Welcome to Philly!

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting is the world's largest gathering of education researchers and a showcase for groundbreaking, innovative studies in an array of areas. This year, we gather in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a major hub of scholarship, history, and even home to the inspiration for the Abbott Elementary television show.

We, the graduate students of Temple University’s College of Education and Human Development, welcome you to our home! We hope you enjoy the more than 2,500 sessions to choose from and myriad opportunities to learn from prominent scholars, engage in stimulating conversations, and foster professional relationships. We also encourage you to find time to explore Philadelphia’s history as the first capital of the United States, a home to favorite foods, and run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art like Rocky Balboa!

In this living document you can find our suggestions for finding food, sites to see, traversing through public transportation, and much more.

Please share this document with friends and colleagues and we look forward to hosting you in Philly!

Sincerely,

The Graduate Students of the College of Education and Human Development

Temple University

FOOD

SITES

TRAVEL

Map of our recommedations.

Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania

We recognize and acknowledge* Philadelphia stands on the Indigenous territory known as “Lenapehoking,” the traditional homelands of the Lenape, also called Lenni-Lenape or Delaware Indians. These are the people who, during the 1680s, negotiated with William Penn to facilitate the founding of the colony of Pennsylvania. You can visit Penn Treaty Park to see the site of the treaty between Penn and the Lenape people.

The Lenape's historical territory includes present-day northeastern Delaware, all of New Jersey, the eastern Pennsylvania regions of the Lehigh Valley and Northeastern Pennsylvania, and New York Bay, western Long Island, and the lower Hudson Valley in New York state. Today they are based in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.

During the last decades of the 18th century, European settlers and the effects of the American Revolutionary War displaced most Lenape from their homelands and pushed them north and west. In the 1860s, under the Indian removal policy, the U.S. federal government relocated most Lenape remaining in the Eastern United States to the Indian Territory and surrounding regions.

Lenape people currently belong to the Delaware Nation and Delaware Tribe of Indians in Oklahoma, the Stockbridge–Munsee Community in Wisconsin, and the Munsee-Delaware Nation, Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and Delaware of Six Nations in Ontario.

You can learn more about the Lenape people by visiting https://www.lenape-nation.org/

*We acknowledge that there are some critiques of land acknowledgements: they may communicate that Indigenous peoples are no longer present, they may ignore the violent history that resulted in the removal of Indigenous peoples, and they may appease the uneasiness of settlers without supporting Indigenous peoples. For more information see a short article here. We are not making a recommendation to stop land acknowledgments but that they are complicated.