Looking Back from AERA

In April, I attended the 2026 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. This year’s theme was “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Education Research.” I was lucky to present two of my own research papers and attend sessions on a wide range of topics. I came home with a few ideas about how we think about our work in tobacco prevention and evaluation.

Community Education: It’s Not Just About What Happens In Classrooms 

One of the highlights of the conference was the Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture by Bianca Baldridge. The title of her talk was “(Re)memory, Community-based Education, and ‘Youth Work’ as the Process of Futuring.” It was not about schools, but about the educators working outside of schools, such as community program staff, youth workers, and community organizers. She described how these educators find ways to create real learning and connection even when the systems around them do not function effectively.

What she described resonated with me because it sounded pretty similar to the description of what tobacco coalitions do. Tobacco prevention coalition members are educators in the truest sense. They show up in their community spaces and do the work of shifting norms around tobacco. They are not standing at the podium in the classroom. They are sitting across the table from someone, building trust, sharing information and experiences, and meeting people where they are. 

Baldridge’s point was that this kind of community-based education carries its own tradition and knowledge. It does not need to justify itself by comparison to formal schooling. I think the same is true for tobacco coalitions. The health educators, community liaisons, and coalition members who do their work aren’t just supporting a tobacco prevention program. Their history, relationships, and accumulated knowledge are part of what makes the program possible. In this sense, they are not just people who carry out the program; they are part of what the program is, carrying its history, relationships, and legacy forward.

This makes me think about how we should understand and evaluate our tobacco prevention projects. Evaluation should recognize the knowledge and capacity generated through the work. It should create space to capture what coalition members are learning, how they are adapting their work to their communities, and what knowledge they are developing through the evaluation process. In this way, evaluation can help us understand not only what the program does, but also the knowledge, relationships, and capacity that make the program possible.

Beyond Data: Seeing What Communities Build

While attending sessions at AERA, a framing I kept coming back to was that the communities that have historically been excluded from quality education are often the same communities that bear the greatest burden of preventable disease. It is not a coincidence but a pattern. This is not a new connection for me. I’ve been hearing about it for a long time. But one session in particular opened my eyes to see this connection a little differently and gave me a chance to think about how it relates to my own work. 

In her speech, ‘The Future Is Here,’ AERA President Maisha Winn traced this connection all the way back to the decade following the Civil Rights Movement. She talked about how communities that had been failed by formal institutions built their own spaces for learning, connection, and collective action. What she described were not just educational alternatives. These historically excluded communities created their own learning spaces, built social connections, developed collective knowledge, and organized for change. These were places where people could belong, be seen, and support one another. This brought me meaningful insight into how I think about priority populations in tobacco prevention projects. 

That made me think about how we often talk about priority populations in tobacco prevention. We tend to start with data about health disparities, risk factors, and needed interventions, while we pay less attention to their historical experiences, community knowledge, existing practices, and collective capacity. What might we see differently if we looked at those things, too?

Another point that stayed with me was Winn’s discussion of “archival intelligence” and the role of the “citizen archivist.”  The history and innovation of marginalized communities are not always found in formal records. They are usually found in community newsletters, local records, flyers, meeting records, personal papers, photographs, or carried by people who remember their community’s history. 

That made me think about evaluation reporting in a slightly different way: as a source of community knowledge, not simply as administrative documentation. What if a report became a record of what a community learned, built, and experienced? In that sense, reporting can help preserve community knowledge that might otherwise be lost. 

For us in evaluation, this also means that measuring whether a project held a certain number of events or distributed a certain number of materials is only part of the picture. We could also ask: Did those activities strengthen community relationships and trust? Are people in these communities feeling more connected, more informed, more empowered? Did the project build community capacity or create something that can continue beyond the project itself?  Those outcomes are harder to measure, but they can tell us something that activity counts alone cannot. It also made me think about some of the work we are already doing at TCEC. 

To be continued in Part 2!