2014 Student Research Conference

Friday, March 28, marked the 19th annual Student Research Conference (SRC), featuring a keynote address by Professor Susan Moore Johnson, who founded the SRC in 1996. This was Johnson’s last SRC as a HGSE faculty member, while it was Dean James Ryan’s first. The conference was a great opportunity for presenters and attendees to network and build community not only through panels, roundtables, and poster sessions, but also through workshops, meals, and a reception held the end of the day.

The SRC is a unique annual event which is a culmination of a year-long effort led by a team of doctoral students to provide master’s and doctoral students – both at HGSE and beyond – an opportunity to both present and engage in discussions about ongoing education research. Our student leadership team coordinated training sessions throughout the year to prepare presenters for the conference, and a large team of HGSE doctoral students reviewed research proposals in order to provide constructive feedback.

We had approximately 300 attendees, 140 of whom were student presenters, whose work reflected this year’s theme: Shifting Landscapes: Education Research in a Dynamic Era. Participants came from near and far, including Harvard University, Boston University, Boston College, Tufts, Leslie, Northeastern, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse, Quinnipiac, Brown, University of Houston, University of California – Berkeley, and UCLA. We also hosted an international presenter from Chelyabinsk State University in Russia.

The SRC featured three special sessions: “Research for Digital Worlds,” an interactive workshop led by Assistant Professor Karen Brennan; a “Justice in Schools” session on moral reasoning for educators led by Associate Professor Meira Levinson’s class; and a presentation by ProQuest Flow, one of our major sponsors for the event.

We were honored to have hosted this unique, student-driven event, and are thankful for all the support we received along the way. In particular, we would like to thank the Office of Student Affairs for their guidance, doctoral students who helped plan and execute this event, faculty discussants who helped facilitate all sessions, and conference volunteers who assisted in managing sessions. We are also grateful to our sponsors, StataCorp, ProQuest Flow, and the Harvard COOP. Working with students, faculty and staff to translate our vision into a reality was an invaluable experience for which we are grateful. We couldn’t have done it without our leadership team, who consisted of doctoral students Wenjuan Qin, Pei Pei Liu, Ziyun Deng, Siwen Zhang, Galen McQuillen, and David Braslow.

We hope students benefited from this conference, and we hope it continues to grow as a student conference devoted for education research.

Deepa Vasudevan & Shireen Al-Adeimi
2014 SRC Co-chairs

For more on this year's SRC and the student poster presentations, please visit the Ed School's Tumblr.