Un/Occupy AERA !!

I have been thinking a lot lately of what I can do as a parent, an educator, and especially as an emerging scholar in response to the Occupy movements. Inspired greatly by Maxine Greene, whom I currently serve as a teaching assistant at Teachers College, here is an idea and an imaginative space I’m proposing...

Un/Occupy AERA

(American Educational Research Association)

In less than two months, a spark created by “Occupy Wall Street” on September 17, 2011 has spread like a wild fire from Zuccotti Park to numerous cities and countries. More and more people are taking to the streets to let their frustrations be heard by the plutocrats and their media and their “too big to fail” banks and the governments under their rule.

In this time of democratic uprisings and societal turmoil, we are reminded of Maxine Greene’s philosophy of ‘social imagination’ and her persistent call for wide-awake involvements “to go beyond the situations one confronts and refuse reality as given in the name of a reality to be produced” (Greene, 1973, p. 7).

How much longer is AERA going to remain silent on the federal occupation of educational research? More specifically, how much longer is AERA going to tolerate the federal government’s political intrusion on academic freedom by policing what counts as ‘knowledge’ mainly through funding allocation? How much longer is it going to tolerate NCLB’s test-driven education that truncates learning and trivializes teachers? How much more is AERA going to accept budget cuts to education especially in arts? How much more of the privatizing and dismantling of public education is AERA going to allow?

If not now, then when?