A Little TLC to APSA's TLC
By Tom Meeks, Soomo Publishing
Consider this a love note to APSA’s Teaching and Learning Conference. True, the big snowstorm that hit Philly made the city more magical than it might have been otherwise, and shared questions and concerns about traveling home strengthened some of the conversations that were already taking place. But it’s pretty amazing to bring so many dedicated teachers together in one medium-sized hotel to talk about strengthening the classroom experiences of students.
I took part in the Simulations and Role Play II track and found myself wishing I was still in school and able to take classes with the broad range of people participating. And Victor Asal’s workshop “Playing Games with (the Theorists of) Political Violence” opened up a range a strategies for making abstract theories concrete for students. Watching Victor manage the expectations of the “students” participating in his workshop was itself a useful lesson in teaching.
If you missed the conference, go here to view the line up and find the contact information of presenters. And to review participants’ impressions in real time, search through the twitter feed at #TLC10. (It’s posted on the conference home page, too!)
2 Responses to “A Little TLC to APSA's TLC”
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The American Political Science Association’s TLC is one of my favorite conferences. It is a wonderful reprieve from the chaos of the beginning of the term and the opportunity to try out new teaching ideas with faculty as excited about teaching political science as I am. More importantly, all subfields of the discipline are represented and all types of institutions and levels of political science education. What’s not to love? The feedback to one’s ideas are thoughtful and the conversations after sessions enjoyable.
The TLC is a great conference, especially for those of us at state comprehensive universities. For me, the best part of TLC is that it takes pedagogical scholarship seriously. Many give it short shrift, but Boyer’s definition of scholarship as a range of endeavors has a lot of support on my campus.
That said, I didn’t get a lot of insight into whether or not my paper would make a good JPSE contribution, and I would have liked to get that kind of feedback. Perhaps it was just my adjustment to the ‘workshop’ format, but I was expecting more. In my panel, I got only two comments before we moved on to the next papers and we never revisited my presentation. I left not knowing if I’d created an automatic pub or a waste of my panel’s time. Honestly, I was never sure if my discussant had even read my paper.
I’d like to see a more elaborated peer review process at the conference – at scholarship of discovery conferences like APSA, at least I know that a good discussant is going to give me critical feedback that lets me know if I’m on the right track or not. I didn’t get that at TLC this time and I’d like to. Let me be clear, though, that my comment is a small disappointment that doesn’t lessen the overall value I got from TLC.