Dear KAERA members and friends,

 

It is a great honor to serve as President of the Korean American Educational Researchers Association. I am grateful to the many leaders and members who have built KAERA since 2008, and I take on this role with a strong sense of responsibility for where we go next.

 

KAERA has created an important scholarly home for Korean and Korean American educational researchers across career stages, institutions, and national contexts. The question now is what we do with that foundation.

 

I believe KAERA should be more than a place where scholars gather. It should be a place where people are developed, where distinctive ideas are generated, and where our collective scholarship has influence beyond our own membership. That vision is organized around three priorities: People, Perspective, and Practice.

 

People. KAERA has always benefited from the generosity of senior scholars who mentor, advise, and open doors for others. But professional growth should not depend on being fortunate enough to meet the right person at the right moment. We will make mentoring, sponsorship, collaboration, and leadership development more intentional. Members should be able to enter KAERA and see a path forward: from finding mentors, to developing research partnerships, to serving the association, and eventually to leading it. A strong association does not simply welcome the next generation. It prepares them to shape what comes next.

 

Perspective. KAERA holds an intellectual position few other educational research organizations have. Our members work across Korea, the United States, the Korean diaspora, and increasingly many other national contexts. That position lets us see what is easily missed inside a single educational system or cultural frame: why an idea that looks universal in one context works differently in another, how migration, language, policy, and schooling intersect across generations, and where the tendency to treat Korean and Korean American educational experiences as one story breaks down. I will work to have KAERA known not simply as an organization of Korean and Korean American researchers, but as a scholarly community that brings a distinctive transnational perspective to the larger questions in education.

 

Practice. Our scholarship also needs to travel further. The value of educational research is not measured only by where it is published, but by whether it helps us understand and respond to what educators, students, families, and communities are facing. We will build stronger connections between the questions researchers study and the questions being lived in schools and communities. That means making our work more accessible, and it also means letting practitioners and communities influence which questions we consider worth asking in the first place.

 

This is an ambitious direction, but it builds on who KAERA already is and what our members already bring. I look forward to the work ahead, and I welcome your ideas about where we should be going.

 

Sincerely,

Jackie Eunjung Relyea, Ph.D. 

President Korean American Educational Researchers Association