Dear Colleagues,

I am honored and excited to serve as Chair and to support our Executive Committee in advancing the vital work of our community.

As a former secondary history teacher and current teacher educator, I am deeply committed to the mission of the SIG, which—as our bylaws state—is to initiate, exchange, and advance research relevant to social studies education in P-12 classrooms, teacher education programs, and broader efforts to cultivate active citizenship across communities and institutions. This includes engaging with students, teachers, administrators, teacher educators, and policymakers in ways that reflect our shared commitment to equity, justice, and critical inquiry.

I am especially inspired by this year’s AERA theme: “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Education Research.” This call resonates profoundly with the work of social studies researchers. In our field, we constantly wrestle with memory, history, identity, power, and possibility. I look forward to seeing how our SIG members interpret and bring this theme to life—through scholarship that unearths hidden/forgotten narratives, critiques dominant structures, and imagines emancipatory futures for education.

Over the coming year, our Executive Committee will continue to foster opportunities for collaboration, mentorship, and dialogue, and we are committed to cultivating spaces where social studies researchers—across career stages and areas of focus—can engage meaningfully with one another and the broader educational research community.

I hope you will join us in these efforts. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with ideas, questions, or ways you’d like to be involved. I look forward to working together in support of our shared goals.

Warm regards,