Welcome to MWERA 2023!
Supporting Teachers through Educational Research October 18-20, 2023
Graduate Hotel
Cincinnati, Ohio

At the heart of the work of education broadly defined are our K-12 teachers who come through programs in higher education in order to learn how to help children lead meaningful lives. Teacher education programs are experiencing declining enrollment and K-12 schools across the United States are reporting an increase in vacant positions, with schools experiencing high poverty disproportionately affected. In part, this is due to the conditions made more visible by the pandemic: a teaching force that is and has been historically underpaid and undervalued. At the center of this undervaluing are issues of gender in a predominantly female profession. Alongside the pandemic, there has been a reawakening of activism around systemic race-based violence as a result of the murder of George Floyd. As such, Boards of Education have also become sites for a political battle over the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools, interpreted as anything diversity-related, with teachers caught in the crossfire as they attempt to do what is best for their increasingly diverse population of students. As educational researchers, what is our role in understanding and changing educational systems in support of teachers? How can our work be part of the solution of recruiting and sustaining a more diverse pool of teacher candidates? We welcome presentations that include the dissemination of educational research through new forms of engagement in public spaces such as editorials, speeches, government testimonies, social media commentary, blog posts, podcasts, videos, wikis, etc.

To better meet the needs of a diverse body of educational stakeholders, educational researchers must choose activities that position research to inform civic participation, engagement, and organized action. Moreover, we may need to go beyond our characteristic publication possibilities so that what we learn is disseminated in a way that may be accessed by those inside and outside of our traditional paradigms. Of particular interest to the conference theme, we seek proposalsthat address the most immediate advocacy needs:

• The current experience of teachers and the current state of schools since the pandemic
• Educational policy at the national, state, and local level
• Public scholarship on the topic of diversity, equity, and Critical Race Theory in schools
• Recruitment and retention of students and teachers of color
• Comparative international teacher education
• Impacts of the teacher shortage, particularly on schools experiencing high poverty
• Technology for more equitable programming
• Teacher and administrator professional development