General Information
The 27th annual UCEA Convention will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Indianapolis, Indiana. The convention will commence Thursday, November 7, 2013 at 12 noon and will conclude Sunday, November 10, 2013 at 1 p.m. The purpose of the 2013 UCEA Convention is to engage participants in discussions about research, policy, and practice in educational leadership and administration. Members of the Convention 2013 Program Committee are Mark A. Gooden (University of Texas-Austin), Terah Venzant Chambers (Texas A& M University), Muhammad Khalifa (Michigan State University), and Samantha Paredes Scribner (Indiana University-IUPUI).

Theme
The 27th Annual UCEA Convention theme, “Seeking New Understandings of Persistent Challenges: A Call to Action to (Re)Unite Research, Policy, and Practice with Community,” is meant to capture the importance of the role of community contexts in which we all exist, navigate, and serve. At times, educational reforms are discussed in the absence of a community's role in education. This year's theme addresses connections between and among research, policy, and practice, with attention to a broad range of community concerns. To this end, the conference theme acknowledges that many of the challenges facing educational leadership are long-standing and have important historical contexts that must be considered. Given the chronic nature of these issues, we intend for the 2013 convention to provide a forum for fresh, engaging, and viable ideas that will be useful to researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, and, more importantly, to encourage coalitions where these constituent groups can work together to put these ideas into action.

We acknowledge that there are competing notions of what or who counts as "community" and how local, state and federal politics and current reforms may privilege or disadvantage different "communities." Educational leaders, increasingly, must skillfully navigate the politics of “community” and its competing conceptions. Thus, we encourage broad, far-reaching interpretations of community, and welcome submissions that consider the role of educational leadership in international settings; local neighborhood contexts; local, state, and federal environments, and, of course, communities within schools. Further, we realize that community will resonate in diverse ways across the field of educational leadership, ranging from ‘school community’ and ‘professional learning community’ to ‘the Black community’ and ‘a community of scholars,’ and welcome these and other broad applications of the community theme.

Common to all of these notions of community is a sense of coming together for a purpose, such as seeking new understandings of persistent challenges. We invite submissions that dare to make bold connections within and across these many notions of community in order to address both old challenges and new permutations of those challenges facing educational leadership. Finally, given the conference’s focus on community, we strongly encourage conversations and presentations that involve collaborations with community stakeholders.

Read the full Call for Proposals (pdf).