History, Pending

Abstract

Tesconi-Warren collaborations began 50 years ago at the University of Illinois-Chicago, then abbreviated fondly as “Chicago Circle,” perhaps the only American institution of higher learning named for a traffic-control installation. We offered Foundations courses in teacher preparation programs of the College of Education, occasionally as a team. Our wives and children became friends. Van Cleve Morris was our dean and president of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) around the time Tesconi brought Warren into the young association early in the 1970s. We jointly designed a PhD specialization in education policy studies and secured grants to support multicultural curriculum development and recruitment of American Indian students from Chicago's Native community. Later, we went separate ways. Our work became more administrative, Tesconi as dean of education and social services at the University of Vermont and American University and Warren in a similar capacity at Indiana University. This article relies extensively on personal memories, refreshed and fact-checked through AESA archives. Readers may find it fantastical and on some points mistaken. But the want of a history of AESA makes searching its past for coherence a stagger through patchy recollections. Believing is seeing. Although our association experiences have extended across 5 decades, the ones we emphasize here occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. All had rippling effects. Specifically, we cite Pride and Promise, an AESA-sponsored publication in 1984; enactment of standards for assessing Foundations courses and sequences in professional education programs; and the AESA campaign to establish what was originally called the Council of Learned Societies in Education, a bonding of Foundations-related associations subsequently renamed the Council for Social Foundations of Education (American Educational Studies Association, 2017, sec. 1978; Tozer, Gallegos, Henry, Greiner, & Price, 2011).An AESA narrative should be constructed as multiple stories with shifting centers of gravity, a design permitting transdisciplinary understanding of how diversity can grow as one without compromising unique traits and histories. Sturdy purposes, reinterpreted and reaffirmed, injected the powerful secret ingredients. The association has always been hydra-headed, but united nonetheless. Membership analyses would confirm whether the guesses have merit. AESA has changed without coherently pinpointing when, how, and why. It devised long-range plans but did not follow them religiously. The flexibility may well have proved to be an asset.