Date and Location

NAAPE 2024 will be held from Friday, October 25th to Sunday, October 27th, 2024. The conference officially begins at 2:15 PM on Friday with a plenary keynote address followed by a champagne reception and ends at 2:30 PM on Sunday following a closing convocation. Here you can see NAAPE’s comprehensive safe conferencing policy followed in 2021 and rest assured that in 2024 NAAPE will be following all current official health guidance.

Each year, the NAAPE annual conference takes place at University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, IL. Mundelein is an easily accessible suburb of Chicago and St. Mary's is a very large, beautiful wooded campus with excellent amenities. For detailed driving directions to the conference site, click here.

Attendees who register by September 1st, 2024 will receive an early bird registration rate!

Further Paper Submission Options

NAAPE highly encourages graduate students and K-12 teachers in addition to current faculty to submit papers to and attend the annual conference. While we hope that many graduate students and K-12 teachers will, through the blind peer-review process, be offered spots on the regular program, papers which do not make the program will often be eligible for roundtable (works-in-progress) sessions. In these sessions, authors will be paired with established scholars in the field who will read and respond to their paper in hopes of improving it for future conferences or journal submission.

The registration and submission site for NAAPE 2024 is now open. All papers are double-blind reviewed. Because NAAPE accepts longer papers, authors will receive only brief comments from each of their referees. Notification of decisions will be sent via email by late August or early September. If you have any questions, you can contact us at info@naape.org.

Call for Papers

NAAPE welcomes submissions in any area related to philosophy and education and encourages submissions from all traditions of philosophy including work that is historical, contemporary, analytic, continental, theoretical and applied. Furthermore, we encourage authors working within the interdisciplinary fields of educational ethics, moral and civic education, and ethics of educational policy to submit to the conference. However, we only accept papers that are written in clear, straightforward prose that is accessible to a wide range of philosophers and educators. We therefore discourage the use of technical language that is not otherwise clearly explained in the paper. Finally, the paper must have some bearing on education. If that bearing is largely implicit throughout the paper, the author must, at the very least, gesture towards its bearing in the introduction or conclusion of the paper. Submissions for NAAPE 2024 are due July 1st, 2024 by 11:59 PM CDT (UTC -5, Chicago time). 

NAAPE accepts any length of paper, but we prefer papers that are less than 14,000 words. The papers may employ any well-established style guideline so long as it is used consistently throughout the paper. We are happy to accept APA, Chicago Style, Harvard Style, MLA or any variants on these. Additionally, papers may be formatted in a standard article manner or as a book chapter. NAAPE accepts submissions in the English, Spanish and French language, but presentations are expected to be given in English. Please make sure your file is fully anonymized before submission.

NAAPE is pleased to accept papers that are simultaneously under review or in press at academic journals, but we cannot accept papers that have been published prior to submission. In addition to full papers, NAAPE also accepts panel sessions and author-meets-critics sessions. For panel submissions, each panelist must provide approximately 1000 words outlining the central argument of the contribution. Moreover, the panel submission must provide a clear explanation of the way the various panel presentations contribute to the panel theme at the beginning of the submission document (approx. 250 words). For author-meets-critic submissions, the author of the submission must provide approximately 500 words outlining how the book is relevant to both philosophy and education, why the book merits consideration at this conference, and (briefly) why various critics were selected. The same person may submit multiple types of submissions but may not submit more than one of the same kind.

Engaging Conference Presentations and Dialogue
As a part of our commitment to exchanging philosophical and educational ideas in a clear, charitable and engaging manner, NAAPE asks authors to present their papers rather than read them. In addition, we make conference papers available on a secured program page to conference participants several weeks before the conference. Interested audience members are encouraged to read the full papers before, during, or after the conference. To get an idea of the kinds of papers, panels and symposia typically featured at NAAPE, see the “Past Programs” button below. NAAPE conference papers are not published outside of the conference itself. As a part of our partnerships with the journals Educational Theory, Theory and Research in Education, and Journal of Philosophy of Education, among others, authors may be invited to contribute their paper to one of these journals’ upcoming issues.

Moderating NAAPE Conference Sessions
Concurrent paper sessions host three papers and are one hour and 45 minutes in length. Discussion of each paper occurs directly after the paper presentation, not grouped in the end of the session. The paper sessions are set up to allow participants to hear one presenter in one session, and then, if they desire, to leave to go listen to a second presenter in a different session, and then leave once more to hear a third presenter in a different session. In order to allow this flexibility, the time-keeping role of the session moderator is essential. The moderators in each session start and end each of the three presentations and Q&A sections on time, so that conference participants can make their way to multiple sessions with confidence that they will hear the majority of the presentations. For panels, symposia and author-meets-critics sessions, the time is divided up between presenters so that there is a minimum of 25 minutes for discussion. Moderators consult with the presenters of these sessions to see how the discussion should be structured. In some cases, it may be interspersed within the session, or done at the end.

Moderators use the two signs indicating 5 minutes and 1 minute remaining provided in the conference rooms in order to help authors remain within the time allotted. Moderators are firm with the clock so there is sufficient time for questions and answers. The sequence of presenters on the program is the order that is followed. Moderators follow this line-up as attendees are expecting it. For this reason, the Q&A for the presentation occurs directly after the presentation and not grouped into a three-person Q&A at the end of all three presentations, as mentioned above. Attendees are reminded at the beginning of the session that people are welcome to leave the session after the presentation and Q & A of each speaker to go to another session. Clarifying questions (i.e. questions about the meaning of certain terms, or the steps in an argument) are just as welcome at the NAAPE conference as other kinds of critical and argument-focused questions.

Regular Conference Sessions
NAAPE asks that papers not be read aloud in paper sessions. Conference sessions are 1 hour and 45 minutes in length, with three presentations per paper session. This means each presenter in a paper session has 15-20 minutes for the presentation and 15-20 minutes for discussion (totalling 35 minutes per presenter). Panels and symposia sessions divide up time between presenters so that a minimum of 25 minutes is left at the end for discussion, or 25 minutes in total, if discussion occurs between presentations. For author-meets-critics sessions, the author(s) of the book being reviewed give a 5 minute summary of the book at the beginning of the session, which is then followed by the comments of each of the book critics.

The goal of the presentations is to generate interest in, and discussions about, the ideas outlined in the presentation. Interested audience members have the chance to read the full papers before, during, or after the conference, so the presentation is an opportunity to emphasize the central arguments of the paper and the evidence supporting that argument. The audience of NAAPE is diverse, including scholars from philosophy, education, philosophy of education, as well as K-12 teachers. For this reason, it is best to adopt an idiom that is broadly understandable and avoids jargon where possible. Projectors with an HDMI connection are provided in the conference rooms if you would like to use digital materials for support. If you do not have an HDMI-connectable device, you will need to bring your own adapter.

Roundtable Sessions
Each roundtable session involves one or two authors of works-in-progress papers. These authors are paired with a member of the NAAPE community (the discussant), who will offer feedback and suggestions for possible extension and improvement of the arguments in each paper. The names of your discussants will be posted on the online program a week or so before the start of the conference. Each session is allotted a total of 1 hour and 15 minutes. NAAPE recommends that the sessions take place in the South Residence Living Room, which provides a relaxed and collegial atmosphere for discussion of the papers, and which is large enough so that the parallel roundtables do not disrupt each other. As a presenter, you should be prepared to give a 2 to 3 minute summary of your paper at the beginning of the session, offering some insight into the writing process, what you might be thinking about in terms of revisions, and any questions you are working through in terms of argument.

Keynote Sessions
NAAPE keynote sessions feature scholars whose work engages with the intersections of philosophy and education and whose style of communication speaks to a wide audience in an accessible way. NAAPE keynote speakers come from all around North America and stem from both philosophy departments and education departments. In addition, NAAPE selects keynotes from a variety of cultural, racial, social and gender backgrounds in order to encourage diversity in the field of philosophy and education. Typically, one NAAPE keynote is devoted to historical issues in philosophy and education, one to philosophical issues with an educational bearing, and one to contemporary issues in education from a philosophical standpoint. The latter keynote is generally held in the form of a “dual keynote,” with two keynote speakers. Normal keynote sessions are 90 minutes, with the keynote presentation lasting 40 minutes, a keynote response 20 minutes, and the plenary discussion 30 minutes. For the dual keynote, presenters each have 30 minutes, leaving 30 minutes for plenary discussion.