APSA Teaching and Learning Conference: A Summary of Four Tracks

Extract

From February 19-21, 2004 the inaugural APSA Teaching and Learning Conference was held at American University in Washington, D.C. The conference was organized to emulate the “European” model of a conference, where a set of working groups (or “tracks”) were convened to work on one of four issue areas that the conference program committee considered important to the political science discipline. The tracks were not designed to follow the standard political science conference format where individual papers were presented and a “discussant” commented on the papers, leaving five minutes at the end for general discussion. Rather, the tracks were working groups, where each individual presented over two days with the papers discussed by the group collectively, not to fete out criticisms, but to build on presented themes. The groups then made recommendations to a plenary session at the end of the conference, suggesting what APSA as a professional association could do to facilitate advances in each of the four issue areas.