I have been to my first NZARE conference now, and so am a full part of the educational research world here. The differences between the NZ educational research conference and the
AERA is an enormous conference. Only a handful of North American cities are large enough to host it because you need hotel rooms for 15,000 and conference presentation rooms for more than 200 simultaneous presentations, plus several large rooms to hold more than 1000 at a time. It’s the conference rooms, I’m told, that scuttle the deal—that’s a whole lot of break out sessions. I think there are about nine cities that can do it—probably eight now that
NZARE is a smallish conference, although bigger than I expected. Still, there aren’t that many cities in NZ, and so the number of cities that can hold the 400 people in hotel rooms and dozen simultaneous presentations is probably close to eight here too. The infrastructure is small enough, though, that at the closing ceremonies on Friday, the organizing committee for this conference looked hopefully to someone who might organize the next one, but they couldn’t find any takers (it was supposed to be a joint conference with the Australian educational researchers but the registration in Brisbane was $800 Australian which the New Zealanders thought was “too dear” for its membership so now they’re looking for someone to hold it here).
The size matters in everything. Here, everyone goes to all the keynotes—because they can. Here, one person presents for 40 minutes as opposed to the seven papers in 90 minutes you’ll get at AERA. Because of that, here there’s real content that gets discussed, which both offers real ideas and also exposes the lack of real ideas. There’s no place to hide in 40 minutes. There’s no place to reveal in the typical 12 minutes you get at AERA.
This all means that I went to far more sessions here because there was much more likelihood that I’d learn something, but each session had just one paper so I saw far fewer papers than I’d have seen at AERA. And maybe that’s the key difference in this tiny size: you have fewer choices, which means that each choice you have is more important than it would be if you had heaps of choices. Here you have fewer people, fewer research projects, fewer ideas. That means that when the folks at my place of work (NZCER) stand up, they are each of them representing the whole organization all the time. I suppose that’s true at George Mason, too, but at Mason, the odds of your being seen by someone who really counts are slim. Here, the odds of your being seen by someone who really counts are much much higher. Each idea gets more currency, which makes each bad idea more wasteful, each good idea more powerful than their counterparts would be in the
Thus scale is human and people get to be human together. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the conference dinner. At AERA I don’t know whether there even is a conference dinner; in any case, it has never occurred to me to go. Rather, each major university has a gathering and you go to those where you have connections—where you were a graduate or are employed or are friends with someone in one of those categories. I go to the GMU session and drink wine and eat cheese and see all the people I see in regular faculty meetings. I go to the Harvard session and drink wine and eat hot nibbles and see former classmates and Grand Personages in Education. I go to some of the bigger, more boisterous schools with a colleague or friend and watch strangers do jello shooters and carve their dinner from huge sides of beef.
At NZARE, people go to a conference dinner, and we sit at big round tables like a wedding reception. And then there’s entertainment! I had heard about this, about the fact that there would be a comic and a band, and I had heard that people danced. Still, it was hard to picture. But sure enough, after the dinner finished and the weak comic production was over, the band began to play and the tables emptied out onto the dance floor. And I mean nearly all of them. All of these educational researchers (mostly women, median age in the mid- or late-50s), poured into the dance floor and began to dance in one seething mass of brain and body power. It was most impressive. Here the Grand Personages of NZ education not only brushed elbows with but actually boogied with the nobodies. Here a new layer was added onto the conference-success-metrics: not only did your methodology need to be sound and your analysis convincing, but you had to have rhythm too. Some of the people I had seen earlier somberly discussing evaluations of major government initiatives were now flailing sweaty arms in the air. (Of course my group, who had the most impressive overall body of research presentation, also had the most impressive overall body of dance prowess, too—which I now realize is an entry bar that I passed only by virtue of my across-the-world phone interview.)
I missed seeing the people I used to see at AERA, old friends and mentors I meet for coffee or dinner. I missed feeling like I belonged to the place, if only by virtue of my snotty judgmental attitude about the whole thing. So I felt like an outsider—again—which isn’t all that much fun. But I felt like I was nearer the center (or centre, really) of something that could make a possible difference than I ever have been at AREA. And that’s a key distinction here, too. In the
(the picture today obviously has nothing to do with anything except it's cute)
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