Educating for world-making: Envisioning and enacting sustainable solutions to global crises. We invite the learning sciences research community to embrace utopias, agency, imagination, speculation, and futures thinking, as central aspects of education and educational research. The theme engages participants in reflecting on and theorizing personal, social, and networked aspects of world making and discussing advances of the field and planning future ways of expanding societal and global impact of the learning sciences.

The 2024 Annual Meeting theme “Learning as a cornerstone of healing, resilience, and community” recognizes the continuing need to respond to global crises, including especially COVID-19 but also war, climate change, and political oppression. Buffalo serves as a fitting venue to examine the 2024 conference theme. After fifty years of deindustrialization and population decline, Buffalo is experiencing an economic and cultural renaissance boosted by a large resettled refugee population and new population growth.

This year’s Annual Meeting once again brings together the Learning Sciences community as a whole by combining its two conference programs, the Learning Sciences (ICLS) and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). These two programs are unified by the theme of “Building Knowledge and Sustaining our Community”. Responding to our three year series of remote, virtual conferences, we aim to revisit the retreat experience of in-person programs. We recognize the value of in-person presentations, learning, networking, mentoring, seeking to revisit (or rediscover) this mode to remember what it is that we had lost.