Rooted: Embracing the Social Foundations as Remembrances, Reinforcement, Reparative, and Rapturous During Uncertain Times

Foundation: the base or ground upon which something is built.

Rooted: the origin, source, or inception.

A foundation is a structure designed to provide support. A stable foundation, although often hidden from sight, provides an anchor and reinforcement to withstand forces that threaten its integrity. This is no less true for a physical edifice than for an individual, a concept, or a theory. A foundation is necessary for something or someone to stand on firm ground.

The history of AESA is rooted in a foundation: the social foundations, to be exact. From its beginnings, the social foundations provided a space of inquiry, curiosity, critique, witness, advocacy, and advancement. As a field born of contexts, histories, questions, appraisal, and imagination, it recognized and elevated the critical role of education and schooling, especially teachers and teaching, acknowledging these as necessary elements in the lifeblood of a democracy. To fully educate—in all its expansive spaces, shades, aims, and approaches—we must account for the sociopolitical and economic contexts that surround and inform educational processes. These contexts are complex, fluid, and all-encompassing of sociocultural considerations (Brown, 2014) and thus require inquiry rooted in the transdisciplinary field that comprises the social foundations. However, this is not all: the social foundations in education have always demanded that we ask incisive questions, pursue relevant inquiries, investigate thoroughly, and present arguments with intellectual integrity, veracity, humility, and conviction. This is needed now, more than ever.

This year’s AESA theme, Rooted: Embracing the Social Foundations as Remembrances, Reinforcement, Reparative, and Rapturous During Uncertain Times, is a clarion call to our past, present, and future as a field and an organization. This theme acknowledges the foundation where our organization was born and invites us to reflect on our origins, the journey we have taken, who we are today, what we need, and the futures we dream of, envision, and strive to build together in community. We are also excited to meet in tandem with the annual meeting of the History of Education Society (HES). Notwithstanding the integral disciplinary place of history in the social foundations, it also provides an invaluable lens to read education as prelude and possibility in this current moment.

We seek proposals that boldly embrace the disciplinary foundations where AESA is rooted: curriculum, philosophy, anthropology, history, sociology, policy, and cultural studies in education. Inquiries grounded in these, as well as interdisciplinary areas and diverse methodologies should address the conditions, challenges, and possibilities of education.  Consider these questions:

1. What perennial and emerging concerns plague education and our efforts to advance the democratic project and its educational aims? What advancements have we made? What barriers stand in our way? How do the social foundations enhance our understanding of these conditions and offer insights into how we forge a just education?
2. What do disciplines in the social foundations tell us about education and the educational systems of thought and practice we embody, embrace, question, disrupt, discover, conceive, transform, and imagine? How have these fields expanded, transformed, and transcended their own disciplinary boundaries to theorize, understand, and investigate the problems and promise of education?
3. How have the social foundations framed, nurtured, and sustained critical education work and vision across new terrains, difficult conditions, and challenging contexts? What do the foundations tell us about who we are, what we have built, what we have and need to transform and create? What do they suggest we do? Where do they suggest we go next?
4. Where have diverse knowledge, voices, and standpoints expanded the contours of social foundations in education? How have these perspectives shifted the questions asked, knowledge generated, methods used, and arguments presented for education and schooling, past and present?
5. What new questions, philosophies, theories, policies, and practices should we explore as our current social landscape experiences shifting sociopolitical transformations, rapidly changing technological advancements, a repudiation of equity and justice-centered policies, and diminishing public investment in education?
6. How do the social foundations offer hope, joy, and inspiration as we promote democratic education in times of uncertainty, disruption, and transition?

We live in times of precarity and uncertainty, marked by questions, anxieties, and curiosities about the future of education. However, we also have a rich intellectual legacy to look to and learn from for inspired hope. We come to Portland, in community with the HES, to remember, inquire, and dream together. Roots and foundations can be strong or weak, able or incapable of withstanding cracks and blows to their structure. Let us draw from our legacy of the social foundations to remember, reinforce, repair, and find spaces of rapture in our consideration of education, past, present, and into the future.

References

Brown, K. D. (2012). Trouble on my mind: Toward a framework of humanizing critical sociocultural knowledge for teaching and teacher education. Race Ethnicity and Education, 16(3), 316-338.