Welcome Graduate Students!

If this is your first visit to the website, I hope you will bookmark the site and come back again. The GSC website offers a vast amount of information and resource tools for all gradate students. Graduate students are a vital part of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Of the 25,000+ AERA members, over 7,000 are graduate students. Indeed, the AERA graduate student community is stronger than ever!

Hello, my name is Andrea L. Tyler and I am delighted to have another opportunity to serve you as Chair of the Graduate Student Council. I am a doctoral candidate at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where I study Curriculum Studies in the Educational Leadership Department.  My research foci include minority access, experiences, and resilience in STEM education, minority retention, and the influence of relationships on STEM career interest.

I’m excited to be a part of the GSC leadership because AERA and the GSC have been such a valuable resource for me throughout my graduate career. By participating in the AERA graduate student community, I have had the opportunity to connect with other graduate students to share experiences and advice, and to get a broader sense of what is happening, from a globally perspective, in graduate education. In addition, the GSC has been an excellent “spring board” for becoming active in AERA, where new researchers have the opportunity to interact with accomplished scholars in the field.
Serving as Chair will present opportunities for me to continue working with a team of graduate students who are serious about promoting and advancing the goals, mission, and initiatives of the GSC organization. As Chair I will focus on four initiatives:

1. Support and provide leadership to the current GSC council and the entire AERA graduate student community,
2. Increase graduate student membership and invite membership inclusion to achieve powerful synergy within the organization,
3. Encourage an environment that invites new voices, embraces diverse perspectives, and new ways of addressing points that are pertinent to nearly all graduate students, and
4. Move the organization to the next level by continuing the visibility of the GSC and expanding the services offered by the GSC.

Additionally, as Chair I will continue to be a pillar for the organization and a constant resource for progressing the Graduate Student Council’s initiatives.

Please take this opportunity to browse the website for information on what the GSC offers graduate students. You will find the current Graduate Student Council roster, as well as information about the 2010 annual meeting in Denver, Colorado.

On the resources page, you will find information specific to each of our twelve divisions, including external links that will be of interest to people working in the specific areas of research covered by each division.

Also, be sure to check out our newsletters. The newsletters are full of information about navigating graduate student life; an excellent resource to what is happening within the GSC, and a section entitled “Ask the GSC”.

And, if you are not already part of the graduate student listserv, be sure to sign up. The listserv is a wonderful forum for dialogue about a variety of graduate student issues. Once you sign up, you can also search the archive, which is a great repository of advice and interesting discussions.

So, whatever your area of interest, from a practitioner in the classroom to administrative leadership, from faculty member to educational researcher, you will find the resources available through the GSC will inform and enlighten you! I hope you will consider becoming an active part of the AERA graduate student community. I am sure you will find it as valuable as I have.

Thank you for visiting!
Andrea L. Tyler
Chair
Miami University of Ohio

A Welcome Message from the GSC Chair-Elect 

Welcome fellow graduate students!  My name is Annis N. Brown and I am the Chair-elect of the Graduate Student Council (GSC).  The GSC section of the AERA website is a space for collaboration, information dissemination, and recognition of the unique experiences of AERA’s graduate students.  Please bookmark this webspace and return to it frequently.  Important calls for manuscripts, job-postings, and fellowship opportunities are regularly updated for each division.  Additionally, the GSC publishes a newsletter three times a year that is archived here.  Feel free to email us with feedback about the utility of the site – because it is a space specifically designed to address your needs as graduate student members of AERA.

 Serving as your Chair-elect is truly an honor.  Over the past few years, I have assumed the roles of the Division L: Policy & Politics graduate student representative and the Community Leader for the GSC.  Both positions afforded me the opportunity to be a voice for graduate student issues – while also affecting change via organizing and facilitating AERA sessions, appointing graduate student leaders to key positions, and fostering communication across our national network of graduate students.   I will continue this advocacy as Chair-elect. This year, my key initiatives are to:

1. Support the current Chair, Andrea Tyler, with her program initiatives
2. Organize the GSC Resource Center at the 2010 AERA annual meeting in Denver, CO
3. Plan sessions that address graduate student needs, interests, and professional development  at the 2010 annual meeting
4. Increase graduate student membership
5. Foster communication across the graduate student community of scholars

I am motivated by the diversity of experiences and interests exemplified within AERA’s graduate student network.  Marshalling this diversity to enrich our scholarly experiences is one of my key goals.  I look forward to constructing sessions and colloquia at the annual meeting where we can learn from one another, push our ideas and theories to new heights, and strive to generate answers to some of our discipline’s toughest questions.  I invite you to take advantage of the opportunities and resources provided by the GSC, both at the annual meeting and here within our webspace.   The GSC is where collaboration happens.

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