American Educational Research Association—Report April 15, 2005

For the very first time, Steinerbooks attended the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference in Montreal, Canada, April 2005. This is a meeting of AERA members—people who are concerned with education in all its aspects, especially educational research. The constituents are mainly professors of education at universities, colleges, and teacher training centers, as well as superintendents, federal, state, and local officials, and administrators concerned with more effective means of educating our young people. Ten to fourteen thousand people attended this annual meeting in Montreal (numbers can go as high as twenty thousand, depending on the location). There are more than forty thousand members of AERA, and in the US there are more than a hundred thousand professors of education.

The exhibit hall was open for 3 days in the major convention hotel and there were attendees in it constantly. There are over a thousand sessions, with usually three or four papers presented on topics ranging from racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity of the student and adult populations in North America, to accountability in education, the nature of democracy, and the role education should play in a democracy. I attended two sessions, both of which had a hundred people in attendance. They covered "Ethical Issues in Education" and "Leadership in Education." They were interesting and understandable even for a non-teacher and non-professor like myself.

Our booth was in the last row of the exhibit hall, but we had two tables on which we laid out all the "Foundations of Waldorf Education" series by Rudolf Steiner as well as many other books related to Waldorf education.

At this education meeting we must have spoken to at least thirty or forty professors who had various Waldorf connections—family members attending Waldorf schools etc—and every one on them was very positive about our presence at that meeting. The other people who stopped and looked (must have been over 250, because that's how many catalogs we gave out) just had never heard of Steiner or Waldorf. They leafed through the books (especially the kindergarten books) and then took the catalogs. People were definitely interested, and to me it is essential that we build greater knowledge of Waldorf and Rudolf Steiner's educational theory to this group.

A few of the people who stopped by and where they came from:

  • Professor.Stephen Raudenbush—University of Michigan
  • Professor Phillip Gause—University of North Carolina, Greensboro
  • Professor Peggy Apple—Indiana University, Bloomington
  • Professor Richard Ackerman—University of Maine
  • Dr. Ximena Harsock—Department of Education, State of Arizona
It is essential that we attend the annual AERA each year. The attendees are professionals in education, and we have a responsibility to help them understand the nature and the real value of Waldorf education and Rudolf Steiner as an educator. It seems they are interested and want to know, and I feel we will find many friends among these members. Next year we hope to have a joint booth—even if we staff it ourselves—that includes AWSNA.

Gene Gollogly
4/21/05