Yay!!!! I am headed there to participate in some workshops. As a Barbara Jackson Scholar I am so blessed to receive such amazing opportunities.

I hope to post some amazing pictures! I have never been farther west than Texas so this will be fun!

Also sadly I had a two week period of a major major flare….talk about torture. Those who sent notes and comments thank you! Rheumatoid Arthritis and Fibro certainly make life interesting!

Take care and I hope to post pictures when I arrive in San Diego!!!

On Saturday 27th 10am-12pm we have our business meeting.

The Agenda

10:00-11:15        Separate meeting of Social Justice Leadership and Leadership for High Need Schools

• Review progress
• Determine future lines of inquiry and dissemination
• Establish timelines and responsibilities

11:15-12:00        Whole group meeting

• Identify emerging issues, concerns, and opportunities
• Discuss involvement in future conferences
• Determine possible publications for our collective work
• Clarify roles and responsibilities

Immediately following our business meeting the ISLDN will be meeting with ISSPP colleagues to discuss possibilities for collaboration – location: meet at Business meeting venue at 12pm.

New to Wiley in 2013!

New Journal!

Prof Ian Menter, Editor of Review of Education and BERJ and Prof Sally Power, Chair of the BERA Academic Publications Committee, will be at the Wiley stand at AERA (booths #600-603) to answer questions and discuss the journals.

Time slots will be confirmed soon.

Education and Poverty: Theory, Research, Policy and Praxis

With over 60 journal articles and book chapters included in the collection, we hope to provide you with a comprehensive look at current research on education and poverty from higher education through K-12 education around the world.

2013 marks the year in which the world’s largest and most diverse educational research organization – the AERA – jointly with Routledge, published the International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education (Stevenson, Brody, Dillon & Wals, 2013). The field of Environmental Education has roughly existed for just under 50 years and has over time developed its own research, research networks and research journals. The AERA commssioned the editors in 2009 to compile this Handbook as a part of AERA’s Handbook Series on Education Research.

The International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education describes the important concepts, findings and theories developed by the research community and examines the historical progression, current debates and controversies, missing elements from EE research agenda, and the future.
The environment and contested notions of sustainability are increasingly topics of public interest, political debate, and legislation across the world. Environmental education journals now publish research from a wide variety of methodological traditions that show linkages between the environment, health, development, and education. The growth in scholarship makes this an opportune time to review and synthesize the knowledge base of the environmental education (EE) field. The purpose of this 51-chapter handbook is to illuminate the most important concepts, findings and theories that have been developed by EE research and critically examine the historical progression of the field, its current debates and controversies, what is still missing from the EE research agenda, and where that agenda might be headed.

You can find the orginal proofs of chapter 1 here: Stevenson, B., Brody, M., Dillon, J and Wals, A.E.J. (2012). International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education_Ch01_1pp In: Stevenson, B., Brody, M., Dillon, J. and Wals, A.E.J. (Eds.) (2012) International Handbook of Environmental Education Research. London: Routledge, 1-12

The Handbook can be order through Routledge or any on-line bookseller. Here’s a link to the Routledge Handbook page which also contains the Table of Contents. Should you be working for a university you may want to recommend the Handbook for you library.

1) Network dinner – an informal get-together at a restaurant ‘somewhere in Chinatown’. Friday 26th April at 7pm.  Venue to be confirmed – details to follow, but please mark the day/time.

2) Business Meeting -

Agenda:

We will start promptly at 10am.  We will work in the two strand groups for 90 minutes.  Each group will discuss work to date and identify the next steps for their respective projects.

In the final 30 minutes each strand group will report back on its work to date and future plans, and we will also discuss future work for the Network more widely.  Bruce and Howard are currently exploring the possibility of a special issue devoted to the project – and following up leads from a number of journals. Details at the meeting.  Our view is that the project is now at a point where we can begin to think more ambitiously about disseminating our work – please bring your ideas (or email them if you won’t be with us) about how we can put our work ‘out there’!

3) A ‘Network of the Networks’ meeting – this will be an informal meeting of members of ISLDN, the International Successful School Principalship Project and the International Study of the Preparation of Principals. It will commence immediately after the Business Meeting, ie 12pm, Saturday April 27th, Hilton Union Square / Tower 3 Union Square 1 and 2.  This will be an chance for members of these networks to discuss common issues, and what work might be undertaken to create opportunities for mutual advantage.

Please note – there are some details still to be confirmed – especially with regard to 1 and 3 above.  We will email any changes – and post them here also.

The substantive work of the Network is not being presented in the AERA programme this year.  Hopefully (subject to acceptances) this WILL take place at BELMAS, ECER and UCEA.  AERA however provides an important opportunity for members to get together and plan next steps (our meeting in Vancouver last year was most productive!).  If you are at AERA – we hope to see you there.  If you are not, we are still keen to hear from you – please email us, or better still, post to this blog.

Bruce Barnett and Howard Stevenson

The deadline for submission is 10th May 2013 – in the form of a 2000 word proposal. Pam Angelle has very kindly agreed to co-ordinate this submission.  We will submit for a international community-building partnership session/symposium.

At our meeting at UCEA in 2012 when we planned a programme for the year we agreed that at the UCEA Convention we would try to take our work forward by connecting the case study data of our social justice leaders with the wider context in which they work.  This would be the local (micro) context of the school – and the policy (macro) context. The aim therefore would be for the presenters to connect the data from their principals with a wider contextual framework – and that if we adopted broadly the same framework this would allow for rich analysis of similarities and differences.

As indicated – Pam will pull the submission together – but she needs our help . . . regardless of whether you will be presenting at UCEA or not . . .

In summary – we need, quite quickly, to agree a framework that we can all adopt, for illuminating the micro and macro contextual issues in which our principals are working. Pam has suggested we might start with a ‘micro-context of the school’ framework I was involved in developing for a report we did for the National College for School Leadership in England.

The report is here – Effective_leadership_in_multi_ethnic_schools and the framework is represented visually on p37.  If you read the report, and also an article I wrote (‘When markets and morals collide’ – in the Dropbox ) you will get a sense of how the framework was used, and how local factors shaped the ability of leaders to ‘do’ social justice.

Pam and I are proposing that as a ‘micro-context’ for our framework we use the framework from p37 of the NCSL report (not because it is wonderful, but because it exists and we don’t have much time!).  However, we have no corresponding ‘macro-context’ – and we need one. Indeed, for a comparative study across this nations, this is obviously critical (not least because the micro-context can only be understood in relation to a macro-context).

Your help  . . .  please help us to develop a complete framework, by making some proposals about how a macro- framework might be constructed. What would be in such a framework? And how might the macro ‘connect’ to the micro?

Please help by using the comments facility to respond to this post and let’s see if we can have a collaborative on-line dialogue to develop our framework.  If someone could get us started, then we can simply ‘reply’ to keep the debate going.  And just to galvanise you into action  . . . neither Pam nor I will contribute to this! (My framework starts it off – and Pam will take a lead on pulling it together at the end -  but she can only pull together from what has been contributed. If there is nothing there  . . . there is no framework!).

On a serious point – to date all our collaborations have been meeting and presenting at conferences. This does tend to exclude those who have not been able to attend any of those conferences.  Developing our on-line collaboration is an important way we can work together outside of the conferences – so please do try to contribute, perhaps especially if you have not been able to be involved much previously.

Important final points – the deadline for submission is May 10th.  I am proposing that by 31st March we have done TWO things:

1. Contribute to the development of the framework as per above
2. Indicate to Pam and myself if you want to be part of the symposium session at UCEA.  This session will be open to anyone who can attend and who has collected data as per our schedule.  Please note – previous Cohort 1/ Cohort 2 groupings do not apply – if you are coming to UCEA, and you want to be part of this session – let us know by 31st March.

This allows Pam the month of April to work with those attending UCEA to draw together the proposal – which we can then share at our meeting at AERA (details here) before Pam finalises it for submission a week later.

Pam and Howard

I’ve been following the MOOC phenomena since I enrolled in Dr. Thrun’s and Dr. Norvig’s AI course in 2011. While I did not complete the course, I was intrigued by the ability to learn one topic along with so many others, all covering material at pretty much the same pace. This made for some lively discussions on the various message boards and I began to see Connectivism in action. Much of what I learned developed from those multiple conversations as resource upon resource was provided by students and instructors.

When I saw that Mr.. Werbach was going to offer a course on Gamification I was very excited, and that excitement grew as the class lived up to my expectations. I don’t mean for this post to become an ad for his course. But I do want to state that quality teaching and learning can be experienced within a MOOC community. The guest speakers, literature provided on the pros and cons of gamification, Werbach’s teaching presence on the videos, and the resources provided by other class members on the course wiki page all contributed to a well-rounded introduction to the topic as well as providing avenues for further learning.

I took what I learned from Werbach’s course and used that information to propose a plan to help teachers create and sustain an online community of practice. There are still many teachers who are uncomfortable with technology, Web 2.0 tools in particular. Therefore many do not really take to wikis or other collaborative online platforms. I won’t spell out the details here; you’ll have to go to San Francisco at the end of April for that as my paper was accepted for a new In-Progress Research Round Table discussion geared towards graduate students.

It’s very exciting to have one’s first conference participation occur at AERA. I will continue to learn more about gamification so that I can “do the course proud” when I do discuss the details this April

BUT NOT AERA.

Now, the leadership of AERA will justify its SHAMEFUL silence as remaining “above politics.” This in and of itself is CLEARLY a political stance. The research is overwhelming regarding the harm, and in particular, the harm to children, inflicted by anti-queer legislation. Nevertheless, much like the Reagan-era executive branch, AERA would rather be on the WRONG side of science, the WRONG side of social justice, and the WRONG side of history than take a research stand that could be remotely seen as pro-queer. As I wrote in September 2010:

The extant research is clear that queer children suffer enormous physical and emotional violence in many US public schools. That AERA, as a collective body, is afraid of being “soiled” by being involved with advocacy for queer American school children misses the reality that they/we already are quite morally filthy by remaining silent in light of decades of the dismal data. I’ve asked this question repeatedly, but so far, to no avail: “How many dead queer kids will it take for AERA to finally give a damn?”

Clearly, although more than 2 years have passed since I first raised this question, the queer body count remains “insignificant” for the AERA boo-bahs. *SIGH!* How awful that I belong to organization that remains committed to homophobia that is strongly reminiscent of the Reagan era. To that end, I will remind the AERA boo-bahs that their continued SILENCE=DEATH.

* Additionally, The American Psychological Association, The American Medical Association, The American Academy Of Pediatrics, The California Medical Association, The American Psychiatric Association, The American Psychoanalytic Association, The American Association For Marriage and Family Therapy, The National Association Of Social Workers and Its California Chapter, and The California Psychological Association, have all filed a joint Amicus Brief. So have NFL players. Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo.

UPDATE:

The American Sociological Association’s Amicus Brief to the Supreme Court is simply terrific.  It totally destroys the anti-queer parent study by Mark Regnerus. In fact, it will be nearly impossible for the haters to use the Regnerus study in future legal filings or in testimony without inviting some pretty intense methodological spankings. This is something that AERA *SHOULD* have done, *COULD* have easily done—but it doesn’t “do politics.” The conclusion from ASA’s brief just is terrific.

CONCLUSION

The social science consensus is both conclusive and clear: children fare just as well when they are raised by same-sex parents as when they are raised by opposite-sex parents. This consensus holds true across a wide range of child outcome indicators and is supported by numerous nationally representative studies. Accordingly, assuming that either DOMA or Proposition 8 has any effect on whether children are raised by opposite-sex or same-sex parents, there is no basis to prefer opposite-sex parents over same-sex parents and neither DOMA nor Proposition 8 is justified. The research supports the conclusion that extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples has the potential to improve child wellbeing insofar as the institution of marriage may provide social and legal support to families and enhances family stability, key drivers of positive child outcomes. The Regnerus study and other studies relied on by BLAG, the Proposition 8 Proponents, and their amici provide no basis for their arguments, because they do not directly examine the wellbeing of children raised by same-sex parents.