The Sixth Gordon Conference on Innovations in College Chemistry Teaching will be held 5-11 January 2001 at the Ventura Beach Hotel, Ventura, California. Participants will include faculty members, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows in the chemical sciences from all institutional types, ranging from two-year colleges through research-intensive universities. Subsequent conferences will be held in June 2002, probably at Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut; and January 2004, at a California location to be determined. The long-term objective of the conferences is to bring together both the practitioners and the researchers who carry out work related to chemical education, in order to benefit the learning an teaching of all students in chemistry courses in colleges and universities.
The specific aim of the project is to increase participation in the conferences by underrepresented ethnic minority faculty in the chemical sciences, drawn primarily from minority-serving institutions but also including faculty from other institutions as well. The five day conferences are methodologically structured with a limited number of formal presentations in the mornings and evenings, informal and in-depth discussion of topics and themes during the afternoons, and posters for attendees to present their own efforts in instructional laboratories and classrooms. Because no publications emerge from the conference, nor may results be cited in the scholarly literature, the atmosphere leads to candid and open discussion and debate about issues of teaching and learning that are often controversial. The centrality of the chemical sciences in the array of science research related to health issues makes these conferences eminently suitable for NIH support. While the program is not fully in place, themes will be chosen from: the interface and articulation between community colleges and 4-year institutions; technology in the curriculum, including distance learning and the virtual university; equity and diversity in the classroom in the post-affirmative action era; the impact of gender and ethnic diversity on teaching and learning; learning from chemical engineering, physics, biology, mathematics, and informal science education; effective communication in the chemical sciences: reaching the nonmajors and no scientists; methodologies for assessing learning and teaching, the impact of the undergraduate research experience, and the effectiveness of computers and computing technology in the classroom; training the teachers and professors of tomorrow, including graduate teaching assistants in a technological framework.
