Re-Membering AERA's History

• In Event: Watering Our Foremothers' Garden: Building a Community for Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color Resistance in Education

Abstract

Beginning with AERA’s decision to become independent from the National Education Association (NEA), AERA has slowly distanced itself from notions of “educational responsibility”. AERA argued that because it was “a society of scholars [emphasis added], not a professional education association,” it was in its best interests to cut ties with NEA, whose members included educators, administrators, and other education support personnel (Ball, 2012, p. 284). Even in this statement justifying the separation of scholars and professionals, we witness the Western dualistic ideologies that distinguish between the mind and body (Britannica, 2020). By claiming that researchers (the mind) were distinct from educators (the body), AERA suggested an irreconcilable boundary between intellectual work and the application of said work in educational practice.
AERA’s departure had a drastic impact: even though prior to separation researchers came from both public schools and higher education, today AERA is decidedly an organization for higher education research faculty and graduate students (Mershon & Schlossman, 2008). Furthermore, while AERA initially explicitly embraced progressive values, it eventually eschewed them post-separation because of their “politicization,” opting for “neutrality and detachment” (Mershon & Schlossman, 2008, p. 333). In this ideology where advocating for the improvement of educational experiences was considered ‘political,’ abandoning educational responsibility was to be expected.
Enlightenment philosophies which prioritize rationality, efficiency, scientific mentality, and “relegation of values to the realm of subjectivity” are now the cornerstone of AERA’s research values (Bauman, 2008, p. 10). As a modern institution “predicated principally on instituting, operating, and (re)producing homogeneity,” AERA inadvertently reproduces whiteness through its review processes, as well as the types of research it accepts and eventually publishes in its research journals and conference programs (Goldberg, 2002, p. 30). These practices all delegitimize em-bodied ways of knowing through Westernized conceptions of ‘intellectual rigor’, and further separate the mind and body. Therefore when AERA encourages individuals to re-engage with em-bodied topics of “epistemological tensions,…research objectivity, and … leveraging of research for equity and justice” as part of accepting educational responsibility, they are implicitly seeking a reunion between the head and the body (Harper et. al, 2020). But the head did not randomly lose its body; it actively abandoned that body. So before AERA can achieve a true reconnection, the association needs to take educational responsibility for severing the head from the body as the first step in repairing harm.
Bycentering resurgent and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing, we draw from Leanne Simpson’s (2017) words, “resurgence must be concerned with the reattachment of our minds, bodies, and spirits (p. 43). The first part of the workshop will allow participants to grapple with all the interpersonal and institutional ways that AERA has functioned as a site for devaluing BIWOC scholars, and the counter-hegemonic onto-epistemologies that they bring with them. We will present a brief history of AERA’s dis/connection to educational responsibility that is contextualized in a broader (counter)hegemonic ideological struggle, and allow participants to reflect on any personal experiences of ideological struggle in the academy.

Author

• Akua Nkansah-Amankra, University of Southern California