The American Educational Research Association (AERA) meets each year somewhere in North America, gathering educational researchers and graduate students from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, as well as from other parts of the world. For the past two years, at AERA meetings in Montreal and San Francisco, SteinerBooks has decided to take a leading role in representing Waldorf education to the mostly mainstream educational professors, teachers, and graduate students who attend. As in previous years, SteinerBooks was represented in Chicago by Gene Gollogly and Jens Jensen.

The AERA meeting this year took place from April 9-13 in Chicago. In the face of growing governmental interference in educational policy (the latest being "No Child Left Behind"), we have noticed over the past few years a growing interest in independent educational movements such as Waldorf schools. Even old-time educational professionals are beginning to investigate the principles behind Waldorf education, because they see the results for themselves. Nonetheless, such evidence has been mostly anecdotal, with academic research on Waldorf not readily available to the broader educational community. It is our goal at SteinerBooks to change that.

This year in Chicago, we presented an excellent new book by Torin Finser, Silence Is Complicity: A Call to Let Teachers Improve Our Schools through Action Research—Not NCLB (No Child Left Behind). This book hit the mark with many of the educators who stopped by our booth to speak with us. Kurt Lewin, a former professor at MIT, first coined the term "action research" around 1944. He described action research as "a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action", using "a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action." Action research can change the entire sense of social science, transforming it from reflective knowledge about past social practices formulated by a priesthood of experts (say, research Ph.D.s) to an active moment-to-moment theorizing, data collecting, and inquiring occurring in the midst of our ongoing lives. Action research is drawing increasing attention from those involved in forming the future of education, as evidenced by the number of meetings and publications on the topic.

Except among those involved in the growing businesses of testing and data compilation, there has been a growing unease in the educational community regarding the fact that government has decided to decree a one-size-fits-all policy for our children, teachers, and schools throughout the country. Furthermore, there is a growing body of literature that demonstrates, through research, the damage being done to the educational system by this program. Several educators I met spoke of similar trends in other countries, including Ireland, England, and Germany. We at SteinerBooks feel (and many of those we spoke with at the AERA meeting agree) that Waldorf education may present one of the best alternatives to No Child Left Behind, and that it needs to be able to speak the language of professional researchers if it is to be taken seriously.

This year, we were pleasantly surprised to see an official meeting featuring presentations entitled "Learning from Steiner: The Relevance of Waldorf Education for Public Education" and "Parallels in the Work of Froebel and Jung." Among the presenters were Ida Oberman of Springboard Schools; Richard E. Siegesmund, University of Georgia; and Robert Anderson of WestEd and Rudolf Steiner College. One had the feeling that seeds were planted, which a number of people have shown an interest in nurturing for the future.

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Like Torin Finser’s book, we are making a call for empirical research on Waldorf education, its curriculum, and the outcome for students and society. It should be serious research that we can present at the 2008 AERA meeting in New York City. For inquiries and/or more information, please contact William Jens Jensen by sending email to (jens@steinerbooks.org).