From Roots to Branches: Mapping Educational Journeys Through Generations

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Memory, History, and Reclaiming Narratives in Education

Abstract

This paper traces four generations of one family’s educational journeys — from a 19th-century religious scholar in imperial Russia to a present-day doctoral student in the United States. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory and principles of narrative inquiry, it examines how educational identity is shaped by overlapping systems: family, institutions, ideologies, and historical ruptures. Through stories of intellectual resilience across war, repression, and regime change, the paper highlights how cultural capital and personal agency persist — and adapt — across generations. In doing so, it responds to the 2026 AERA conference theme by reclaiming lived educational histories often excluded from formal archives. Rather than offering nostalgia, the paper positions memory as method, exploring how imagining educational futures begins with unforgetting the past.

Author

• Anastasia Lavrenyuk, University of Maryland