Conference Grants

Overview

<p>The Conference Grant program provides support to scholars in developing small research conferences and focused symposia to explore critical issues in education research with budgets up to $50,000. We intend for applicants to bring together researchers, practitioners, and other important collaborators whose substantive knowledge, theoretical insight, and methodological expertise can be assembled in ways that build upon and advance education research. These convenings can serve as starting points for building new research agendas or as touchstones for research communities to connect and advance their shared scholarly interests about education research. The Foundation rotates the area of focus for this program annually to generate fresh ideas and perspectives on pressing educational challenges. For this funding cycle Spencer will support conferences related to three topics that emerged from our year-long field engagement with the education research community.</p> <p>Developing High-Quality Educators and Leaders<br>Essential to any successful system of education is the strength and capacity of those who perform its core purpose - its educators and leaders. The preparation and ongoing learning needs of educational professionals deserves more attention. Teacher shortages, breaks in leadership trajectories, and labor conditions for educators across all settings share challenges that coordinated research efforts can help address. Notable examples include the training of the Pre-K educator and out-of-school learning workforce, especially given the rise in policies supporting universal pre-K and the increasing reliance on after-school and out-of-school learning settings. At the other end of the spectrum, we recognize that leadership positions in universities and colleges are increasingly difficult to fill, and scholars have called for more explicit attention to the development of university and college leadership pipelines.</p> <p>Exploring Human Learning and Thriving <br>Learning is ubiquitous to human activity, and it is importantly shaped by people’s interactions with others as well as the institutions, histories, and places that expand and constrain the possibilities for learning. Developing more robust understandings of the complexities and variation in learning across cultural communities and learning environments that support a diversity of forms of human flourishing across the lifespan is critical. Learning serves multiple purposes in and beyond formal learning environments at all levels of education. Learning involves a wide range of cognitive and non-cognitive dimensions. We welcome proposals that advance conceptualizations of strength- and resiliency-based perspectives of whole-person pedagogies that value and partner with communities and families as central to learning. Investigating human learning and thriving includes recognizing that social challenges of today and tomorrow might call for renewed attention both to optimal pedagogies given technological advances and also to how we conceptualize and measure learning.</p> <p>Innovative Research Methods<br>Rigorous research methods are at the heart of knowledge-building efforts and are essential to how we create evidence that is usable and reliable. In both quantitative and qualitative traditions there are opportunities for development that will strengthen the quality of the data and evidence in education research. In the quantitative tradition, new opportunities to engage with “big data”, including administrative data sets across multiple agencies, population-level data sets, and other new and emerging forms of data create the possibility for impactful conclusions and innovative study designs. However, these new data sets create demands for new quantitative and analytical approaches and careful consideration of data ethics. Additionally, ensuring that quantitative analyses of large data sets are informed by sophisticated theoretical frameworks is critical. In the qualitative tradition, the proliferation of emergent qualitative approaches creates new opportunities and challenges around ensuring that such research is conducted in adherence to a set of rigorous practices and standards of evidence. Additionally, the field continues to build on both quantitative and qualitative traditions to forge new directions for rigorous mixed methods.</p> <p>Making the case <br>We are interested in proposals with thoughtfully designed meetings to address any one of the three topics listed above. One of the strengths of educational research is the way in which scholars engage numerous disciplinary traditions to answer critical questions facing our field. Successful proposals will bring together researchers from the field of education and beyond to approach the proposed topic from multiple perspectives. We also encourage applicants proposing conferences to consider ways of bridging the substantive, theoretical, and methodological expertise of participants. While not a requirement, successful proposals in previous rounds have also included other attendees outside of the academy such as teachers, policymakers, artists, or journalists if the convening called for such expertise.</p>