Although I’m deeply conflicted about the privileged position the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and its Annual Meeting enjoy within the field of educational research, I continue to submit proposals and attend the Annual Meeting. This section of my site is designed to both track my own and others’ ongoing frustrations with the organization and offer resources for people interested in submitting work to the conference.
My writings on various AERA-related issues:
July 13, 2011: I guess I’ll be submitting proposals for the 2012 AERA Annual Meeting.
February 14, 2011: Request from AERA Queer Studies SIG for gender-neutral bathrooms.
May 6, 2010: notes on being the chainsaw you wish to see in the world: closing remarks for the 2010 AERA Annual Meeting.
Others’ writings on various AERA-related issues:
July 18, 2012: An open letter to AERA, by Jon Becker. “The deadline for submissions to the 2013 annual meeting is a few days away, but I won’t be submitting anything….”
February 13, 2010: AERA Scheduling, by turducken. A description of the organization’s “frustrating” tendency to schedule similarly themed presentations against each other.
March 31, 2008: Tacit knowledge and the AERA program hustle, by Sherman Dorn. “Whether your AERA proposal is accepted is substantially a game of craps. This conclusion doesn’t mean that horrid proposals are accepted but that plenty of very decent proposals are shot down because there is no way to create a consistent system of reviewing, and there is probably no way to predict which good proposals are accepted and which good proposals are rejected. (I wonder if anyone has asked permission to look at a set of proposal ratings to calculate reliability…)”
March 30, 2008: Reflections on AERA, by Chris Craft. This post includes a description of the main types of presentations and includes an explanation of why attending AERA can be a frustrating experience.
February 28, 2008: Everybody’s favorite punching bag returns! The Annual Meeting of AERA, by eduwonkette.
Notes on the organization itself:
March 7, 2012: AERA erasing line between scholarship and partisanship, by Rick Hess. The writer argues that AERA’s recent denunciation of Arizona policymakers’ decision to remove the state’s Mexican American studies programs from school curricula and its decision to boycott the state of Georgia because of its anti-immigration policies are innappropriately political stances for a research organization: “AERA can clean up its act and start behaving like a scholarly, rather than a political, organization. Or, if AREA continues to engage in partisan advocacy, it seems appropriate for state legislators and university trustees to start asking whether researchers at public institutions ought to be using public funds to pay for membership, travel to its conferences, or conduct AERA-related business. “
May-June 2011: Media, think tanks, and educational research, by Holly Yettick on AcademeOnline. “Though I have so far sorted through nearly forty thousand articles in hundreds of publications, I have yet to come across a single mention of any of the six peer-reviewed education journals published by the American Educational Research Association, the world’s largest academic organization devoted to the study of education.”
