Dear Colleagues,
Greetings from the new leadership team for SIG: Democratic Citizenship in Education! We are grateful for your trust and excited to help move our SIG forward towards our shared goals. We want to take this opportunity to thank our colleagues who established and led the group before us. We thank James Mitchell, Caroline Pryor, and others for their extraordinary work to sustain our mission over the years.
Ours is the only group at AERA that focuses on the critical work in integrating citizenship, democracy, and education. With 116 active members from all over the world, our scholarship encompasses a diversity of academic disciplines, theoretical frameworks, and critical perspectives. We will continue to welcome new members to our community and strengthen our work on multiple fronts. The leadership team is currently working on the following tasks:
- 2022 annual meeting. Melissa Gibson is diligently working to put together another excellent annual program for the in-person meeting in San Diego next year. Thank you for responding to her call for reviewers! The AERA Call for Proposal Submission is now open and we welcome you to submit your work to our SIG!
- SIG website. Ellen Middaugh is working on the AERA sponsored website of our SIG. It will be a great platform for us to share resources and information.
- SIG bylaws. There are some things in our bylaws that need to be updated. We are working with AERA Governance to amend the bylaws. We will seek feedback and inputs from the membership, when needed.
- SIG Awards. We currently don’t have any AERA approved awards. The leadership team is working on the possibility of creating awards. Based on the timelines of petition and approval for awards, our first award may be given at the 2023 annual meeting.
- Finance and spending. We are identifying appropriate ways to spend our funds. We are interested to support grad students, first time presenters, and international travelers, along with potential awardees and keynote speakers at the business meeting. We are familiarizing ourselves with relevant AERA polices about spending.
We would like to see the list-serve be used more actively as a place for SIG members to share resources. We will draft norms for using the list-serve and share them out in the coming weeks.
In addition, below is a link to the YouTube video of the keynote address by Joel Westheimer at our 2021 meeting: https://youtu.be/IokCKEuezmU . Enjoy!
Sincerely and in solidarity
Tianlong (Tian) Yu, Chair, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, tyu@siue.edu
Ellen Middaugh, Secretary and Treasurer, San Jose State University, ellen.middaugh@sjsu.edu
Melissa Gibson, Program Chair, Marquette University, Melissa.gibson@marquette.edu Under constructions