This conference covers the whole spectrum of education from primary school to higher education and so provides an opportunity to hear about developments across a broad range of areas and explore what might be transferable to other areas.
I was able to attend for all four days and as can be seen from the picture this was held in Landers College for Women in New York that was in the middle of the city. Space was precious and so the largest room could not hold all 550 delegates at the same time. This meant that the opening message was provided on two mornings but otherwise the conference provided a range of parallel papers which were often grouped together in three or papers. There were around seven topic choices for each session and this did make choosing sometimes difficult.
Like Susannah I did however attend some great sessions which have left me a number of things I want to explore further. An interesting paper on day one was presented by Donald and Shelleyann Scott from Canada and explored the area of developing as a Dean, Associate Dean or Director. They are currently undertaking some research in this area with some other institutions and both Susannah and I think this is an exciting project and have contacted them to see if we can collaborate on this.
Another session I found interesting was one exploring the messages given to first year students from Janet Wyvill, Sharn Donnison and Micheal Carey from University of the Sunshine Coast. They had undertaken some research to explore what memorable messages students got in their first year and who from. What the team found was some expected messages around assessment, time management etc but they realised that actually students were getting the inspiring and motivating message about their specific course and being given the passion to learn more. I thought this would be interesting to explore here at City University London.
The third session I have picked out to highlight here is one around the nexus between teaching and learning from Emmanuel Akanwa from Central Michigan University. This speaker explored some students’ views around teaching and learning and gained some interesting feedback about professors having all the knowledge and students should therefore sit in class and takes and listen but this does not match the teachers’ views which were that students should come to class prepared and be co-creators. The paper then explored some implications for educators.
Over the four days I chose to attend a range of papers from those looking at learning and teaching, professional development, mentoring and graduate experiences. It was a good opportunity to meet many people from across the globe and if you want to see some more about some of the papers I attended please do follow this link to my conference blog http://blogs.city.ac.uk/pamsconferences/
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