2021 SCIPIE Virtual Conference
Theme: Power and Knowledge: Implications for Our Social World
The conference will focus on the overarching questions of how we know what we claim to know and what constitutes equitable educational outcomes in the face of major social upheavals, economic crises, and public health crises.
The year of 2020 saw multiple major upheavals around the world that brought with them challenges and new considerations for understanding teaching, learning, and schools. The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the educational experiences of students at all levels and in many cases foisted online modes of learning to the foreground with teachers having limited support for understanding how to use these modes effectively. As a public health crisis, the matter of racial and economic justice in education was brought into sharp focus: educators and researchers alike had to ask how the abrupt shift to online learning under such conditions would affect the most disadvantaged students and their families in the face of unsafe work environments, unemployment and underemployment, and rapidly changing policies regarding in-person learning. For others, inadequate conditions for children learning while adults worked from home became a concern. Further, social upheaval manifested for the majority of 2020 in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor by police and vigilantes in the U.S. Then, the year of 2021 opened with politically-motivated attacks on the U.S. capitol, in part connected with social movements that were already in motion propagating conspiracy theories about U.S. governmental activity and pseudoscience during the COVID-19 pandemic. For many, these events were jarring and unexpected, while for others these were less shocking. Nonetheless, as educational psychologists pursuing innovative research projects and aiming to address questions with practical relevance, the events taking place since our last biennial meeting inevitably have affected the contexts we study, the kinds of research we are able to conduct, and the kinds of opportunities that can happen within doctoral research training programs.
Accordingly, this conference will extend SCIPIE’s recent focus on complex and critical perspectives to promote reflection and discussion of how educational psychologists can maintain relevance and contribute to these currently foregrounded challenges. As exemplars of how educational psychologists may be uniquely equipped to contribute to solving pressing social problems, we outline the following sub-themes:
Promoting a scientifically-literate populace to mitigate public health crises: How do we know what counts as scientific knowledge? How should we design learning environments to afford understanding of this matter? What do teachers need to know in order to achieve this goal? How should racial and socioeconomic disparities be understood in relation to this goal? How do we make our inquiry more accessible/consumable for communities?
Promoting clarity around the social nature of knowledge construction and value-ladenness of inquiry: How are our understandings of what counts as valid knowledge sociohistorically contextualized? How do issues of classed and raced positionalities play a role in our understandings of whose ideas are authoritative and which ideas are deemed politically-neutral (as opposed to subjective and politicized)? How do our decisions about these matters have a real impact on the lived experiences of marginalized populations? How might we help teachers navigate these charged sociopolitical waters in pursuit of educational equity for their students?
Supporting high-quality learning in and across multiple modalities: How should we design learning environments when face-to-face instruction is not possible? What is possible in computer-supported learning that may not be possible in traditional instruction? What do teachers want and need when considering technology-rich learning environments? How do racial and socioeconomic disparities inform our understanding of these matters?