SoJ Web Report | Nov. 29, 2011
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| Photo by David Boeyink |
| Graduate students and professor David Boeyink attended the Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching in November. From left are Nate Floyd, Audrie Garrison, Adia Waldburger, Katrina Overby, Fatima Alsalem and Shuo Tang. Claudia Kozman also attended. |
“I enjoyed meeting instructors and learning about how their careers evolved into teaching at the college level,” said graduate student Audrie Garrison. “Meeting these people helped me see how a career might progress.”
The 31st annual international conference drew nearly 600 teachers and graduate students from around the country. The Lilly is the best teaching conference in the country, according to Craig Nelson, professor of biology at Indiana and a presenter at the conference.
Adia Waldburger, one of the students from Boeyink’s class who attended the conference, agreed.
“I knew I would enjoy myself, but I had no idea that I would find it so enriching and fulfilling, both in my teaching practices as well as in deepening connections with my colleagues,” she said.
The conference theme this year was “Teaching for Brain-Based Learning.” One presentation that proved memorable for students was on ways to use metacognition to facilitate learning. Presenter Saundra McGuire, director of the Center for Academic Success at Louisiana State University, talked about why many students lack confidence in their ability to learn and perform below their ability levels.
“The talk on learning strategies was inspiring,” Shuo Tang said. “It breaks much of my fixed thinking on how to teach, what to teach and why to teach.”
The heart of the conference was in more focused small-group sessions. Saturday alone featured 50 concurrent sessions.
“A conference like this is packed with new ideas,” said Nate Floyd of his first conference experience. “Why wouldn’t you attend such a conference, where people are literally giving away their best ideas?”
One session that drew raves from the group was by an instructor thrown out of a program in home economics for her presentation on cannibalism recipes—including calorie counts. Her session “encouraged instructors to make learning and, particularly, researching, fun by encouraging students to research topics that are already interesting to them,” Garrison said. “The instructor gave all sorts of out-of-the-box ideas such as gender and policy issues related to toilet paper, to research into cannibalism for a nutrition class.”
For Claudia Kozman, the best session was about creating learning environments with drama.
“It made me think of the class as a group of different students who are there for different reasons,” she said. “Some are there to learn, some because they have to.”
One highlight of the conference was an informal session for the IU students with Robert Kaiser of Canisius College in Buffalo, N.Y. Kaiser, a long-time journalist who recently became a college teacher, made a formal presentation at the conference on his use of music to teach writing. Following that session, he met with the IU contingent to talk more about how he teaches writing and about his transition from journalism to teaching.
“Robert Kaiser’s session gave me a whole new way to think about news writing, and song writing and writing in general,” Floyd said.
Others came away with broad insights.
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| Photo by David Boeyink |
| Rob Kaiser, director the journalism program at Canisius College, visited with graduate students at the conference. The informal session focused on his earlier presentation on writing and music at the conference as well as his second career as a college teacher. |
Waldburger, for one, enjoyed the spirit of conference attendance that includes learning as well as camaraderie among colleagues. She said she will treasure this trip as one of her best IU memories.
“I loved the opportunity to connect with my fellow students and the professor,” she said. “I honestly could have stayed there for a week and been neither bored nor tired of spending time with these people. I have never laughed, relaxed, felt more encouraged and truly connected at a conference like I did this time.”
Materials for some of the sessions, including McGuire’s presentation on learning strategies, are on the conference website.
