Some reflections on conferences.

This is my first full day back post-BCCE (owing to a brief leisure-related detour through Santa Barbara). I am trying to dial down my coffee dependence (since I was getting my wireless where fine coffee was sold — so I maybe overdid it a little), and my body doesn’t really know what time zone it’s in — so this is probably as good a time as any for some reflections on the BCCE in particular, and on conferences in general.

One of the interesting features of the BCCE (to which I alluded in an earlier post) is that, while all its participants have some interest in chemical education (the final “CE” in the initials), there were at least three distinct tribes gathered at the conference. There were the folks who teach chemistry at colleges and universities who do research in chemistry. There were the folks who teach chemistry at colleges and universities who do research in chemical education. And there were the high school chemistry teachers. I imagine that there were also moments in which finer tribe distinctions became visible in people’s interactions (private vs. public institution, research oriented vs. teaching oriented, etc.), but I didn’t see so much of that.
But, there were definitely moments where the faultlines between the college chem-ed folks and the “real chemists” were pronounced. On the one hand, the folks who do their research on chemical phenomena were adamant that all the pedagogical tricks in the world are utterly useless unless one has deep knowledge of the area one is teaching. On the other hand, the folks who do their research in chemical education were insistent that deep knowledge of chemistry is not enough to ensure that one can meaningfully convey that knowledge to students.
And, the chem-ed types would note, educational research is real research! It involves hypotheses, theoretical frameworks, interventions, data collection, statistical analyses, the whole nine yards. There are some challenges inherent in it — for example, given that it’s hard to get inside people’s heads as they are learning, you have to work out some reasonable proxy for mental processes that can be probed experimentally. Educational research involves working with humans as research subjects, which means getting your protocol approved by the Institutional Review Board. And, setting up a clean “treatment group/control group” experimental design can be challenging when one is essentially studying one’s students. You can’t study a new teaching technique compared to “doing nothing”. Rather, you need to study the intervention of interest against teaching students “normally” (whatever that would mean).
None of this would be a big deal, except that the folks who study chemical systems rather than chemistry students seem surprised that the chem-ed research takes so long to conduct (and then, given the relatively small number of journals about chemical education, so long to get into print). They complain that the results are equivocal. Back at their colleges and universities, some of the “real chemists” argue against wasting billets to hire chemical educators when “real chemists” are more likely to be able to produce enough articles during the probationary period (and to be able to supervise “real” grad student research).
Plus, the folks who do their research in chemistry seem to assume that they have a high degree of expertise teaching science. Some of them do, but it’s not clear that they are always clear on what part of what they are doing is effective, nor that they can easily teach their less-effective colleagues how to be more effective teachers. Indeed, some of the “real chemists” seem to regard teaching chops as a talent you’re born with rather than a set of competencies you can cultivate.
While the “real chemists” at the BCCE were probably a lot more sympathetic to the notion that research in chemical education can be worthwhile than those who didn’t come to the BCCE in the first place, the vibe when the different groups interacted was sometimes a little weird.
The high school teachers seemed to be doing OK for themselves, maybe due to the “strength in numbers” thing. Also, the chem-ed people, who seemed to be looking at learning as a long process, gave every indication of valuing the role high school science instruction plays in that process. But I did hear the occasional exclamation of dismay about how ill-prepared chemistry students can be when college teachers get them.
Of course, while I was playing anthropologist watching these different tribes interact, I wasn’t really part of any of them. (You could practically hear the crickets every time the words “philosophy department” left my lips.) This meant that I had no real emotional stake in any of the inter-tribe tensions, but it also made the conference a bit lonely. While there were things for me to talk about with the other conferees (grad school horror stories, why ethics matter in science, favorite nerd joke, etc.), these were not really my people. I could participate, but I couldn’t really fully feel at home.
And ultimately, I think that’s part of what conferences do for academics (and, I’m guessing, for people in the “real world” as well). They gather a tribe with a set of common interests and experiences and goals. The conferees have a common identity that transcends their professional homes (where they may be the only one who studies X), and conferences give them a less formal (than in a journal, say) way to interact with the others who identify themselves similarly. Like a family reunion, a conference is bound to be the site of disagreements, but they are disagreements that you find ways to address or accomodate or ignore. And, importantly, there is a sense of a shared future: the people you confer with are going to be part of your professional life, not just now, but years down the road. When you have lunch of drinks with them, you’re not spending time on transients, but on people who are more or less permanent parts of your world.
There are ways in which the conference thing is a little fragmenting, though. For me, communing with my people at a conference generally involves spending time away from my department (which also feels like “my people”) and away from my family (ditto). In other words, my different affiliations and identities seem to exist in universes that are parallel to each other. Perhaps this is unavoidable (especially if one’s interests are kind of a motley assortment), but one ends up feeling sometimes that the universe you are in at any given moment is more real than the other universes you visit at other times. Or maybe, that they’re all equally real, but that you can’t really get the other people you’re with to fully grasp the reality of the other universes to which you travel.
Anyway, I had fun, but it’s good to be back.