Seminar Information for AERA 2012

2012 Division B Preconference Seminars
Abstracts and Bios

Division B is proud to announce our 5 annual preconference seminars (4 for graduate students and 1 for junior faculty):

1) Vice-Presidential Graduate Student seminar;

2) Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Researching Diverse Curriculum Cartographies;

3) Visual Culture Theory Meets Digital Media & Gaming: Curriculum Studies in the 21st Century;

4) Which Differences Make a Difference? New Curriculum Theories and the Continuous Production of Alterity;

5) New Faculty seminar

The Division B preconference seminars are an important tradition within the AERA annual meeting structure to which AERA and Division B devote significant resources. For each of the graduate student seminars there will be six $200 scholarships available and a maximum of six unfunded positions also available. The New Faculty seminar for junior faculty is self-funded. All preconference seminars run for the day and a half before AERA begins and participants are responsible for finding their own transportation and accommodation. The evening meal at the end of the first day is included for all participants.

Seminar abstracts, co-facilitators, and participation information including application materials and deadlines are below.

Vice-Presidential Graduate Student Seminar
Carl Grant (Div B. Vice-President, Wisconsin, USA), Lead Facilitator
Bernadette Baker (Div B. Secretary-elect, Wisconsin, USA);
Seminar Assistants: Yoonjung Choi (Div B. Grad. Student Rep, Teachers College, USA); Ronald Porter (Div B. Grad. Student Rep, UC Berkeley, USA).

Please direct inquiries and applications to:
Carl A. Grant, Lead Facilitator: [email protected]

Entering into a graduate program can be both exciting and unnerving. Many opportunities await you and many more immediate tasks have to be accomplished. The Vice-Presidential Graduate Student Seminar gives you rare access to an intellectual leader in the field who has a strong record of research excellence that has opened new and cutting edge fields, a scholar with an international reputation and a long history of institutional mentoring, This seminar specifically discusses the new kinds of knowledge-production and areas of focus that 21st century curriculum scholarship requires, offers mentoring in regard to institutional processes that are common across research communities, and helps with developing a research network in the interdisciplinary field of curriculum studies.

Bios:
Dr. Carl A. Grant has mentored/advised both US and international graduate students. In 2011 he received the Division G Mentoring Award. He has served as Chair of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and Department of Afro American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Grant has served as Chair of the AERA Publication Committee and was the Editor of the Review of Education Research (RER). He has written/edited more than 30 books and has written more than 130 articles.

Prof. Bernadette Baker teaches in the areas of transnational curriculum studies, US curriculum history, social studies of science and technology, philosophies of knowledge, and comparative cosmologies. She advises students pursuing a wide range of graduate projects, from math and science education to policy, global studies, and post-foundational research. She was awarded an AERA Div B Outstanding Book Award for her research, a Fulbright fellowship to study education in Finland, and is currently working on joint projects in Brazil and China. She serves on the editorial board for several major journals including Educational Theory and Curriculum Inquiry.

Yoonjung Choi is Ph. D. candidate in Social Studies and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, with research interest in global/multicultural education, social studies curriculum and instruction, and teacher education.

Ronald K. Porter is a doctoral candidate in the Social and Cultural Studies in Education program, with a designated emphasis in critical theory, at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his B.A. in Political Science from Eckerd College and his M.A. in Education at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include African-American educational thought and critical theories of race, gender and sexuality. His dissertation research traces the intellectual history
of African-American educational thought looking specifically at the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and James Baldwin.

Beyond Methodological Nationalism:
Researching Diverse Curriculum Cartographies
Jane Kenway (Monash, Australia); Amit Prasad (Missouri, USA); John Richardson (Washington, USA)

 
Please direct inquiries and applications to:
Jane Kenway, Lead Facilitator: [email protected]

In an era of traveling discourses and reforms, of interlinked systems and mobile technologies, curriculum and educational processes can no longer be accounted for through reduction to the nationalist frame or to sub-national state-based cartographies. What, then, do curriculum researchers study, and how? If we get beyond conventional curriculum maps how do we frame our inquiries? This seminar explores those possibilities. The methodological and analytical implications of nation as a focus and how and why we need to think differently - using the material from the co-facilitators’ own research – will be presented. A central tenet will be the idea that not only are there different conceptions of world, which have further changed during the recent phase of globalization, but perhaps scholarship needs to look at history differently and how it continues to bear upon our imaginaries and practices, including those that become a part of commonly used institutions.

Bios
Professor Jane Kenway’s current research project is Elite Schools in Globalising Circumstances: A Multi sited Global Ethnography. Her most recent book is Globalising the Research Imagination and her work-in-progress book is Moving Ideas and Mobile Intellectuals. All illustrate various ways of exploring the links between socio-cultural and socio-political change, education and educational research. 

Professor Richardson's recent research on the global expansion of special education (Comparing Special Education, 2011) emphasizes the need to submit the topics of low achieving and special needs students to non-Western comparisons.  This focus accentuates the unanticipated resurgence of institutional arrangements that have historically segregated and limited educational participation. 

Professor Prasad's research is focused upon transnational and postcolonial aspects of science, technology and medicine; he recently completed a book on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) research and development in the US, the UK, and India.

Visual Culture Theory Meets Digital Media & Gaming:
Curriculum Studies in the 21st Century

Suzanne de Castell (Simon Fraser, Canada), Inés Dussel (FLACSO/Argentina & DIE/Mexico); Kurt Squire (Wisconsin, USA, tentative)

Please direct inquiries and applications to:
Inés Dussel, Lead Facilitator: [email protected]

The 20th and 21st centuries have witnessed an explosion of new technologies, forms of communication, e-pedagogies, games, simulations, and automations that have transformed everything from perceptual and cognitive processes to time, space, and sense of place. Research is now catching up with the visual turn, e-literacies, and new frameworks for understanding phenomena that include and exceed the written word. Visual culture theory considers a wide range of philosophical and interpretive frameworks from the ruptures that modernity/nationalism wrought (such as ocularcentrism and challenges to it) to the elevation of phenomenology and qualitative research. What happens when the resources of visual culture theory meet the resources of digital media and gaming? What does it mean for students to to say “I see” and “I know” in light of gaming, new classroom pedagogies, and the pressures of 21st century information processing? This seminar will explore the conceptual and methodological implications of such innovations through the research, projects, and studies of the facilitators.

Bios:
Suzanne de Castell teaches qualitative research methods, and in literacy,
new media, and educational technologies, focusing on digital games for learning. Her current research project is concerned with real/virtual world relationships and connections between real world players and their virtual world avatars.

Inés Dussel teaches curriculum studies and visual methods in educational research. She has produced educational documentaries, shortfilms and videogames. She is doing research on the use of digital media in secondary schools, analyzing the visual cultures of teachers and students in and out of classrooms.

Kurt Squire (tentative) is an associate professor in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently a senior investigator and creative director at the Morgridge Institute for Research. Squire is the author of Video Games & Learning: Teaching with Participatory Culture in the Digital Age, published by Teachers College Press, and has written over 75 scholarly articles on digital media and education. His research investigates the potential of digital game-based technologies for systemic change in education. He was recently awarded an NSF CAREER grant to study embedded assessments in online role playing games, and a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study mobile media and learning in youth culture. Squire also co-founded Joystick101.org, and for several years wrote a column with Henry Jenkins for Computer Games magazine.

Which Differences Make a Difference? New Curriculum Theories and the Continuous Production of Alterity

Nina Asher (Minnesota, USA), Jen Gilbert (York, Canada), Nathalia Jaramillo (Auckland, New Zealand)

Please direct inquiries and applications to:
Nathalia Jaramillo, Lead Facilitator: [email protected]

Since the 1960's the concept of 'difference' has been used to chart out social struggles and inequities.  We need to ask, however, what is used to conceptualize difference? Why is particular attention given to some social characteristics (i.e. race, gender) and not others? Is there a space within difference to discuss what binds social groups together, or put in other words, their sameness? It has been claimed since the 1960s that difference is the problem of the era. How does something come to be called a difference in the first place, why have particular formations come to matter and not others, how has sameness been identified, and do historical dividing lines between difference/sameness shift or merely take new forms? From the vantage point of potentially irreconcilable theoretical frameworks that produce ‘different’ notions of difference (e.g., critical race theory, postcolonialisms, feminisms, psychoanalytics, and more) the implications of a variety of classificatory regimes will be analyzed and discussed in the seminar. Drawing on the research, studies and projects of the facilitators, the politics of curriculum reforms and implications of cultural clashes (e.g., identity politics versus essentialism) will be drawn out. Discussions will bring into question whether inclusion/exclusion has become the new metacode for 21st century educational research, the possibilities and limits this forges, and the philosophical assumptions that theoretical frameworks bring to the study of everyday practices in education in a globalized, digitized context.

Bios:
Nina Asher is Professor and Chair in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Nina writes in the areas of postcolonialism and feminism, globalization, critical perspectives on multiculturalism, and Asian American studies in education. Her current project focuses on the issue of fostering "critical global literacies" in education;

Jen Gilbert is an Associate Professor of Education at York University.  Her research interests include psychoanalytic theory, sexuality education and LGBTQ issues in education. She is currently working on collaborative research projects investigating the affective stakes of LGBT issues in teacher education and completing a manuscript titled, Sexuality Studies: LGBT issues in Education;

Nathalia Jaramillo is Senior Lecturer in the department of Critical Studies in Education, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Nathalia writes in the fields of critical pedagogy, decolonial thought, and socio-political critique in education. Her most recent work includes Immigration and the Challenge of Education: A Social Drama Analysis in South Central Los Angeles and a co-edited book (with Erik Malewski), Epistemologies of Ignorance in Education.

New Faculty Seminar
Keffrelyn Brown (Texas-Austin, USA); Erik Malewski (Purdue, USA);
Hannah Tavares Hawai’i, USA);

Please direct inquiries and applications to:
Erik Malewski, Lead Facilitator: [email protected]

Universities are old inventions and ever-changing sites of knowledge-production. The challenges of beginning a new university position, earning tenure or contract renewal, designing research projects, publications, grant applications, teaching, and service all matter. In addition to the idiosyncracies of each institution are broader historic patterns of interactions and power relations that new faculty are often made to navigate. This seminar is designed to support and mentor new faculty through the forest and the trees of academe. It draws on the experience of faculty who have more recently gone through tenure and promotion processes successfully in a range of different kind of university settings.

Bios:
Keffrelyn Brown is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and affiliated faculty in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  Her research interests focus on examining how teachers and teacher candidates acquire, understand, and use sociocultural knowledge and interrogating school-based and societal discourses that recirculate about African Americans.

Erik Malewski is an Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies at Purdue University. His research interests include cross-cultural international experiences in teacher education, discourse and language in educational policy, and biographical representations of education figures. He is editor of the Curriculum Studies Handbook: The Next Moment and recently published in Curriculum Inquiry and Teachers College Record.

Hannah Tavares is associate professor of educational foundations at University of Hawaiʻi.  Her work has appeared in the journals Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (Special Issue on Gender), Educational Studies, Educational Theory, and the books Handbook of Research in the Social Foundations of Education, and New Curriculum History.  Her current work explores the use of visual sources, specifically the "photographic record," in the making and remaking of truth and falsehood within a given historical juncture.

How to Apply

Deadline: Feb 29, 2012

Send the following application materials to the Lead Facilitator for each preconference seminar:

- a maximum one-page, single-spaced description of how your research relates to the seminar theme and description;
- an up-to-date curriculum vita;
- full contact information including Dept, University, and program you are in, e.g., Masters or Ph.D. and the sub-area of your Dept if applicable, your surface mail address with zip or post code, best telephone number, and email address.

Where to Send Applications

Vice-Presidential: Carl Grant: [email protected]
Visual Culture Theory Meets Digital Media & Gaming: Inés Dussel: [email protected]
Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Jane Kenway: [email protected]
What Differences Make a Difference? Nathalia Jaramillo: [email protected]
New Faculty: Erik Malewski: [email protected]

General Questions – All Seminars: Bernadette Baker [email protected]