This year I participated as an attendee and presenter for the 2022 Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE) Conference that was held virtually. Attending academic conferences has been an integral part of my graduate student experience throughout my master’s degree program and into my current PhD program. My advisor at the University of Manitoba, Dr. Melanie Janzen, encouraged me to attend the CSSE conference when I first began my graduate studies as a way to engage with the Canadian landscape of educational research. CSSE has become an annual event in my calendar that I look forward to as space is made to share, think, read, and talk about all things related to educational research and in the company of other new scholars and academics.
By day, from September to June, I am a public-school educator, and it can sometimes be a challenge to strike a balance between work and my graduate studies. The CSSE conference provides time for me to spend several days immersing myself in a myriad of presentations that ignite, disrupt, and extend my thinking about my own work and the research of other scholars. This year I had the opportunity to be a part of the Knowledge Mobilization Team and my role included tweeting about the presentations that I was attending each day as well as highlighting the “Spotlight Sessions”. (I had previously been a part of the Knowledge Mobilization team in 2016 when CSSE was hosted by the University of Calgary and was excited to have the opportunity to do it again.) Many exciting threads wove throughout a variety of presentations that were hosted by the different associations: futurity, uncertainty, the more-than-human-world, relationality, in-between spaces, decolonization, anti-racist work, the image of teacher, climate crisis, and indigenization. It is important to not only look for the presentations that mirror your own research interests but to also branch out and attend other associations as there can be welcome surprises that may unsettle assumptions that you hold within your own research or allow you to move your research in another direction that you may have yet to consider.
I recently completed a course on Ecofeminist Thought and Teacher Identity and up until that point I had not ventured much into the realm of environmentalism or climate change. Being new to these areas of study, I was particularly drawn to the presentations that took up ideas of the climate crisis, futurity, and the more-than-human-world. I attended a session hosted by the Canadian Association for Teacher Education (CATE) where Brittany Tomin from the University of Regina presented her work on the potential of science fiction storytelling as a way for preservice teachers to critically consider futures of education while also making space to critique the current social issues and concerns for climate change. I found this presentation particularly compelling because of the intentional space made for preservice teachers to critically take up ideas outside of the often over emphasized practicalities of “doing” teaching. It is productive (and potentially transformational) for preservice teachers to critically consider what it means to take up the work of teaching amidst the crises that impact the world we live in and the world from which we welcome our students.
I will look forward to the 2023 CSSE conference and its return to an in-person model. Part of attending conferences is not only attending the phenomenal sessions but taking part in the spontaneous conversations that take place during the unscheduled pockets of time throughout and around each day’s events. These are valuable opportunities to connect with other graduate students and academics to hear about their research and experiences in academia. The 2022 CSSE conference was a fantastic experience with an abundance of intriguing, inspiring, and compelling presentations. Thank you to CSSE for hosting virtual conferences over the last two years so that we could continue to connect and learn from one another.
Christie Petersen
PhD Student
Faculty of Education, University of Manitoba