Greetings R&E SIG Colleagues,
I am writing to provide a summary of R&E SIG activities at the recently completed AERA conference in Vancouver, BC. I do this for the benefit of those who were not able to attend as well as for those who were there but couldn’t be in two places at once.
I attended all nine of our SIG sessions to learn what presenters were doing and to see who was attending toward the end of inviting them into the SIG. To my mind it was an excellent collection of sessions (please refer to the spring newsletter emailed to you earlier this month or on the SIG website for a complete listing). Thanks must go to Charlie Russo our program chair for overseeing the process--for grouping the papers so well and selecting excellent session chairs and discussants. This is an art and Charlie is a master at it. The paper sessions had attendance ranging from 38 to near 50. I believe it would be worth your while to peruse the sessions in the program and contact presenters for their papers according to your interests. They were very willing to share and interested feedback. As a measure of increasing interest in these topics, I noted that across the entire AERA program there were 38 sessions that had religion or spirituality as part of the session. Of course, we have long known that we are not the only ones to be paying attention to these subjects, but it is heartening to know that more divisions and SIGs are accepting papers on these topics.
Monday morning at 7:30am, nine stalwart souls met for our first attempt at what we tentatively called a ‘meeting-in-a-meeting’. It had been suggested at the 2011 business meeting that it might be desirable to organize a time to meet outside of the business meeting or sessions to more informally exchange information about our work with other colleagues. Everyone present seemed to profit from this hour and a half spent, making new connections and leaving with more information than when they arrived. It made for a long day, but seemed worthwhile for those attending. We’ll try it again in San Francisco next year.
From feedback I received, the business meeting went well. (We’ll aim to get the minutes out after the end of the term). We approved two new awards—Emerging Scholar and Distinguished Achievement (more on these in the next few weeks). The highlight, of course, was the dissertation award presentation by Dr. Jesse Rine (again, see the spring newsletter for details on the topic). It was well received and provoked some interesting discussion. He is working on publishing portions of it, and we will alert you to where that will appear as it comes to fruition. We had a reception for the first time and, again from reports, it was a success. We had some visitors to the meeting that had developed interest in the SIG from attending a session; the opportunity to interact immediately after the meeting in a social setting helped them feel welcome. Our thanks to Routledge Taylor Francis and the University of Northern Iowa for sponsoring this reception. After the reception, a number of members continued the conversations at a nearby restaurant for dinner. For some who started at the 7:30am meeting, this turned into a 16 hour day.
One particularly important item that came out of this meeting is the new method for determining slots assigned to Divisions and SIGs. Instead of gauging this on member numbers, they will now be assigned as a percentage of total submissions. I will write more about this again later, but for now the message is to start planning to submit proposals for next year. Though I don’t want to necessarily encourage “gaming the system”, we do need to have a healthy number of proposals to maintain our session and roundtable slots. And in this connection, please volunteer to review proposals. The site is now open.
More information on things coming out of the conference will be forthcoming, but I wanted to communicate the highlights before time slipped away.
Mike Waggoner
April 19, 2012
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