May 2025
The 2025 Annual Meeting featured four prominent lectures given by 2024 AERA award recipients. These four lectures span some of the most prominent awards in the field from the Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education and Early Career awards to the E. F. Linquist and the Social Justice in Education awards. These lectures convey both the breadth of significant research in the field and this importance of elevating exceptional scholarship in the education research community.
Kris D. Gutiérrez (University of California, Berkeley) delivered the 2024 Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award Lecture. Her lecture, titled “Mutual Constitution, Learning as Movement, and Developmental Ecologies,” explored how the analytic frame of mutual constitution helps to avoid the tendency to separate individuals and practices from one another and the activities in which they participate and help to co-construct.
Gutiérrez discussed how context should be understood as mutually constituted by people’s practices, participance, and tools.
“Too often in our field, it has been easier to look at pieces of human activity and to ignore contexts of their relation,” said Gutiérrez. “This is important, as context, even here at this meeting, is still talked about and studied as a variable, as that which surrounds a container of human activity.”
Travis J. Bristol (University of California, Berkeley) delivered the 2024 Early Career Award Lecture, titled “Diasporic (Dis)Connection: The School-Based Experiences of Teachers of African Descent Across the Americas.” His lecture traced his early meaning-making experiences around Diasporic connections and shared findings on the experiences of Black teachers in urban areas and Latin American countries.
Bristol began with his early research on why Black men left teaching, finding that almost half of Black male teachers at urban schools with three or more other Black male teachers left the profession.
“I knew that understanding why teachers left the profession was as important, if not more so, than recruiting teachers,” said Bristol.
The 2024 E. F. Lindquist Award Lecture was delivered by Gregory J. Cizek (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). His lecture, “Seven Questions for Educational Measurement Specialists,” posed questions that challenge diverse but common practices in educational measurement, such as the role of differential item functioning (DIF), matching appropriate accommodations to test-taker needs, and the relevance of opportunity to learn.
Cizek’s first question touched on finding better ways to communicate assessment to those who are not well versed in it, such as parents and media professionals.
“Instead of focusing on assessment literacy, the onus is on us to figure out ways to communicate with our audiences, regardless of their backgrounds in educational measurement,” said Cizek.
The 2024 Social Justice in Education Award Lecture was delivered by Leah P. Hollis (Pennsylvania State University). Her lecture “Ain’t I an Academic? Ancestral Whisperings on Workplace Bullying” examined how workplace bullying hurts higher education for individuals and the institution, concluding with strategies for coping and wellness when faced with a bully in the workplace.
Hollis discussed how and why workplace bullying affects 58 to 62 percent of higher education, occurring more often for women, and then for women of color. She also noted that those who are affected include bystanders and witnesses.
“The reason why so many Black and Brown folks end up experiencing workplace bullying is because it’s built on a power differential,” said Hollis. “Too often, we are in entry-level or even middle-level ranks and don’t have the power to fight back.”
Video recordings of these lectures will be released on the AERA website and YouTube channel by June 18.