SUBMIT A PROPOSAL TO THE 2025 MERC SUMMIT |
2025 MERC Summit Proposals
The Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium (MERC) in the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University invites proposals for its 2025 Summit under the recurring theme Connecting Research, Policy, and Practice Through Shifting Paradigms in Public Education. The Summit will take place on Thursday, June 26th at Huguenot High School in Richmond Public Schools. Public schools are in a constant state of flux, subject to changes in policy due to administrative shifts at the federal, state, and division levels. Additionally, in the past year public schools have navigated complex challenges related to supporting student mental health, addressing chronic absenteeism and school dropout, adapting to the rapid ascension of artificial intelligence and other emergent technologies, ensuring that students develop literacy skills at an early age, recruiting and retaining a skilled teacher workforce, and more. As schools and school systems work to address these challenges, MERC is positioned to provide support through collaborative research that provides data-driven insights that inform policies and practices in our region. The annual MERC Summit is an opportunity for stakeholders in our community to come together and connect across research, policy, and practice for the benefit of our public schools.
We welcome proposals from a broad range of individuals invested in public education, including PK-12 school division-based personnel (students, teachers, school leaders, and other PK-12 educators) and university-based researchers (faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students). Collaborative works are encouraged, although individual submissions will also receive consideration. Presentations can include reports of findings from completed projects, discussions of work in progress, reviews of existing research literature, or classroom practices used to solve identified problems. Note that research is a connecting line of the MERC Summit, and because of this all proposals should indicate how their work either includes or is informed by research in some capacity.