Edith P. Middleton | Chair
Dearest Fellow Graduate Student Scholars,
I viscerally remember my first AERA experience in 2024, feeling both excited and overwhelmed. I knew there were opportunities to connect, learn, and contribute, but I was at a loss about where to find them or how the many parts of AERA fit together.
It is from that place of lived experience that I step into my role as Chair, with both deep honor and a strong sense of responsibility. AERA is one of the largest and most vibrant scholarly communities in education research. It is home to Divisions, SIGs, committees, grants, awards, leadership opportunities, and countless spaces for intellectual exchange. Yet many graduate students experience these opportunities as scattered across websites, listservs, newsletters, and networks that can be difficult to navigate, especially when the pathways are not clearly marked.
This year, the Graduate Student Council (GSC) is committed to making AERA more accessible, transparent, and connected for graduate students. Our goal is to help graduate students better understand, access, and shape the opportunities available within AERA.
Over the coming year, you will see new efforts to bring information into one place. Monthly Chair updates from me will highlight opportunities, deadlines, events, and resources from across AERA's Divisions and SIGs. We will continue our GSC Writing Groups with renewed attention to facilitation and community-building, expand opportunities for engagement through our newsletter and social media platforms, and create additional avenues for graduate student feedback and participation.
The most meaningful work of the GSC begins with listening. Whether you are planning for your first Annual Meeting, preparing your dissertation proposal, navigating the job market, balancing research and caregiving responsibilities, or searching for your place within AERA, your experiences matter, and we want to hear from you.
I invite you to share your ideas, bring your questions and your wins, and help us imagine what graduate student engagement within AERA can become. Together, we can build a more connected, supportive, and responsive community for graduate student scholars.
I look forward to supporting your work, amplifying your voices, and learning alongside you in the year ahead.
In Kindness & Aloha, Edith P. Middleton She/Her Chair, AERA Graduate Student Council
Olesia Pavlenko | Chair-Elect
Dear Graduate Student Scholars and Colleagues,
I am deeply honored and grateful to step into my role as Chair-Elect of the AERA Graduate Student Council. For me, AERA has become more than a professional organization. It is a scholarly community where graduate students can find collaborators, mentors, research questions, methodological approaches, and a sense of belonging. It is also a place with many possible entry points: a Division, a SIG, a committee, a newsletter, a podcast, a proposal review process, a writing group, or a conversation that opens the door to another community. Through these many forms of engagement, graduate students can grow as scholars, leaders, collaborators, and contributors to education research.
What makes AERA especially meaningful is the range of people and perspectives that come together within it. Graduate students enter this community from different institutions, disciplines, methodological traditions, languages, and lived experiences. Some arrive with a clear sense of where they want to belong; others are still discovering which conversations, questions, and communities feel most connected to their work. That range of experiences is part of AERA’s strength. It gives graduate students opportunities to learn from scholars whose work feels familiar, and from those whose work helps us think in new and unexpected ways.
The current GSC leadership team has helped create structures that make graduate student participation more visible, navigable, and meaningful across AERA. Through writing groups, communication efforts, newsletters, social media, programming, and opportunities for feedback, the team has supported graduate students in finding information, building relationships, and seeing themselves as active members of the broader AERA community. This kind of work matters because participation does not happen only through formal roles. It also grows through invitation, guidance, continuity, and the feeling that there is a place for graduate students to enter and contribute.
My own path through AERA has been shaped by several of these entry points, including engagement with Division C, the Writing and Literacies SIG Graduate Student Board podcast team, and Annual Meeting proposal reviewing across multiple research communities. These experiences have reminded me that service and scholarship often develop together. Through service, graduate students encounter new ideas, learn how different communities think and organize knowledge, and begin to imagine new research possibilities.
In the year ahead, I look forward to learning with you and contributing to GSC work that supports graduate students across AERA. I hope this community continues to be a place where graduate student scholars can ask meaningful questions, share their work, find support, build connections, and participate in shaping the future of education research. Together, we can continue strengthening a graduate student community that is generous, engaged, and intellectually alive.
With respect and gratitude, Olesia Pavlenko Chair-Elect, AERA Graduate Student Council