Greetings, AESA members and other listserv subscribers…

The Executive Council of the American Educational Studies Association
directs your attention to the following statement:

STATEMENT OF CONCERN (4/27/17)
The Executive Council of the American Educational Studies Association
wants to express publicly our deep concern about recent U.S.
executive, legislative, and judicial actions taken at odds with AESA’s
most deeply held values.  In the face of such actions, we want to
reaffirm truth, love, and justice as AESA’S guiding values.  AESA’s
scholarly commitments to public education, to democracy and the arts,
to cultural diversity and environmental sustainability, educational
equality and equity are reflected in our Standards for Academic and
Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational
Studies, and Educational Policy Studies.  Recent political rhetoric
and actions have imperiled our conscientious work to uphold them.

Our members’ language, inquiries, situations, standpoints, and
strategies for interpreting, expressing, and transmitting those deeply
shared core values in multiple disciplines are various and
dynamic–ever subject to elaboration, critical debate, and mutual
deliberation, irreducible to any dogma.  Yet the intensity of our
present shared concern moves us to make this brief public statement.

We condemn the targeting of any named religious, racial, sexual,
differently-abled, or ethnic group for exclusionary, discriminatory,
violent, and hateful speech or action as inconsistent with the
nation’s democratic ideals—harmful to children and profoundly
miseducative.  We hold dear the United States’ historic hospitality to
refugees from oppression elsewhere, so eloquently proclaimed on the
Statue of Liberty, yet so often abused and selectively applied, and
welcome diverse arts and humanities scholars and social-scientific
researchers who bring conscientious imagination, critical
intelligence, and practical wisdom to the educational challenges that
this national hospitality and its merciless contradictions require us
to meet.  We deplore the privatization and commercialization of public
schools and public colleges and universities as profoundly
undemocratic.  We value education that respects truths and their
experienced and observed complexities from diversely situated
perspectives; we condemn public deceit and falsehoods as public
miseducation.  We reject public attitudes of denial and indifference
toward the scientifically documented ecological crisis that now
afflicts our entire planet, damaging land, air, and water, and harming
human children while endangering countless species; such irresponsible
attitudes are profoundly miseducative.

All these severe challenges call for educators’ courage, creativity,
and wisdom.  These challenges impart practical urgency to AESA
members’ rigorous educational inquiry, thought, and criticism.  They
require our deliberate curricular, pedagogical, program, policy, and
community initiatives, in pragmatic ethical responses to these
challenges.  They demand our strategically vocal, conscientious
engagement in public controversies concerning them as well.

Sent by:
Jennifer Stoops
Social Media Fellow, Urban Education
The Graduate Center, CUNY

Communications Director
American Educational Studies Association