Presidential Address

Last year, I was elected President of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS), my primary professional academic society. For the past year (2019-2020), I served as President-Elect, which involves sitting on the executive committee, some ad hoc activities like sitting on a search committee for new journal editors, and preparing for my upcoming year as president. It is customary every year at the closing session of the international conference being hosted (conferences alternated on a biennial schedule between ICLS - the International Conference of the Learning Sciences - and CSCL - Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, but is now switching to an Annual Meeting of ISLS with programs for Learning Sciences and CSCL) for the ‘gavel’ to be passed from the outgoing president to the incoming president. This year (2020) with the global pandemic, what looked to be our largest ever ICLS, we had to cancel the face-to-face meeting and move what we could online. The conference chairs did a heroic job. The community self-organized, and we ended up having a rather successful online conference, especially considering the very short time frame and abrupt shift. As part of the online conference, we did have the annual closing session where I assumed the presidency for 2020-2021. I have been told that my remarks got a positive reception from the community, and I have been asked to publish them in some form. The president’s address on the ISLS website has a very truncated, slightly adapted version of my remarks. I did not include full remarks for that website because speeches don’t read well as plain text (you can get away with run-ons in speeches, speeches have rhythm and pauses for effect, things like that), and I also had a rather long speech. It would have been a lot of scrolling on a page that usually is much more succinct. So on the official site, some of the main message is still there. But I am providing the full text of my 2020 address, by request, below. If you are a member of the society and can get involved in some way, such as through one of the committees, please reach out to the appropriate chair or ISLS board member or to me. (Also, if you decide to poke around this blog, you’ll see I really don’t update it very much. The main page, which has listings of some of my publications, is more interesting.)

Thank you Heisawn and the ISLS board of directors.

Right now is a time of change – we are seeing it in the streets, in the news, on the internet, and hopefully in ourselves. We are changing the ways in which we act in the world, and thus we are learning. That’s sort of a central idea in the learning sciences – when we change the nature of our participation in the world, we are also learning. Right now, I and so many others in our community are working to make sure that we and our institutions all change and learn in ways that demonstrate that we are aware that anti-Black racism is real, it is a systemic problem, that Black lives matter, and we all need to, can do, and will do better for a more just and equitable world.

I am assuming the presidency of ISLS in circumstances I could not have foreseen. More voices are speaking out about injustice and state-sponsored violence against black bodies. We are faced with a global pandemic. We are battling widespread misinformation and disruption of our notions of leadership and governance and civic engagement. We are showing inadequate progress in doing what is necessary to avoid the most disastrous effects of climate change. We are in the midst of a data revolution where issues of privacy and ethics and bias are only now beginning to enter the mainstream conversation. We are seeing massive and abrupt transition to online education for those who have the resources and the absence of the support and care that can be provided in a school-based learning environment for those who do not. There has been so much happening that I know I have needed to retreat at times to even try to make sense of it all and to think about what place I have in this changing world. In those times, I have also thought about what place do we as learning scientists have in this world. What purpose do we serve when there are so many things that seem wrong and in need of change?

What I have concluded is our purpose as learning scientists right now is to engage the public. Fully. The learning sciences is of the utmost relevance and importance for the challenges we see before us right now. We need rigorous work that understands how people think and learn in the real world, how concepts and epistemologies form and are maintained and changed in spaces like schools, home, and online. We need to understand and support new multimodal and computational literacies – new forms of thought and expression - that are emerging in conjunction with fundamental changes to our social and technological infrastructures. We need rich understandings of culture, of how cultures adapt and change and how participation in one or more cultures enables or inhibits participation in others. We need to understand the ideas and perspectives of youth, what they value and believe and what they have to say about a world that is as much theirs as it is ours. We need to know how we coordinate and collaborate with technology as more of us are living and learning in physically distributed arrangements and participating in complex and rapidly changing sociotechnical ecosystems. We need to understand and support our educators who have shown resilience and ingenuity despite insufficient resources and so many demands on their underappreciated expertise. We need visions and models for how research and practice can meaningfully pursue joint work that has consequence for communities and public institutions and for the academic endeavor. We need design, so that we can invent new technologies, new experiences, and new futures.

So as the incoming president, seeing all these needs, I have a question to ask seriously of all of you. How is what you are doing helping us to meet one or more of these needs? I have been a member of the learning sciences community for almost two decades, and I know that each and every one of you – each and every project that you pursue – no matter how traditional or boutique it may sound - has value and relevance to the challenges we have at hand. And as the new president of the international society of the learning sciences, I ask of you to think about the value that you are bringing through your work and share it. And craft the rich and compelling story that centers the work we do, because some of our most foundational work in the learning sciences has demonstrated the power of stories for making ideas stick, for motivating inquiry, and for organizing and structuring communities. Communicate these stories. Tell them to your deans and rectors and advisors and supervisors. Share them through social media. Write op-eds. Record videos. Tell everyone that learning scientists do the hard work of figuring out how people understand the mathematics, science, and history of disease and disease spread. Tell them that learning scientists are unpacking what makes us believe some ideas are true and others are false. Tell them learning scientists are coming up with new and effective ways to do teaching and learning in online and other computer-supported collaborative spaces. Tell them learning scientists are devising ways to help people become fluent in and reshape the practices that are essential to our economic and civic futures. Tell them learning scientists are figuring out how to make meaning from these endless streams of big digital data that we are producing. Tell them how learning scientists are doing the work of partnering with communities and listening to individual voices and helping amplify the truths we need to hear. Academic and scholarly communities are notoriously bad at asserting the value that we bring to people outside of our intellectual communities. We need to do better.

So, get word out. Work on telling your stories. Because what we are doing matters and is relevant and is needed right now. Post. Write. Talk. Record. Listen. Get the attention and interest of more people than those who are established veterans of our field with comfortable seats in the ivory tower. As president, one initiative I will pursue is establishing some online meet ups and workshops where those within our society who are knowledgeable and experienced with public engagement can share and exchange their wisdom with the rest of the community. The expertise I am talking about is how to share scholarship through social media, with op-eds, popular press books, and with turning research into action within a community. I will be asking for some of you to please volunteer your time to help in that effort. My metric for success is – within the course of this next year - whether we can get more people to know what it is we do, how we can help and that while we have learned so much in the 30+ years since the field was formed, we are still humble – we are always ready to learn more.

And please allow me tell you what else I will do. This is a challenging year to be president. We are moving to a new conference structure with the ISLS annual meeting rather than having ICLS or CSCL. We have financial matters to reckon with due in part to changes in economic conditions. We are working to figure out how to best support a hybrid conference next year in Germany given so many unknowns. Our international board of directors and dedicated committee chairs and members, journal editors and editorial boards, will be working very hard this year. Please join in that work – contact editors and committee chairs and board members to see how you can contribute– not to build your CV but to make our intellectual community better. And as president, I will do the usual president things. I’ll send lots of emails and lead lots of meetings. I’ll promote the society and the excellent work you all are doing. When appropriate, I’ll make sure we write the occasional statement to make public what our values are and where we stand on issues that matter in this world. But beyond that, I am here to learn. I want to see the amazing scholarship that our newest community members are contributing. I want to hear the voices and ideas of those who are often spoken over or dismissed. In service of that, I am committing right now to dedicate the presidential session of the ISLS 2021 annual meeting to the elevation of voices of minoritized scholars who have thus far been unheard. One of the perks of presidency is to organize a dedicated plenary conference session on the topic I see fit with speakers that I invite. Next year, this session, whether it takes place in person or online, will showcase the amazing work of one or more of our junior scholars who have been historically marginalized in our field, who have not yet reached the mythical citation level or h-index of our most well known and cited scholars.  And let’s be honest. Those individuals are – like nearly every academic field – mostly white, and heavily, although not exclusively, male. They have made invaluable contributions to our field, and we are appreciative – but we have more diverse and more young voices who have excellent ideas that will push us forward. Next year, in the presidential plenary session, we will hear them. 

So, to close, I want to say that we are right now, facing challenging times, but the work that we do is important, and we are very relevant. Let the world know what we have to offer. Listen to and amplify the voices of those in our community who are not being heard. Come up with ideas for how we as a society and community can work better, and reach out to me. I am easy to find on the internet. Let me know, so we can make ISLS a more impactful and more welcoming community for all. Many of us joined this community with the idea that by focusing on learning, we could design a better world. Right now is chaotic, but it’s also our big chance. So let’s take it. Let’s continue the mission that began over 30 years ago, let’s do it better, and let’s get the word out. 

Thank you all for this opportunity to serve as your new president. I look forward to seeing you all online or in Bochum next year.