AESA 2024 Annual Meeting
Social Foundations in Education: The Power of a Preposition
Similar conversations are currently reverberating in diverse areas of the education landscape, themselves echoing the concerns of a generation ago, and perhaps beyond. Then and now, here and there, academic researchers in the field of education are asking: But what of the schools? For the American Educational Studies Association’s next annual meeting, November 6-10 in Greenville, South Carolina, we call on this year’s proposals to highlight lessons from, applications to, and collaborations with p-12 schools.
It is not surprising that this question has arisen in this historical moment, when p-12 education is in crisis—to an even greater degree than usual. Schools are in the news constantly, and the news is rarely if ever good. As a society, we have grown numb to the devastating tragedies of near-daily school shootings and hysterical in response to disingenuous accusations of indoctrination with critical race theory. Dips in literacy achievement scores are once again being used to justify phonics-focused pedagogy, ignoring the pandemic-spurred drops in attendance that mean students are not physically present in schools to benefit from any approach to reading instruction, scientific or otherwise.
Much of what we observe in and about schooling—from classrooms of sedentary young children focused on worksheets to adolescents whose teachers are required by law to inform their parents if they ask to be called by anything but their legal name—is contrary to what research tells us is promising practice. Justice-oriented scholars can no longer (or no longer only) share their insights and innovations with the academic community. We must engage with teachers, administrators, and the young people they serve—as well as with policymakers and the voters who keep them in office.
The echoed concerns referred to in the opening paragraph of this call have been heard in conversations in and about AESA. Attentive readers may also notice similarities to a recently published volume in curriculum studies (Vaughan & Nuñez, 2023). The ideas behind that book and the article that inspired it (Vaughan & Nuñez, 2020) should both be credited to lead editor/author Kelly Vaughan. As an interdisciplinary scholar of curriculum and disability studies, Vaughan was inspired by the birth of a subdiscipline within the latter field: disability studies in education, or DSE, whose scholars “investigate what disability means; how it is interpreted, enacted, and resisted in the social practices of individuals, groups, organizations, and cultures” (Danforth & Gabel, 2008, p. 5). Vaughan asked curriculum studies to join in “translating theory into practice and, alternatively, allowing practice to inform theory” (p. 6), inaugurating yet another subfield: curriculum studies in education.
At this year’s AESA, we ask the same of foundations scholars. Inspired by our colleagues in disability studies in education, and echoing Vaughan’s call for curriculum studies in education, we humbly suggest an exploration of what might transpire, and what might transform, with a change of prepositions—if ‘of’ becomes ‘in,’ if we might in November in Greenville introduce social foundations in education. What say you?
References
Danforth, S., & Gabel, S. L. (2008). Introduction. In S. Danforth & S. L. Gabel (Eds.), Vital questions facing disability studies in education (pp. 1-16). Peter Lang.
Vaughan, K., & Nuñez, I. (2020). Curriculum scholars’ reflections on the curriculum field. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 12(1).
Vaughan, K., & Nuñez, I. (Eds). (2023). Praxis: How educators embody curriculum studies. Teachers College Press.
