Day 13 of Classes

 I had fun making people angry.

Okay, so it was a righteous anger, and not so much fun as a satisfying result. Poster sessions at conferences are always interesting. Apart from the values of professionals representing a whole bunch of information on a small space, there is always a wide variety of information.

This is one of the reasons I assign something like this to my students (yes, a recurring theme in my reflections this semester). I changed it up a bit for my students this time around. Early in the semester I put them in groups based on their research topics, each group having a thread (or a couple of threads), linking them together. Granted, some of the threads were as hard to see as that spider web on a hike that you walk right through, but they were there. Those groups just had to stretch a bit to find - or wander through the woods of their research before accidentally running into their threads.

When it came time to present, I gave each group two goals - they had to convey their topic and the results of their research while also finding those threads and showing the synthesis of their topics. I love tweaking this end-of-semester presentation every year, so I can definitively say it was the best semester of presentations yet.

So, of course, I was thinking about how I assign similar experiences to my students while a student in my doctoral courses. I like being reminded what it is like being on the presenter end rather than the professor end.

Granted, the presentations at the doctoral level are a little different from what my undergrads present, but I see the same commitment to inform at both levels, the same passion for a chosen topic.

My passion was evident throughout the semester, as I began really working on what I hope will be the foundation for my dissertation. Seeing other people get angry when they saw my poster, saw the statistics, saw the lack of progress over decades, was not just satisfying, it further pushed me to create the change for which I see a desperate need.

Even without classes, my winter is going to be busy.

I'll take a moment to talk about some of that other information I saw from the rest of the doctoral students in my cohort. Several addressed the experience of marginalized communities in varying aspects of education. This included the mental health effects, which was a linking thread to several other presentations (they could have had a panel in my class, too). Other students focused on subject-specific topics: literacy, reading, math, music, play-based learning. Like I said, there was a wide variety, which meant I was able to learn a lot in a short time.

This should serve as a reminder - always stop by the poster sessions at conferences.