In late April, 25 Lynch School faculty, 38 graduate students, and dozens more alumni joined some 18,000 others in San Antonio, Texas, at the annual American Educational Research Association (AERA) meeting.

The largest educational research organization in the world, AERA boasts more than 25,000 members—from senior behavior scientists to first-year graduate students, from early-education sociologists to psychologists who specialize in English-language learners. AERA’s annual meetings, says Marilyn Cochran-Smith, the Lynch School’s Cawthorne Professor of Teacher Education for Urban Schools and former AERA president, are where education “ideas collide.”

AERA’s 2017 conference, its 98th, focused on “Knowledge to Action: Achieving the Promise of Equal Educational Opportunity.” In hundreds of breakout sessions, participants from universities and research centers across the globe discussed and presented their research on gaps in opportunity, achievement, enrollment, and retention related to race, language, gender, and more.

Lynch School faculty and graduate students took part in 56 sessions. Dean Stanton Wortham joined the deans and faculty of five other colleges and universities in a panel discussion on “Well-Being: Dilemma or Opportunity in Higher Education?” Buehler Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor David Miele, Associate Professor Marina Vasilyeva, and Ph.D. candidate Shenira Perez presented their findings in a roundtable discussion on “Extending Mindset Research: Implicit Beliefs of Teachers and Students in Diverse Contexts.”

Cochran-Smith participated in seven symposia, including “Teacher Education for Equity: National and International Perspectives” and “Getting Accountability Right in Teacher Education.” The latter featured a discussion of developing “democratic accountability” standards that Cochran-Smith says would hold teachers “accountable for preparing people to work and live in a democratic society.”

Cochran-Smith also cochaired, with her longtime research collaborator Susan Lytle of the University of Pennsylvania, “Practitioner Inquiry and Educational Equality/Inequality: The Next Generation.” The two-hour symposium included presentations from six researchers of marginalized students, families, and communities. Among them was Lynch School doctoral candidate Shawn Savage, M.Ed. ’10, who discussed “Teaching While Black,” his investigation into the experiences of black male professors at universities throughout the US. The ongoing project, he says, “advocates for teaching in the academy as a space that both needs to foster equity for black male instructors and that fosters equity for students to work through and be prepared to work equitably with black and brown children, youth, and adults.”

AERA sparks collaborations among researchers, says Cochran-Smith. A decade ago, she and her husband, Professor Larry Ludlow, who is chair of the Lynch School’s Measurement, Evaluation, Statistics, and Assessment Department, met researchers at New Zealand’s University of Auckland who were on a panel discussion. Soon after, they jointly formed Project RITE (Rethinking Initial Teacher Education for Equity), which has reported its findings at each AERA meeting since 2012. Savage said the 2017 conference alone led to invitations to several other symposia across the country. And AERA offers students many opportunities—including meeting and talking with the authors of texts they study. Cochran-Smith says her students often return from AERA and say, “I got to meet everyone on my bibliography!”

Lynch School students and faculty have already begun to prepare for next year’s AERA meeting, which takes place in New York. The topic: “Dreams, Possibilities, and Necessities of Public Education.”

—By Zachary Jason