A welcome message from the ISLS President, Jasmine Ma
I am honored to serve this year as President of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, as the organization enters its 23rd year. As I said in my remarks at the 2024 Annual Meeting, I’m queer, gender nonconforming, and Asian-American. I am a body that is regularly told that I am in the wrong bathroom, or told that I am much younger than I look. These interactions are always initiated with good intent, but the message is that I am not recognized within normative cultural models. The Board has put their trust in me by electing me the next President of the Society, and before that, you, our membership, put your trust in me by electing me onto the Board. I wish we were beyond representational politics, but I can’t help but feel both a sense of pride and a sense of responsibility in the privilege of serving ISLS in this leadership role. I see my work in this role as a commitment to serving, to the best of my ability, the heterogeneous perspectives, needs, and strengths of our community, both to support our members and continue to strengthen and expand our scholarship to better support the communities to which we are committed. The learning sciences is my home; the community that nurtures my development as a scholar and a mentor, and friend, but that has, on occasion felt harmful to me. It’s the space where I have committed my heart and energies because I believe that our commitments are in the right place – making sense of learning in its naturally occurring contexts, shifting how we understand and talk about learning by developing new theory, and designing tools and environments, through deeply interdisciplinary lenses and methods. All this for better futures for individuals, communities, lands and waters.
Since serving on the Board of ISLS, I’ve developed new ways of understanding what the Society is, and can be. Sure, it’s our “professional organization.” We pay our membership dues for the privileges of attending the Annual Meeting, getting access to our journals, maybe getting job announcements, and so on. But I’ve come to think of it as a crucial piece of infrastructure for our scholarship and our professional development. It is through ISLS that we are in community: it’s where we meet colleagues who become friends and mentors, where we try out ideas, where we challenge each other, where the field gains momentum in particular directions. It’s where we work out sticky tensions, like how do we address current challenges with new theory and forms of inter- and transdisciplinarity while continuing to build on the rich theoretical and empirical foundations of the learning sciences?
The ISLS 2025 Annual Meeting is one of those places where this might happen, and this year’s theme, “Educating for world-making: Envisioning and enacting sustainable solutions to global crises,” is an absolutely critical orientation for our research and design. Thank you to the local organizing committee, Annual Meeting Committee, and many others for your hard work!
We know that traveling in person to Annual Meetings is not possible for many members for a variety of reasons, and I’m excited about the initiatives that the Society is developing to support different kinds of engagement with the community, from more robust hybrid engagement at the Annual Meeting to virtual meet-ups to online dialogues hosted by our various committees. The Board is also hard at work trying to develop sustainable strategies for supporting more of our membership to participate in Society activities, particularly those experiencing financial precarity, health challenges, linguistic differences, and other situations that have presented obstacles. One way we are doing this is through our Affiliates Program, which we have been piloting the last few years. This year, that program will be formalized; stay tuned for more information! Another major project is shifting the financial process of the Society to clarify our annual budget, to be able to make more informed decisions about how to plan for and allocate our funds. Thank you to our new Financial Officer, Michelle Wilkerson, and new(ish) Executive Officer, Stephanie Teasley, along with our fantastic Financial Committee, for your efforts on this! We are also developing better strategies for collecting feedback and data from our membership to better understand the Society’s needs and challenges, and make sense of the impact of our ongoing activities. Additionally, our Fellows, in partnership with ILSSA representatives, undertook the task of more deliberately shaping a more inclusive “conference culture” at our Annual Meeting. Finally, I want to welcome the new Editors-in-Chief of the Journal of the Learning Sciences, Leema Berland and Erica Halverson, who have some wonderful ideas for welcoming more diverse authors and cultivating expansive scholarship in the learning sciences. Thank you all for this hard work!
I invite all of our membership to get involved in efforts like these, as you have the capacity to. We have a number of Committees who are looking for your help, with lots of different options for how you might participate. If something seems interesting to you, please reach out to the committee chairs for information about joining! I’m excited for a busy yet generative year in community with you all.
Jasmine Ma
ISLS President 2024–2025