2010 AERA Annual Meeting

Understanding Complex Ecologies in a Changing World

Carol D. Lee, AERA 2010 President

Ronald Rochon, AERA 2010 General Program Chair

Education research sits inside what Donald Stokes calls “Pasteur’s Quadrant,” referring to the dual focus of building basic theory while simultaneously improving practice. This process occurs through attention to individual psychological functioning (cognitive, social, emotional); social organization of settings; curriculum design and assessments; educational policy; or historical, political, and economic circumstances as they influence opportunities to learn. Opportunities to learn within and across both formal and informal settings occur in the complex ecologies of peoples’ lives, not isolated in a single setting such as a school or family. These complex ecologies include people’s participation within and across multiple settings, from families to peer and intergenerational social networks, to schools and a variety of community organizations; and participation within and across these settings may be either physical or virtual. Our attempts to understand and influence such learning often try to strip away complexity for presumed efficiency.

Opportunities to participate in multiple settings and the norms for participation are influenced by larger cultural, political, and economic forces and institutions. Ubiquitous technologies empower and encourage all forms of communication and movement within and across all kinds of borders; transnational border crossing is increasingly common throughout the world. Different settings demand different norms for participation and, as a consequence, require that we recruit what and how we have learned in other settings of our lives as resources to help us make sense of new tasks and the new settings in which these tasks are carried out. There is also the question of how each new setting is organized to facilitate or constrain our recruitment of what and how we have learned in other settings. It is in this sense that learning entails cultural navigations.

The theme of AERA’s 2010 Annual Meeting—“Understanding Complex Ecologies in a Changing World”—is intended to encourage submissions that address the conceptual, methodological, and practical challenges and opportunities inherent in understanding how and what people learn across time and space. We encourage submissions that move beyond a narrow focus on individual sites or on purely cognitive or psychosocial explanations, or on singular conceptions of identity. Such an ecological focus encourages education researchers to draw on interdisciplinary constructs and theories, complex research designs, and multiple methods of data analysis. We encourage submissions that examine:

• how the repertoires that people develop within and across the routine settings of their lives can be recruited to support complex learning;

• how educational settings—formal and informal—can be designed to address the interrelated cognitive, social, and emotional demands of learning;

• how multiple identities (e.g., based on family, ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, and sexual orientation) are shaped, recruited, and managed in different settings to influence goals, efforts, and persistence in acts of learning;

• how learning in organizations involves the recruitment of diverse repertoires;

• how knowledge develops and is distributed across time and space;

• how the recruitment of diversity along multiple dimensions facilitates learning;

• how learning occurs within and across time and space in complex dynamic systems;

• how transitions across schooling, including transitions to postsecondary education, are influenced by a range of ecological factors;

• how alternative organizational spaces for education, such as for-profit schools, colleges, firms, community organizations, and museums interact with schooling in recruiting and expanding repertoires for learning.

We further encourage submissions that examine learning within and across complex social and cultural ecologies from a historical perspective and that examine policy implications for improving learning in formal and informal settings in ways that take into account the complex ecological factors that help to shape opportunities to learn. We also highly encourage submissions that address the methodological challenges of studies that address this kind of complexity.

Finally, examining learning within and across the complex ecologies of peoples’ lives inevitably requires that we address how political and economic factors create inequities in opportunities to learn. Such inequities are exacerbated when the dominant discourse of education research articulates hierarchies of particular constellations of ecologies as inherently deviant and pathological or when such research views understanding the diverse ecologies of peoples’ lives as a purely political social good and not as a scientific enterprise of fundamental importance aimed at articulating generative theories of human learning.

Our hope is that the collective submissions for the 2010 Annual Meeting will stimulate new conversations and collaborations that fundamentally expand our understanding of the richness of the diversity of the human experience and enable us to use that knowledge to enrich and expand opportunities to learn for all.