Dear all,

As surely as we anticipate the blooming of the beautiful magnolias in the Education building courtyard each Spring, the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association (AERA) also heralds another flowering of ideas and new relationships. We at the College of Education at Illinois are looking forward to welcoming our faculty colleagues to our home state and the beautiful city of Chicago later this week at the 2015 AERA Annual Meeting, which takes place April 16-20. This year’s meeting theme is: Toward Justice: Culture, Language, and Heritage in Education Research and Praxis.

This round, the key sessions and presentations at the 2015 AERA Meeting are focused on the ways in which educators can harness the social, linguistic, and cultural attributes of all learners as sources for strong, productive identity as well as high performance in learning across the curriculum.

As always, our faculty members and students, as committed to social justice as they are, are well represented and actively engaged in this agenda: 51 faculty are presenting or participating in sessions (roughly 60 percent); 58 graduate students are presenting or participating in sessions; and four faculty members are participating in key sessions while 27 are participants in invited roundtables or speaker sessions. View the full list and see our revamped website that showcases our endeavors in this area.

We are also honored to have three of our faculty members and one of our graduate students recognized at AERA for the following awards:

• Debra D. Bragg – 2015 AERA Fellow
• Michelle Perry – Outstanding Review for 2014 for the AERJ – Teaching, Learning and Human Development
• Patriann Smith – Emerging Scholar Award in the Language and Social Processes (LSP) SIG
• Ifeyinwa U. Onyenekwu – 2015 CASE Outstanding Graduate Student Research Proposal

In this spirit, we were proud recently to witness the coming together of our Graduate Student Conference participants with the recipients of our Distinguished Alumni Awards. Those who participated in the presentation of student work-in-progress and the alumni awards ceremony were uplifted by the unmistakable commitment to scholarship toward the public good, recognizing such efforts as a continuous tradition across the generations.

The type of students we produce and their illustrious trajectories are awesome things to witness each year. There is no hyperbole in this claim—our College is unique in the diversity of its people and ideas. The results are evident by the extraordinary careers of our alumni, who make significant impacts on policy, theory, and practice. This translates into outcomes for learners across the lifespan despite conditions that get more complex and contested each year.

The scenario planning exercise that we have embarked upon for the last few semesters has illuminated clearly to us the opportunities and the challenges we face as a consequence of changing politics, economic conditions, technologies, demographics, and the environment in which we live. Under these conditions we are considering priorities to take action. Education has always represented a pathway to self-realization and social progress. However, we also know that its delivery remains stubbornly uneven. It continues to fall short for too many people. This is unconscionable at a time when the U.S. economy, measured at least in terms of the indicators that are formally counted, is on the rebound.

The education system in the U.S., particularly its public schools, community colleges, and universities, is the foundation of economic and social wellbeing. It is a bastion of opportunity and remains the envy of the world. This is not the time to let it fray, particularly not in Illinois, when more than ever we require investment in education and faith in our collective heritages. We need transcendent thinking, collaborative effort, and dogged commitment to robust, inclusive, and innovative education. We must not allow ourselves to slip into ideological trenches of inaction, becoming fearful, fractious, or allowing ourselves to wait for miraculous solutions. We are tasked to understand the world, solve problems, and design solutions that improve opportunities for all, irrespective of backgrounds. This is our mission, season after season.

This is one thing that has not changed since, over a century ago, William Chandler Bagley helped establish what would eventually become the College of Education at the University of Illinois. This was a breakthrough for our field of endeavor because unlike the Normal Schools that predominated at that time, the College of Education made research a core agenda alongside the preparation of educators. He believed, as we still do, that educators are crucial to the development of ethical, knowledgeable, and capable citizens.

The task of the preparation of education professionals, however, requires the support of rigorous research into all aspects of the profession. The two activities—teaching and research—thanks to Bagley, came to be bound tightly together in our university setting. Education was an academic practice as legitimate as all other studies in a university, and it was one that underpinned all forms of learning. This made collaboration across the academic sciences and interdisciplinary research an imperative, as it remains now. This year’s AERA theme proclaims these sentiments and call to action, both locally and globally, and we look forward to catching up with many of you over the next week.

Have a wonderful spring, everybody.