AERA 2024 trip report: blight and belief
Although I’ve always loved teaching and learning, as a PhD student in the early 2000’s, I never imagined myself an education researcher. I was a builder, inventing technologies, dabbling in empirical work to inform the design of new technologies, and generally advancing a (problematic) vision of the future as one in which computing would clean up the messes that computing had created.
But in 2010, when NSF started funding basic research in computing education, I caught the bug. I’d always found thinking about the social cognition underlying learning and teaching fascinating, especially in the context of understanding programming as a human activity. NSF made a way for me to explore that, and I was quick to chase the opportunity. I found myself attending my first ACM ICER and SIGCSE conferences, fumbling around with theories of learning, and generally trying to squeeze in another PhD in learning sciences and education research amidst faculty life and a startup. It was messy, but fun, and I never looked back.
Yet despite all that learning and investment in computing education research, even up until last year, I had yet to spend much time in education research spaces that were not computing related. Last year was my first chance: while on sabbatical, I spent a few days in Chicago at my first AERA conference, surrounded by 15,000 education researchers. It was overwhelming: not only was it the largest conference I’d ever attended, but it was sprawled across seven hotels, conference norms were wildly different from those in computing, and as much as some forms of racial and gender justice were central, other forms of justice — most notably disability—seemed essentially absent in scholarship and practice. It was all very disorienting, and made more so amidst 2023’s unprecedented assaults on trans civil rights, which everyone I met at the conference seemed oblivious to. Given that experience, I wasn’t eager to go back. It wasn’t that it was bad, it was just way too much information in a short amount of time, and didn’t feel particularly welcoming.
So when the chance to attend again this year arose, I was skeptical. But the reasons to go added up. I’ve always loved Philadelphia and its human scale urbanism. My postdoc, students, and I were invited to a few poster sessions, which last year were a highlight of my time. There were a few smaller receptions that seemed like they’d be fun to attend. And there were a few keynotes and invited talks that seemed well considered and curated. The idea of spending four days in Philly, occasionally going to a party, a gathering, or an interesting speaker, but mostly just hanging out, with some time to focus on other things in cute Chinatown cafes and libraries, seemed like a nice escape from a bumpy year at home. My goal for the week was slow conferencing — taking my time between sessions, finding places to rest and recover, and savoring the limited social encounters I had planned.
I set out for the conference early Wednesday morning. I had a bit of lounge membership left from my splurge last year during sabbatical, so I found a quiet corner overlooking the north terminal jetway, did a bit of email, planned a bit of fundraising, and wrote. On the plane, I worked through a pile of ACM ICER reviews, trying to reciprocate labor after my lab submitted four articles a few weeks ago. And then I did a bit of remote teaching after some dinner and settled into my hotel.
Thursday: Warming up
My body did it’s usual unhelpful thing of waking up super early. (We went forward in time brain, not backwards!). I went to Bower Cafe for a breakfast sandwich and espresso, then wandered over to the convention center. It turned out that there was only one entrance: back three blocks by a Dunkin Donuts. I enjoyed being confused with the masses as everyone found their way to registration, and then got in a line of hundreds to print out badges. Just like last year, it was mayhem; kicking off a temporary community of 15,000 people just seems to invite confusion and disorder.
Once I found my way in, I decided to scope out the space. I found long hallways with big windows, very fewer power outlets, very little seating, and rooms with no information about what was inside. There was only one little cafe for 15,000 people inside. While there was plenty outside, it meant having to backtrack to the main entrance again, as there was no reentry from the building’s many exits. What a strange, inaccessible venue situated in the bustling Center City!
I had a busy afternoon and evening planned, and wanted a quiet morning, so I settled into a seat overlooking the main hallway, and tinkered with hyper wonky administrative organizational process planning for my upcoming Associate Dean role, did some journal editing, and answered some emails. There was something surreal about being at a conference, but intentionally disengaging from conference activities for a few hours. But also something very calming, as I’d relieved any pressure to do anything, and instead just be in a space of energy and motion and thought.
For lunch, I wandered across the street to the Reading Terminal Market, a vibrant and dense warehouse of a hundred little eateries and shops. I decided on a cheese(less) steak sandwich and fries, and sat down at a wobbly table. Another attendee saw my AERA badge and sat down next to me. She turned out to be an art history educator, and shared her work about art from the Jewish diaspora. Then she said something racist about CRT, and “all the race talk.” I pushed back, and talked about my experiences as a mixed race person, and the tensions between acknowledging the social reality of its social construction, while also trying to dismantle very real systems that use it to divide, exclude, and oppress. She didn’t seem convinced. I decided not to tell her I was transgender; she seemed a little terfy too.
As I was wrapping up lunch, I ran into my iSchool colleague Michelle Martin. She was at her first AERA, and we caught up about our experiences why we were attending. It was great to randomly discover that I wasn’t the only iSchool faculty member attending! (There were dozens of UW faculty, of course, from the College of Education).
Eventually, I wandered to my structured poster session with Jayne and Anne, and we shared our work on justice-centered pre-service CS teacher education. The session was organized by Luis Morales-Navarro, a PhD student at Penn, and others. It was wonderful to be in a room of other researchers grappling with some of the same challenges, but also really different challenges around DEI bans nationwide. The thought I took away was just how rare—and valuable—our administrative work was in creating a sustainable context for learning. Many of the other projects were one-off professional development efforts. I was also reminded how much I liked the structured format, which involved everyone sharing for 1 minute, then half the presenters discussing at posters, then the other half, then discussants reacting to the work shared, then a group discussion for 20 minutes. (I also remembered how disappointing it was that the conference didn’t provide amplification for these sessions. It was so hard to hear!)
After the posters, Jean, Jayne, and I caught the beginning of Kimberlé Crenshaw. Only just barely: the room was nearly full when we arrived, and then they stopped letting people in. We heard the first five minutes, but then I had to pee, and then we decided to go to a house party that Yasmin Kafai was throwing, since the room was so full and standing room only. At the party, I had many great conversations with PhD students, postdocs, faculty, and even Yasmin’s neighbors, especially about Philly and its many merits at problems.
On our way back on the metro, Jean, Jayne, and I witnessed a man overdose. I’ve seen people overdose before, and it was clear some others on the train had too, but everyone was still in a bit of shock. And yet, the set of people closest new exactly what to do. They pressed the emergency button to stop the train (which was at a station), one did chest compressions, the train security radioed in the situation to the driver, and several people scoured the station for someone with NARCAN. Eventually, someone came in with some, administered it, and he regained consciousness. A backup train came to take passengers, so that the operators could get him medical care, and get the other passengers on their way, to process what they’d seen.
Day one of slow conferencing, as slow as it was, was still overwhelming. Fifteen thousand people, intense intellectual work, a jiving party, and a transit OD were plenty for one day.
Friday: Learning, leadership, and hijinks
My Fridays are usually administrative and service work, and this Friday was no different, just remote, but with a bit of opting out to keep the day slim.
I started with another poster session, also organized by Luis, but this time about youth instead of teachers. It was just as much fun as the first one, but this time it was Jean and I, sharing our work on critical conversations with youth about algorithms. The session had many interesting emerging insights, but the one I took away the most was the idea that even when talking about critical ideas about youth, its important to center play, joy, and expression, not only to avoid always being heavy, but because play and joy can also center imagining better futures.
After the session, I ducked away for a Dean review preparation meeting online, and then went on a taco adventure to South Philly Barbacoa with Jean and several of her friends and colleagues. The tacos were amazing, the company was wonderful, and the weather was great. After, my postdoc Max and I, and his 3 month old Illia, went on a walking adventure, talked about cities and urbanism, and dug into some of his postdoc career plans and publishing goals for the next year. He works remotely in Oregon, so it was great to spend a few hours with him going deep on his work.
I came back after to do some strategizing around a state summit for Washington’s K-12 CS education ecosystem with my collaborator at our state superintendent’s office, and then got on the phone to strategize a bit with our outgoing Associate Dean about some hiring priorities. While I did, I walked back to south Philly to an old church that had been converted to a group housing rental for an informal University of Oregon gathering. I met some cool faculty and got into some wonky debates about unions, graduate student funding, language justice, and art.
After I filled up on pizza, I walked back to Center City for tail end of the University of Washington reception. I tried to bus, but buses kept passing me at stops. Once I finally caught one, it got stuck in car traffic and was going slower than those on foot. Once I made it to the reception, though, I stumbled upon some colleagues in the College and did some faculty gossip, and met some amazing doctoral students and research scientists working in science education. The party fizzled, my club soda was empty, and so I ducked out.
I hadn’t gotten enough food, so I decided to go to the gayborhood near my hotel and find some chicken wings. The place I found was curiously quiet and open until 4 am. The women behind the counter looked at me curiously, wondering why I was there, and didn’t say anything. I asked for some chicken bites and BBQ sauce, and one of the women said, “bites?” And I said, “yeah”, and she rolled her eyes, and then punched it in. I stood awkwardly and waited for the bites, while she yelled at the boys in the back kitchen about where my bites were, and they yelled back, “what bites?” and then she yelled “this lady wants bites!” They grumbled, made my bites, and then I went back to my hotel to eat them and watch a bloody episode of Shogun.
Saturday: Collaboration, reconnection
I slept in a bit after my late night of receptions, then walked east toward the Liberty Bell for some pastries and espresso. The patisserie I wanted to go to said it was opened at 8, but it still wasn’t open at 8:30, so I want to a bagel sandwich place called Knead. They had a really good lamb sausage egg and cheese sandwich, but only drip coffee. So after my sandwich, I went to a coffee shop around the corner called Thank You Thank You and ordered a cortado. They only had three tables, and I sat down at one, but a guy was sitting between the tables and said to me, “If you’re going to sit there, you have to work.” And I said, “Okay, I’ve got plenty of work!” and he said “No, like with pen and paper. No typing or devices.” I wasn’t sure if he was joking, so I asked, “Shop rules?” and he laughed, and said, “Yeah”. I had no idea if he was being sarcastic, so I sipped my coffee for a bit, and then eventually pulled out my laptop, and then the shop owners gave me the evil eye. Shop rules, I guess. So I left, and got another coffee at another place that was very empty and dark. But it was a cozy place to do some email.
After, I checked out the Liberty Bell, then circled back to meet up with my psychometrics collaborators working on fair CS assessments (Min Li from UW and Mo Zhang, Hongwen Guo, and Yi Qi from ETS. We met up at the Chinese interest section of the Independence Branch of the public library system, which turned out to be full of random Chinese adult romance novels. We spent two hours talking about the third year of our grant, planning for summer project, and sketching out possibilities for how our undergraduate researcher would help. We made a lot of progress, then walked back to the convention center together. I had some oysters with Hongwen for lunch, and then went inside to do a bit of writing and recharging. If only there were a napping room.
Around 4pm, I went to meet up with colleagues Ryan Baker and YJ Kim at the city hall park, chatted, and played with their wonderful daughter. Then I ambled back to for AERA President Tyrone Howard’s presidential address. After a beautiful sequence of celebrations of his mentorship and vision including, testimony, videos, and a marching g band, he spoke. He talked about Robin Kelly’s “Freedom Dreams”, calling us to envision what we are fighting for. He talked about the question that drove him: “why, across the globe, do darker people suffer the most?” He argued that the academy should be playing a pivotal role in disrupting this, partly because of the role that academia played in creating and upholding racism, through admissions and racist pseudoscience. He argued that we need to tackle the most complex problems, not the most tractable problems, including not only Black racial injustice, but Indigenous injustice as well, and that since academia helped build these, it can help dismantle them. He talked about John Diamond and Louis Gomez’s work on organizational routines that reify racial systems. He gave examples of peer review, search committees, budgeting, syllabi, tenure and promotion, and more. He argued that we have to address racism in our own systems to be positioned to address them in the world’s systems. He then shifted to talk about racism in schools today, where racism appears as book bans, intersecting with queer identities; as school discipline and arrests that reify racial stereotypes; and as Supreme Court rulings that deny racial realities. He ended by talking about resisting pessimism, focusing on hope, transformation, love, rigor, self care, and progress, and do this by interrupting organizational routines to produce racial justice, listening youth, and dreaming like Afrofuturists do and have done.
I left the session promptly, hungry and needing a restroom, but also with the moments that had punctuated my two evenings prior. One night ending in witnessing a near death, intrinsically tied to racism induced poverty and its despairs. Another in a Black business with questions about who it serves. And tonight, an evening of Black excellence, and a call upon an entire community of education researches to bind together to imagine and create the better futures we all deserve. But also a night that a Black woman randomly stabbed a mother and her 1-year old just down the street. I see all the ways that our collective work, and could be these things, and yet always fail to be, and feel recommitted to it as a lifelong project. But also feeling the deep pain of everyone’s trauma and isolation in this work, and my own personal struggle to make community as a mixed race person rarely invites into racialized spaces of solidarity.
I decided on Malaysian, solo, instead of another reception. My waitress dropped off my food and squinted at me, then said hesitantly, “you want fork?”, not able to see the 43 years of chopsticks training in the shape of my eyes or the color of my winter skin. I thought about the other things that people see in people’s skin, and how they’ve created the world we have.
Sunday: A quiet closing
I slept in Sunday, then got a smooth cortado at Elixir, and a cinnamon roll, and then a breakfast bowl at Le Pain Quotidian. After Dr. Howard’s address, I was in an administrative mood, thinking about organizational routines, and decided to spend the morning finishing up a draft of a massive ARCI table for all of our academic tasks, and who is accountable, responsible, consulted, and informed on all of them. This table, I think, is partly what Diamond and Gomez we’re referring to: what organizations do, who does it, and why, are where racism lives. Doing this very mundane work reminded me of an emerging feeling I’ve had over the past ten years of academic life that real change in communities is in the mundane. The spreadsheets, the hidden policies, the way power are woven through them, making it almost imperceptible. In my administrative roles, I’ve recently become obsessed with ways of making all of that visible, so that it may be advocated for and against, and made more easily changed, by making it more easily learnable people new to an organization. I listened to Bolis Pupul’s new album Letter to Yu while I did this very boring work, which has this kind of heartless, droning, mechanical thump, but also this sense of humanity trying to wrestle itself from procedural loops.
Around 11, I walked over to the convention center to see the wonderful Ricarose Roque speak as part of her Jan Hakwins award talk. After a few speakers introduced her and the early career award winner Stephen J. Aguilar, Ricarose started her talk Joy as an Aesthetic: Meditations on Designing Transformative Learning Experiences. Ricarose began by talking about group that focuses on playful, joyful learning experiences through computing. She described her ecological, and equity-centered approach focusing on families and peers, and then shared her thoughts on joy visually, through photographs and student creation. Her particular notion of joy was drawn from Montgomery and bergman’s Joyful Militancy, which described it as a complex emotion that can be overwhelming, painful, and disorienting, but also transformative. She talked about joy also as an aesthetic, one she developed by growing up in immigrant communities, creating found families to restore and renew amidst the struggle of settling and resettling in unfamiliar spaces. She talked about how she brought this aesthetic to creating spaces for young people with their families and caregivers. She described her model for this work as “Family Creative Learning”, situated in community centers, with a four part structure of eat, meet, make, and share. Some of her key contributions from this were insights into how youth transform and develop identity in the context of families, and their intricate relationships, but also insights about how to facilitate such learning experiences. One of Ricarose’s quote stuck with me: “Emotional transformation can be an end goal too.”
She then talked about some elements that she found essential for fostering joy in learning environments:
- Designing spaces for belonging by creating spaces where people can eat, meet, make, and share, allowing for physical intimacy between families and disruption of norms about what materials are around computer hardware
- Creating opportunities for learning grounded in funds of knowledge by centering choice and agency (a la constructionism) to build knowledge and identities.
- Intentionally fostering relationship building within, across, and between families, facilitators, and technologies, but also pre-service teachers, who could see what kinds of learning might be possible in their classrooms.
- Redistributing power by treating facilitators as co-learners, to develop a collective power in the experience.
- Making joy visible by curating research, photographs, and sharing it with families as photos and dialog.
She ended about the challenges of doing community-based work, and how joy can be a sustaining force for persisting through those challenges. She talked about how to cultivate joy in scholarship, through creating and expressing themselves by designing activities with others; through being in community with others and witnessing their lives; and by centering hope and possibility in the work.
After the session, I attended a brief roundtable with the about liberation in STEM education, where I heard Brittany Nicole Anderson and and Tierra Parsons talk about Black girlhood and Natalie Araujo Melo talk about the alterous discourse of Black changemakers. They’re two papers, which centered the experiences of those on the margins, brought up all sorts of feels about my own positionality as a queer trans mixed race person of color, and the challenges that come with most of my marginalized identities being invisible. What I learned from the conversation was the power of embracing the the unique assets that come with living at the boundaries, and the possibilities of reimagining worlds that are invisible to dominant groups.
I was hungry. I caught lunch with the wonderful Jean Salac, just to celebrate her last week as my postdoc before she takes a break and then starts as faculty at Carlton. We got Peking duck, talked about food and faculty life, and generally enjoyed the sunny Sunday afternoon. After that late lunch, and a fourth day of thinking, I was ready to crash, and found a cozy spot in my hotel room to nap and finish this blog post.
Reflections
Four days of slow conferencing was still a lot. I’m tired, and it’s Sunday, and I have an early flight and a full day of work tomorrow. As I look out my hotel window on this beautiful Philly afternoon, I’m unequivocally glad I came, as I’m leaving re-inspired to do the work I’m doing. But also looking ahead to that work to come and feel some anticipatory fatigue, because I know it will drain me, like this week has.
But I also know that I will be refilled. By rest. By the youth I learn from. By the caring community of PhD students and postdocs who I work with, who are full of love and curiosity and passion. By the communities I struggle to create with others. By quiet weekends of adventuring with my wife, and playing with my cat, and listening to quiet jazz and loud metal and irresistible dance. These are the things that heal me, and give me the strength to try to imagine futures of computing that are themselves healing and joyful. If I can manage a glimpse of that by the end of my career, as many of the amazing scholars at AERA have done far more than I have, I will be satisfied, even though I know that will not be enough.
