The 27th Symposium on Education will highlight outstanding papers, posters, and activities highlighting education and outreach, with a focus on broader impacts. Presentations by this year’s pre-college and university teaching award recipients will be included in the program. A special Education Town Hall meeting will take place Tuesday evening immediately following the late afternoon session.
The theme for the 2018 AMS Annual Meeting, “Transforming Communication in the Weather, Water, and Climate Enterprise—Focusing on Challenges Facing Our Sciences”, highlights the need for fundamental communication and information to address our most pressing needs, including those in education and outreach. As appropriate, we encourage authors to incorporate and discuss the best methods to communicate information as well as communication-related examples in their presentation and poster abstracts.
For the 2018 meeting, the Symposium is soliciting papers and posters on all aspects of university, K-12, formal, and informal education. This year, abstracts can be submitted for sessions with the following themes, including submissions for jointly sponsored sessions:
1. Pre-College Education Initiatives
2. University Education Initiatives
3. Outreach and Broader Impacts
4. Innovative Teaching Strategies in University Instruction on Atmospheric Dynamics
5. Using Alternative Presentation Formats to Inform your Audience
6. Effective Strategies for Increasing Minority Participation in the Atmospheric Sciences
This session seeks projects that demonstrate innovative and transformative strategies and best practices to solve the lack of inclusion of diverse groups, including minority students in the atmospheric sciences. It seeks methodologies for attracting, recruiting, and retaining diverse ethnicities and projects that demonstrate practices that increase participation, access, awareness, and interest of underrepresented minorities.
7. Building Tomorrow's Atmospheric Science Workforce
We are particularly interested in research to understand workforce trends in our field as well as presentations of how we should best prepare students and postdocs for tomorrow's atmospheric science careers.
8. Active learning demonstrations from the atmospheric sciences
Research shows that students benefit from active learning strategies in the classroom. In this session we request proposals for demonstrations of successful activities that attendees could use in their own teaching. Demonstrations should be active, i.e. the audience members should be called on to participate in them, or a video should be shown of students performing the activity. Demonstrations should take no more than 13 minutes and be accompanied by a handout outlining the activity for participants to take home. Each demonstrator will have 2 minutes at the start of the session to introduce their activity, the grade/educational level it is aimed at and the learning context that their activity fits into. Demonstrators will then simultaneously present through the rest of the session in a share-a-thon format, with attendees free to move between tables/activities. We ask that abstracts briefly outline the activity and learning objective, educational level the activity is aimed at, and any requests for demonstration space (e.g. video screen, table, large open space).
9. Research relevant to the teaching and learning of atmospheric science
Discipline-based research in atmospheric science education is a fairly new field. To encourage discussion and support growth in this area, we welcome preliminary research reports with a 7-minute presentation / 7-minute discussion format where audience feedback can be solicited, as well as more polished education findings using the traditional 11 minute talk/3 minute question format.
10. Television Meteorologists As Educators - themed joint session with 46th Conference on Broadcast Meteorology
Television meteorologists not only deliver weather forecasts and information but in many cases are called upon as trusted sources to educate their audience on a wide variety of atmospheric and more general science issues. In this session, we explore the universe of methods and topics -- from blogs to podcasts and from tsunamis to climate -- whereby weathercasters become educators.
11. Scientific Communication - joint session with 34th Conference on Environmental Information Processing Technologies (EIPT)
A broad invitation to submit papers related to all aspects of science communication.
12. Poster Session (open for all education, outreach, and broader impacts topics)
For additional information please contact the program chairpersons, Diane Stanitski (diane.stanitski@noaa.gov) and Jeffrey Yuhas (jayuhas@mac.com).