“The Vision Thing”: Educational Research and AERA in the 21st Century Part 1: Competing Visions of What Educational Researchers Should Do

Abstract

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of mini-feature articles by former presidents of the American Educational Research Association about the future of the association and educational research in general. This particular collection of brief essays presents quite different visions of the sort of work educational researchers should undertake in the future as well as radically different assessments of the worth of the work that has been done to date. The articles in this series were gathered and submitted by Jane Stallings, a former association president. They were originally presented in two symposia Dr. Stallings organized for the 1996 AERA annual meeting in New York City. It is hoped that this series will generate others to think and write about the future of our field. We invite AERA members (particularly those whom Michael Scriven describes in his article below as paradigm breakers) to submit their visions of the association and education research to the AERA Web site, where a special section has been constructed to receive and display members' comments: http://aera.net/pubs/er.