Friday, April 25, 2025, 1:30-3:00 pm MDT
The Colorado Convention Center
Ballroom Level, Mile High Ballroom 2BC and 3BC
This talk presented by Distinguished Professor Kris D. Gutiérrez extends the analytic focus on what confers sustained resilience to ecologies discussed across her work, including her AERA Presidential address. Given the dramatic and dynamic sociopolitical, cultural, civic, and environmental shifts in the ecologies that currently constitute our daily lives, we need generative analytical frames that help us understand how resilient ecologies, their people and practices are and can be sustained. In contrast to individual notions of resilience, ecological resilience in this work refers to the system’s ability to shape and adapt to change and transform while sustaining the social welfare, resources, and social futures of participants—i.e., sociocultural systems such as towns, communities, educational and other activity systems. Employing a utopian social design-based methodological approach, Professor Gutiérrez presents two cases of resilient ecologies— one educational and the other a community—to illustrate ecologies as unbounded, with interlocking linkages across human life mutually constituting their formation and resilience. The talk explores how an analytic frame of mutual constitution helps us avoid the tendency to separate individuals and practices from one another and the activities in which they participate and help to co-construct. Further, the analytic frame of mutual constitution brings attention to how learning occurs across multiple connected systems, to understand the role of collective learning and lived civics in the development of historical actors central to the sustainability of resilient ecologies.
The Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award is the premier acknowledgment of outstanding achievement and success in education research. It is designed to publicize, motivate, encourage, and suggest models for education research at its best.