historiography for the Future asserts that those who are keenly interested in thinking about the future must also analyze historical signals alongside current signals of change,” she said.
Throughout her address, Winn emphasized the importance of cultivating “citizen archivists” through engagement with primary sources.
“So many ‘maps’ of the future of education that speak to pressing issues in education today are hidden in boxes, under beds, stacked in basements or forgotten in closets and elsewhere,” she said.
Winn stressed the importance of collective work toward futuring, especially in the age of AI, while also introducing alternative framings such as Ancestral Intelligence, Ancient Intelligence, and Archival Intelligence.
“As scholars from across disciplines, we have a responsibility to examine the historical contexts in all the work we do in the name of education research,” said Winn. “Futuring values arriving to the future as a collective with all our intelligences intact.”
Winn concluded her address by describing futuring in practice through several ongoing projects, including her Families as Futurists social design experiment.
“Together, these families explore historical signals as well as signals of change as they generate plans and ideas for the future of education,” she said. “Futuring brings textured visioning and coordinated action to dreams. As a collective we have opportunities to build the futures we want for the next generations which requires more than reacting but curating spaces to dream, imagine, and act.”
The video recording of Winn’s Presidential Address will be released on the AERA website and AERA’s YouTube channel in May.