Day 1: AERA 2018 New York City
My first day at the American Education Research Association (AERA) 2018 conference was met with a few challenges, one being trying to walk successfully around Times Square while using Google Maps to find hotel locations. I believe there are over ten hotels where conferences sessions are being held at this year’s conference. Overall I logged a total of 5 miles and 10,123 steps.
Selfie in Times Square!
I was fortunate to be selected to present my research paper on “The Role of Teacher Leadership for Promoting Professional Development” this morning at the Special Interest Group on School and University partnerships. It was a great panel focused on how universities are partnering with schools to build teacher capacity and support professional development and teacher pipelines. Check out my presentation below!
The rest of the afternoon I spent attending sessions where my other research interests lie such as in science education for elementary teachers, and social media. I really enjoyed learning about Jason Engerman’s work on the role of gaming experiences as an ethnographic phenomenon. You can read about his work here. His research resonated with me about the value of gaming for student learning, and that there is a boy’s crisis in education that should call forth a change to how we teach. In an earlier paper Sousan Arafeh shared that most students don’t have access to mobile devices during school and so this connects back to my research area in teacher professional development. The reality is technology will become available to students once teachers’ develop the efficacy to use it in the classroom.
After a day packed of conference sessions I attended the USC alumni mixer and met my classmate Dr. Jerry Sun who is now a professor in Taiwan. I am so proud of him and the work he has accomplished. As Jerry shared USC has really prepared us to follow our dreams and pursuits in education, and ironically that is the theme of this year’s conference “The Dreams Possibilities and Necessity of Public Education”
Public education has opened many doors for me in my life. Growing up in the projects of Boston, I have come a long way and education has made it possible. I look forward to sharing more research rumblings tomorrow in Day 2 of AERA events!
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Read Day 2 Musings here
