0 AERA Today, and AERA Tomorrow

The annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association just wrapped up, an enormous event attended by something like 15,000 scholars from across the world. It was, as always, overwhelming.  This time, however, in a mainly positive way thanks to the efforts of the incredibly attentive and creative Kris Renn.

Since Kris worked so hard to make the 2013 AERA far better than AERAs of the past, I want to honor that by noting some of the best changes, and proposing some additional innovations for the future.

The Latest & Greatest of AERA:

1. Free Wifi everywhere. This year, for the first time, in every space of the conference we were able to get online and participate in Twitter chats, send each other papers in real time, and convey follow-up thanks immediately. This was no easy feat, since the conference was spread across multiple hotels rather than a single convention center.  The Wifi was easy to find, easy to access, and much much appreciated.

2. Twitter. Wow, they really took this seriously. There was a very active @AERA2013 Conference tweeter (very nice grad student), multiple hashtags, handles on the name tags, and active encouragement to engage even before the conference began.  The back channel discussions were the highlight of the conference, especially during Arne Duncan's talk.

3. Doing more for the community. The most difficult part of this meeting was the sharp contrast between the theme "Education and Poverty" and our daily actions of inhabiting expensive spaces and places while people begged on the street outside.  To its credit, the organizers created opportunities for charitable giving and volunteering in San Francisco, and canceled the annual reception.

4. Trying new formats. This will be the AERA where I learned about and performed an "Ignite" talk, and heard music played before sessions for the first time. There were many new things attempted, and from what I heard they mainly worked out.

5. The app. A big congrats on making it possible to do without the paper program!

Looking to the Future:

1. Give back with our greatest skill-- expertise. Unfortunately, while clearly well-intentioned, this year's efforts to do more for the community also reminded us that charity can be a form of violence.  It was also not very effective, and somewhat embarrassing-- the donations to GLIDE lagged far behind what was anticipated, making us look stingy.  Instead, I think a future conference could capitalize on the opportunity created by so many education scholars concentrated in one place over a week's time by pairing local community organizations, schools, politicians and business leaders who often actively seek the insights and assistance of AERA members with those members who will be at the annual meeting. For example, the conference leaders could assemble a set of practitioners who'd like to have a 2-hour session on a given topic, and then using a list of AERA volunteers who indicated their available time and areas of knowledge, match them up.  You can send the scholars out into the conference's local community to share what they know, learn from those practitioners and policymakers, and thus share the wealth.  Even better, embed a mentoring program in this, pairing a more seasoned public intellectual with a more junior one, and provide time for them to debrief afterwards on the experience.

2. Teach people to tweet in advance.  The medium was widely available but many people I met expressed frustration because they don't know how to tweet.  How about providing a short video and set of instructions, featuring the AERA "stars" that people can review in advance and begin to practice before the conference?

3. Encourage dissent and provide more space for it.  There were some frustrating moments in this conference around the Reclaim AERA protests at the president's speech and Duncan's speech.  I will never forget the cutting remarks I overheard in hallways from so-called "progressive" colleagues about the "inappropriateness" of public protest, the "disrespect" displayed, and a sense that this was led by an "extremist minority."   We are scholars and therefore by definition we disagree. Protest is a necessary and wonderful form of expression.  Major speakers should be required to respond to a panel of people who both agree and disagree with them.  Follow-up sessions after speakers like Duncan would be helpful to provide legitimate spaces for people to talk out issues.  Put up a twitter feed behind speakers so that the audience's questions-- beyond the 3-4 who get to speak-- can be voiced.  But most of all, we must disabuse ourselves of the idea that vehement and public disagreement is "inappropriate" and "disrespectful."  We ought to be speaking truth to power more often, not less.   President Tierney did the best he could this year, and it was a good start, but I'd like to see this message more clearly promoted and dissent anticipated in advance.

4. Engage the local community further.  Creating structural change is difficult and charity won't cut it. In addition to my first suggestion, I also propose that AERA provide conference registration waivers to local community leaders, enabling their full participation in our meetings. The money used for champagne toasts could easily be redirected to that purpose.


It was a very solid meeting, and I look forward to more. I hope this suggestions are useful for future organizers (but no, do not even think about looking in my direction)!

0 Derek Bok & the Path to Changing Faculty Teaching Practices

Last night Liam and I attended a talk by Derek Bok, Harvard's president emeritus, hosted by the Spencer Foundation at the meetings of the American Educational Research Association in Vancouver.  Due to a lack of Wifi and data service, I couldn't tweet the speech, which was probably good because we both got a little worked up. Here's a bit about why.

Bok is a thoughtful, experienced leader in higher education and I have long appreciated his efforts to get colleges and universities to pay attention to undergraduate education.  He's written a book on the topic, and found a set of Bok Centers on many campuses to try and get faculty involved (unfortunately, as he admitted last night, engagement in the centers is often low).

The main thrust of his speech was that professors need to get focused on rigorously improving undergraduate education because policy changes are bringing a reform agenda focused on student outcomes, and we'd best get prepared. We ought to do this, he suggested, by acting as the good researchers we are and attending to and creating new research on what works to improve student learning and graduation rates. We ignore those studies at our peril, he said, instead going about our teaching in un-informed ways -- lecturing, failing to use technology, failing to conduct formative assessments etc-- and it's partly because there's a dearth of good research on quality teaching in undergraduate education. It's time to wake up and embrace our role in the problems we "know" exist-- a lack of learning in higher education, students who don't study, and falling graduation rates.

His contentions were on the one hand laudable -- I'm always a fan of people who push the comfortable elite to wake up-- and on the other hand deeply problematic.

First, Bok spoke about the faculty as if we are a homogeneous bunch.  Only once did he mention adjuncts, and it was when he said they were the workforce of for-profits, which are organizations that do pay attention to pedagogy, according to him.  So my open question to him, and the first question asked after his talk was "It is increasingly the case that we research types are not 'the faculty' -- the faculty are the enormous number of part-time, contingent, and adjunct workers used by administrations to teach for cheap.  What are the implications of your argument for them-- and what are the implications for tenure?"   I don't think Bok really understood my question since he respond simply that they 'they' needed to care about good teaching too. (He also made some statements about the potential that the use of adjuncts reduces graduation rates and promotes grade inflation--things that I have commentary on but will take up another day.)

Well, part-time, contingent, and adjunct faculty do care about teaching practices -- and they are arguably more experienced than those of us who teach a few times a year.  They also know quite a bit about technology and contemporary teaching practices.  But the big difference between "us" and "them" is tenure, status, and pay. They teach very frequently with little job security, no perks like offices to meet with students, and for very little money.  They are not segregated to for-profits as Bok suggested, but are employed nationwide in all types of colleges and universities.  And they are the workers whom the accountability movement will hit first, hit hardest, and undoubtedly change forever.  

When it does, "our" response will have everything to do with tenure.  And it will have everything to do with the future of tenure.  If those without tenure respond in ways policymakers "like," then you can be sure that tenure will be deemed the obstacle to student success -- just as it has in k-12 education -- and will be under steady attack.  We tenured professors will be pitted against our students in a classic "who cares most about student achievement" false dichotomy, and that is the situation we must prepare for-- and work to avoid.  That is what I'd hoped Bok would address.

A few other thoughts.  I'm tired of the movement to improve undergraduate outcomes being led by people at institutions where everyone finishes college and money appears to grow on trees.  I'm not saying people at those schools don't care about these issues, but most  speak in ways that suggest they are out-of-touch with the 99.9% of the rest of us.  (There are big exceptions to this rule-- Bridget Terry Long is one.)   One could make the case that Harvard got us into this mess -- leading the arms race, raising the costs of attendance like it was going out of style, and setting up an idealized standard in the public imagination that could never be realistically achieved.  The more public higher education tries to be like Harvard in any way, the more our doors close rather than open-- leaving the vast majority of students outside in the cold, just waiting to be devoured by the for-profits.  Again, I'm so happy people at elite places care about these issues, but I wish that they would (at minimum) partner with people in settings where the real problems actually exist.  And I think that wonderful foundations like Spencer should elevate the stature and share the work of people whose research struggles in focused, daily ways with the reality of students dropping out of college and faculty working over-time and under financial constraints to serve them.

I also fervently hope that leaders like Bok will stop repeating shaky empirical research findings that cast undergraduates as fundamentally lazy and underachieving.  Throughout his talk, Bok showed a recognition of the importance of rigorous research in establishing cause and effect.  Yet he gave great credence to studies of student time use that have enormous problems with measurement error, failed to recognize the role of technology in changing both study and leisure time, and again imposed a homogeneity assumption on undergraduates.   Ask yourself, what if undergraduates were mainly a hard-working bunch, with a strong desire to learn -- wouldn't you still want to work harder to teach them well? Why do we feel we must establish a crisis by saying they are unengaged partiers, playing more and doing less?

Finally, I take issue with a point Bok ended with -- the challenge of measuring learning outcomes in higher education. When asked whether he agreed that some goals of higher education are more difficult to measure than others, he responded that that's "mainly because people haven't thought through the issues of measurement enough and aren't clear enough on what those goals entail."   While I agree there is too much hand-waving at broad goals, and we often aren't specific enough about what we want students to actually learn, I disagree that everything is quantifiable and readily assessed.   College today is a place where life begins to come together for students-- and that happens alongside textbook learning and is a key piece of faculty work.  Those successes should be recognized and we deserve credit for them.  But they will not be easily measured.

0 Politics, As Usual

The recent decision by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to hold a news conference condemning Arizona's new immigration law was somewhat unpredictable, and according to at least a few observers, unwise. For example, Rick Hess told the Chronicle of Higher Education it wasn't "smart politics" to "baldly politicize the role of research." The Chronicle's editors fanned the flames further by titling its article, "Education-research group puts itself on the border of advocacy."

Oh, the horror--research and advocacy meeting, having coffee, perhaps even deciding to date. The children which could result are feared by PhDs everywhere, particularly those evil twins: Compromised Objectivity and Biased Conclusions.

Of course academia trains us to think, like Hess, that research is worthy only when fully divorced from politics. Our research questions should be derived from theory, stemming only from the reading of great books and dusty journals, and never from a desire to enter policy or social debates. Puhleese. Every research question is inherently political--we conceive and ask questions the way we do because we have a desire to know something. Knowledge is socially, and therefore politically, constructed.

I'm the first to admit that AERA is a deeply flawed organization, but aren't they all (Hess's included)? I think honesty and transparency are among the best qualities, and would much rather AERA's leaders and members take visible positions on issues they care about rather than pretend not to have opinions. Research lacks an agenda only in the most naïve of imaginations. But agendas lack research all-too-frequently. If AERA begins to use its members' work to create a research-backed agenda, that can only be a good thing.