Our commitments
ABER Submissions for AERA Annual Meeting (Deadline: August 14th, 11:59 pm PDT):
Awards:
Mentoring:
Digital Presence:
Spotlight Workshops/Talks:
Membership, Graduate Student Support:
- We will welcome, as we always have, submissions for the 2021 annual meeting that focus on various creative lenses and arts-based methodologies in diverse genres. AERA announced this year’s focus to be on educational responsibility. We are asking our membership to consider the following: How might we imagine our responsibilities informed by anti-racist and anti-oppressionist stances in this current moment and moving forward? Thus, we will give preference to papers and symposiums that draw on integrating anti-racist or anti-oppressionist intersectional perspectives with creative methodologies. Beyond 2021, we will continue to encourage proposals that highlight intersections between anti-racist, abolitionist work and ABER methodologies.
- We plan to approach other SIGs to invite them to collaborate with us for preconference activities. Creating a preconference allows us to offer more slots for presentations which can be listed in the program. ABER has passed 30 years as a SIG and while we could not honor such a milestone this year, we are hoping to do so in the upcoming year. We will focus on the next 30 years of ABER and our educational responsibilities that bring forward equity and freedom from anti-Black, racist, white supremacist, and multiply-intersected structures and practices of oppression within education. We will reach out to the membership and beyond to help us plan for this event.
Awards:
- We will update our awards to include a focus on the intersection of anti-racist, anti-oppressionist perspectives and arts-based educational research. While we have never been opposed to nominations with this focus, we have also never actively and transparently centered these agendas.
Mentoring:
- We will reach out to our membership for volunteering to be a part of a mentoring committee, a new initiative that we are launching. We are looking at possibilities of mentoring graduate students, early-career scholars, minoritized scholars, and anyone else who would find this offering valuable. As much as possible, we would provide opportunities for meeting virtually rather than in-person in order to expand the limits of in-person mentoring at AERA annual meeting, which is costly for both domestic and international members.
Digital Presence:
- We will update our website and create spaces in Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We will share these spaces once we prepare them. Our goal is to use these spaces to build community, share work from diverse perspectives, encourage participation from the entire globe, and cultivate inclusive, representational dialogic spaces. This statement will be hosted in all of our digital spaces.
Spotlight Workshops/Talks:
- We will offer online workshops/talks open to everyone on relevant topics two to three times a year. The workshops/talks will spotlight our colleagues’ work and offer ways in which we can continue to be in dialogue with each other while honoring diverse voices and approaches of doing art-based educational research. We also hope that these workshops will demonstrate our invitational stance and allow more people to see ABER SIG as one where they belong.
Membership, Graduate Student Support:
- We will work on enhancing and increasing our membership and graduate student support. We encourage all of you to please invite graduate students and other colleagues who would benefit from the activities of ABER. We need your support to grow our membership, and with the growth we would like to extend more graduate student travel awards to the conference. We believe that as a community we can focus on creativity, criticality, and contemplation simultaneously as we hold ourselves firm in our anti-racist and anti-oppressionist commitments.