Reflections on AERA/NCME 2025
AERA/NCME 2025 was a fabulous experience this past week. Thank you to my collaborators for their excellent presentations this week. I also had the opportunity to present at NCME for the first time and found a welcoming and constructive community. I am energized by the extraordinary work our community does.
At the same time, there was a strong undercurrent of anger and anxiety about the seemingly indeterminate and arbitrary cancellation of federal grants. It is in times like these that I like to reflect on what Tim Cook calls the “long arc of time.”
30 years ago this summer, I succeeded in the first-ever defense of a learning sciences doctorate in the history of our field. At that time, there were no learning sciences faculty positions for me to apply to outside of Northwestern University, where I earned my degree. A week after defending, I started my first soft money job at the NASA Classroom of the Future. Since then, I have spent the last 29 of 30 years in soft money positions.
This long arc of time provides the perspective that this DOGE disturbance is not anomalous. It is unique, but all disturbances are unique. I earned my doctorate at the dawn of the Internet era and the dot-com mania, which was a great time to be in academia. However, not long after, we had the dot-com bubble burst, 9/11, the housing bubble burst leading to the Great Recession, and, more recently, COVID. Couple these national disturbances with localized ones such as teacher strikes, school closings, localized DOGE efforts, grant-writing dry spells, and the revolving door of district leadership. I have come to see that disturbance is the norm, not an anomaly, each with different degrees of existential threats to your work and your employment.
Speaking to all PIs out there: Over my 30 years of working on soft-money funded projects, I’ve experienced situations where specific projects have ended, both gradually and suddenly, which affects personnel. This is incredibly difficult, regardless of how it happens. In such cases, I have always seen my leadership role as one that includes being responsible for helping my team find new employment opportunities so that I would not have to officially terminate their position.
Over the long arc of time attending AERA, I have seen a cornucopia of extraordinary work. The vast majority of this extraordinary work never became ordinary, existing only in the archives of our academic journals, if at all.
During this period of national angst and crisis, now is the time to think about your own arc of time and what legacy you want to leave behind besides your CV of publications. How will you make your extraordinary work ordinary to protect your work from the most significant, inevitable disturbance: your retirement?