Activities at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association AERA

AERA is the professional association of American educational researchers and has more than 25,000 members. The annual conferences, which are held at different locations in the US and Canada, bring together educational researchers, educational practitioners, and representatives of publishing houses and funding organizations. Ice offers German education researchers the opportunity to present their research in ice forums, to discuss research findings with North American and international scholars, and to explore opportunities for collaboration through formats aiming at international exchange.

2013 and 2014

During the 2013 San Francisco and 2014 Philadelphia conferences, ice participated with an information stand in the conference exhibition and organized a series of poster presentations by German researchers, to which conference participants from the respective topic areas were invited for discussion. In Philadelphia, ice also organized a joint panel discussion on educational standards in Germany and the US as well as a reception together with the the German Center for Research and Innovation in New York and has been cooperating with the GCRI ever since.

AERA 2015-2017

For the 2015 conference in Chicago, ice altered the event format: instead of exhibition stands ice invited experts to discuss German, North American, and international research at panel discussions and roundtables, which also provided an  opportunity to establish or deepen joint collaborations. The topics were selected in collaboration with German and international education researchers. Interested scholars were invited to become involved in this process in the run-up to the conference. The seminar topics related to the overall conference theme and addressed current research debates. In Chicago, for example, the discussions focused on "Education, Democracy and Justice: Transatlantic Perspectives". At the conference in Washington DC in 2016, education researchers discussed "International Perspectives on School Governance" in the context of government funding programs in the education sector. At the 2017 conference in San Antonio, the seminar focused on the question of "Societal Challenges and Educational Research".

AERA 2018 until today

At the 2018 AREA conference in New York, ice organized a panel discussion and a reception on "Public Education at the Crossroads" in collaboration with the University Alliance Ruhr (UA Ruhr) and the German Center for Research and Innovation (GCRI). An international seminar of the same name was also held on the following day.

The following year, 2019 in Toronto, Canada, ice participated with a seminar on "International approaches toward leveraging education research in a post-truth era".

The international seminar on "Education in the Digital Age", scheduled for the 2020 Annual AERA Meeting, had to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and corresponding activities as face-to-face events were also not possible in the following years. Instead we decided to continue the international exchange online with an event series in 2021 on Education in the U.S. and Germany: "Contested Public Education, Pedagogical Conceptions and Sustainable Innovations" in cooperation with the GCRI in New York.
Also in 2021 the volume "International Perspectives on School Settings, Education Policy and Digital Strategies. A Transatlantic Discourse in Education Research", edited by Dr. Annika Wilmers and Dr. Sieglinde Jornitz, was published. The volume gives an overview of the transatlantic activities in education research with regard to the sessions in recent years.

In 2023 we will be back on-site at the AERA Annual Meeting in Chicago from April 13-16. More information on our next international seminar at AERA will be released on this page soon!