Who Is Your Audience?

We are deep in teaching and learning centre conference season and my post this week is about those particular types of conferences and how they are each very different from each other, but some are also morphing at the moment to become another third type thing in the new higher ed environment that we are in that is not really great for anyone. 

When I was at the colleges often the teaching and learning conferences were 2-day (sometimes 3 day) things that were closed to only employees of that college. It was an opportunity for faculty and staff to showcase what they are doing in their classroom spaces and how that could be applicable to other faculty and other disciplines. There were very few of these college teaching and learning conferences that were open to colleagues at other colleges. But this has also changed a fair bit over the years and now some college conferences are less in-house professional development than an opportunity to frame who they are in relation to other colleges in the programs that they offer.

This is also true of university spaces. Some teaching and learning conferences at universities made it a point to never allow outside presenters, that this was something to showcase the work that is happening in-house, to build community within the space they find themselves in. Some did it because they felt they didn't need outside presenters because there was already many folk at the institutions who wanted and could present; there was a bit of gated prestige there. Others would open their teaching and learning conferences up to colleagues at other institutions because they wanted their teaching and learning conference to be seen as a place where cross-disciplinary, and cross-institutional pedagogical innovation happens. 

Basically the decision to have a teaching and learning conference opened up, through a larger call for papers, to folk outside of the place hosting the conference is really a conversation about purpose and audience. Both of these things are really important to know before planning. Some have always had open CFPs for their conferences because they have been traditionally seen in purpose as a place where a lot of folk who do the work that I do, and teaching teams, and faculty could share different innovative practices and learn from colleagues at different institutions and in different disciplines. 

So far nothing that I have said here should be shocking to anyone who has been in higher education for any length of time. We have seen both types of conferences, the in-house only professional development and celebrating of work at the institution type, and the open to more people let's be in community type conferences. They each have their own purpose, and ideally both have a clear audience. Until they don't, and that is what I am watching happen this term.  

I preface what comes with I understand the motivation for doing what I am seeing. My LinkedIn for the last 3 months has become like marketing for a really bad neo-liberal HigherEd Prince cover band: "the administrator formerly known as associate dean", "the critical disability scholar formerly known as accessibility coordinator at the College of accessibility doesn't matter here anymore and probably never did", "the staff member formerly known as having 20 years experience in student support excellence". You know these band members, some of them are our friends, some of them are colleagues, some of them are you. 

In the time of neo-liberal HigherEd Prince cover band excellence, there is more pressure to highlight what a place does well, why an area matters, why it should still be funded. And this can get done in different ways, but what I am seeing a lot this teaching and learning conference season are conferences that should have been in-house conferences only that instead opened up their calls for papers to outside folk, but the conference itself is still so in-house, celebrate our own wins and services heavy that those outside folk don't really belong, because the audience is wrong. Because the outside people are being brought in to bolster the conference to show there was interest from far and wide, but nothing about the structure or set-up makes it inclusive to folk outside of the institution hosting. Like I said, I get it, no one wants to be the next member of the Prince cover band, but we are really doing a disservice to our colleagues and their work using them in that way. 

So if you are part of people organizing a teaching and learning conference and you are thinking of opening up your call to outside participants, please make sure you are doing it for the right reasons. No one wants to be a data point on your spreadsheet of reasons to keep your budget. Who really is your audience? What is the overarching purpose of the conference? If you are really interested in outside community engagement, build that in, if you want to highlight the awesomeness at your institution totally do that, but remember that the quarter percentage of people coming in and paying to be there who have no clue about your institutional acronyms and service areas and why that could matter to them, will not feel welcome, and will probably not come back next year because it is clear why they were there in the first place, and in crisis of trust Prince cover band times, that is what it sounds like when colleagues cry.