Closing Conference Conclusions

So the Alberta Teachers' Association Science Council's Science Teachers' Conference concluded this weekend. It was held in Calgary for the first time in recent memory, and myself and my colleague Brian were part of the organizing team.

The first takeaway of the weekend was that being on the other side of the registration table is a vastly different experience. Problems arise and need to be dealt with, and the overhead view is quite different from what you get moving session to session.

The second takeaway is that volunteers are important. Organizers and programmers can design a wonderful set of speaker sessions but without enough volunteers A/V material doesn't get delivered to the proper rooms, giveaways never get handed out, and speakers don't get picked up at the airport.

That said, the conference was a fantastic experience, even though I only managed to make one session - that of University of Calgary professor Dr. Leslie Reid. Dr. Reid related her attempts to redesign her undergraduate geology course to move it more inline with Assessment For Learning and Focus on Inquiry methodology. These are the same things that many Albertan teachers are trying to do, except that Dr. Reid is carrying it out with 400 students in a university lecture hall.

Instead of attending sessions then, I spent most of my time talking with fellow conference-goers like Frank Jenkins, who helped define large parts of the Chemistry curriculum, and with whom I briefly chatted about the early efforts to reform high school science in Alberta during the 1970s. Bernie Galbraith, who received the ATA Science Council's Long Service Award, was in a similarly reflective mood.

A first for the conference was the organization of a Science Education Leaders Day where Science Alberta's Hyacinth Schaeffer and her group of Fort McMurray teachers talked about their efforts to create a school culture conducive to science education.

Next year, the goal is expand the circle of conversation, hopefully drawing in more post-secondary voices, as well as more French Immersion sessions and First Nations, Metis, and Indigenous perspectives.

Foucault vs. Education

We've attached  a link to an article applying the ideas of French philosopher Michel Foucault to education. Much of it is taken from his work on the underlying philosophies of prison systems, Crime and Punish, and it's somewhat scary to consider how similar the two institutions are - however, if you remember that the purpose of education is (considered by some) to be the development of the individual while that of prison is the rehabililation (redevelopment) of a corrupted individual, the analogies become much clearer.

There's certainly lots to consider about the subtle effects of the school system, but one of the immediate take aways is the suggestion that increasing persistance and sophistication of surveillance of students will result in an arms race between students and the administration. As schools take ever greater measures to observe and monitor their students, those students reluctant to be a part of such doings, will resort to greater and more underground efforts to avoid detection. Thus, there would appear to be a natural limit to how much policies such as lanyards and closed circuit televisions can curb student behaviour.

Here's the link: http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~auderey/Applying%20Foucault%20to%20Education.pdf