May 2025

2024–2025 President Janelle Scott delivered her presidential address, “Education Research for a Time Such as This: Rupture, Remedy, and Repair,” to a packed audience on Friday, April 25, at the 2025 Annual Meeting in Denver. She presented an engaging exploration of what the field can do to become further connected with the goal to reimagine and rebuild education, especially during these uncertain times.

“None of us alone or within our social bubbles can intervene on the attacks on democracy, but together, we can reflect and restore our connections to each other and learn from our different scholarly standpoints to resist and reimagine,” said Scott.

Scott reflected on California’s redwood trees, which use a complex and diverse ecological system to survive and thrive, as a metaphor for what the education research community can do.

“In the same way that the trees protect each other and help to regenerate, I want all of our education research community to consider how we might emulate and learn from this ecological model in this time of challenge, uncertainty, and crisis, turning toward and nurturing our own biotic community,” said Scott.

She noted that education researchers are often in a position to say something about the application of knowledge, informing remedies for inequality and discrimination, but scholarly silos can become barriers.

“We are also segmented, and our emphasis on knowledge domains limits us from seeing across the research toward holistic understandings,” Scott said. “In AERA, we separate ourselves into such specialties and call it ‘divisions.’”

Scott offered ideas about where the field is and how it got there, then offered possible models for how it might more effectively and collectively respond to the current multiple crises. She noted that we must first acknowledge how recent and historical ruptures have destabilized society, revealing existing injustices.

She specifically noted that the COVID-19 pandemic co-existed with and magnified inequities and crises such as climate change, constitutional challenges; racial-, gender-, and religious-based violence; school shootings and gun violence; and ongoing war and rising fascist movements around the world.

“Even in this prolonged era of crisis, there are spaces and opportunities for us to resist and reimagine, ever mindful of the enormity and seeming impossibility of what we face,” said Scott.

She also discussed how advocacy groups from the corporate sector have tried to remake education along market models, feeding into the notion that public education is broken, and institutions associated with it are broken as well.

“The story sold about the brokenness of public education made it easier to break things around it,” Scott said. “We need to think about how research in the learning sciences, human development, measurement and evaluation, leadership, and curriculum studies is situated in our current political ecology.”

Scott explored ways in which research can unveil new information that challenges the conclusions that were previously confidently assumed, recognizing the full picture of stories that were missing from the timeline. As an example, she noted assumptions about the positive possibilities of artificial intelligence without consideration of threats of algorithmic injustice, intellectual property, surveillance, and environmental harms.

“As we examine the answers to these questions, we can start to understand how the stories we tell reflect who we are as a society,” she said.

Scott concluded with a call for more collaborative, multi-modal, and integrative research approaches; critical examinations of the forces that have long pushed to eradicate public education; research that continues to identify and remedy past harms; and engagement with organizations that work to uplift the goals of educating for democracy.

“Through collaborative research and curiosity, we can realize a vibrant research context in which our multiple ways of conducting inquiry complement and contribute to much more holistic understandings of pressing questions,” she said. “Like the redwoods, may our research be intertwined, robust, and mutually sustaining, contributing to a diverse, healthy, and vibrant ecosystem that supports and commits to a compromised and battered, but still possible democratic society where everyone’s knowledge, life, potential, and thriving matters.”

The video recording of Scott’s presidential address will be released on the AERA website and AERA’s YouTube channel by June 18.