May 2025
The 2025 AERA Distinguished Lecture and the 2025 Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture were given during the Annual Meeting in Denver by two prominent scholars, Vanessa Siddle Walker and William Penuel.
Vanessa Siddle Walker, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Educational Studies Emerita at Emory University, delivered the 2025 Distinguished Lecture: “Erasures and Mappings in African American Education: Tag, You Are It.”
In her lecture, Walker overviewed some of the negative societal perspectives of African American children that filtered through American society as African American educators worked to build schools. She elevated the historical context in which those educators worked, through leadership practices, beliefs, and networks, to create full access to all schools for African American children.
“It’s not that these ideas are unknown, especially to historians in the room,” Walker noted, about the historical context. “It’s that they’re not in the public consciousness and mind in the way they need to be elevated.”
She then described strategies African American educators employed to create opportunities for children despite the negative climate.
“In a plethora of ways in the decades of inequality, while they waited for the federal government to do what it was supposed to actually do, Black educators and their partners provided support for the children,” she said.
The 2025 Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture was delivered by William Penuel, Distinguished Professor of Learning Sciences and Human Development in the Institute of Cognitive Science and School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. His lecture, “Education for Flourishing: Building Initiatives and Partnerships for More Just and Sustainable Futures,” focused on how to engage young people in culturally relevant learning opportunities, strengthen families’ connections to schools, and nurture compassionate educators.
Penuel began by defining flourishing, the idea that education should focus on designing activities that allow young people to develop their own individual potential.
“The ethical dimension of flourishing emphasizes the value of supporting others’ flourishing and living with integrity, even in challenging times,” he said. “In fact, there are many other different conceptions of flourishing that we can and should draw on in imagining a new educational system.”
Penuel ended his talk with the suggestion that we need education systems that look very different from the ones today if we are to support collective flourishing.
“Rather than the impulse to destroy, what is needed is the impulse to repair and renew,” he noted. “It is a time to give ourselves the freedom to imagine a world where we can all flourish and where education prepares us for flourishing as a lifelong, life-wide, and life-deep endeavor.”
The Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture will be posted on the AERA website and YouTube channel by June 18.