This year's OOPS Conference will be held as a Preconference to the Association for Experiential Education Conference in Vancouver, WA on November 5, 2008
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This year’s AEE conference theme is
“Bridges in Education: Inquiry, Knowledge, Action.” In keeping with this theme, our goals for
OOPS are:
1)
To create bridges between outdoor
orientation program professionals, campus administrators, and other student
affairs professionals in an effort to support current programs and to advise in
the development of new programs. This approach is intended to provide increased
awareness, inclusion, and diversity among first year programming resources.
2)
To offer a diverse set of workshops
catering to the needs of administrators, program managers, practitioners,
student leaders, and researchers alike by integrating inquiry, knowledge, and
action within workshops and throughout the conference.
3)
To continue to expand our knowledge base
and to provide mentoring opportunities by incorporating programs and
individuals who have been active in the OOPS community and to introduce new
programs and individuals to the conference.
In order to meet those goals, we seek
proposals that do one or more of the following:
1)
Address current issues in
pre-orientation and outdoor orientation practice, programming, & training
as they relate to the first-year experience and beyond.
2)
Provide guidance for student development
administrators seeking to create or to support outdoor orientation programs at
their universities
3)
Provide insight into current research on
or assessments of outdoor orientation programming
4)
All proposals should fit into one of the
three programmatic strands below.
A) Administration and Management:
How do school administrators and program directors work to collectively support
a program? How do program directors improve and sustain programs? How do we
manage budgets, fundraise, and evaluate our programming? How do we create risk
management plans? What should student
managers be concerned with? This strand is focused on issues for
administrators and program directors with questions, concerns, and interests in
how to manage a program through experience, research, or the forecasting of
future trends.
B)
Leadership and Curriculum Development: A
key task for many programs involves the development of leaders, trainings,
curriculum, teaching skills, and discussing leader judgment. Leaders in outdoor
orientation programs are entrusted with a great deal of responsibility. This
strand focuses on issues related to leadership training, curriculum enrichment,
peer leadership and role-modeling.
C) Connecting Theory and Research to
Practice: What does the research say about the learning
outcomes surrounding outdoor orientation programs? How do we communicate the
efficacy of our programs between programs and the administration? How are
different programs structured, and which structures really work? This strand focuses on: Research and
assessments that support the efficacy of outdoor orientation programming;
program models; unique designs that integrate outdoor orientation into the
larger first year experience; success stories, reflections and growing pains.
We
are looking for a wide range of workshops, offered by a broad selection of
professionals and students. The audience this year will consist of program
managers, school administrators, student leaders and managers, professionals
eager to start a program, and seasoned program directors within outdoor
orientation and outdoor education programs.
In developing a workshop, please think about the audience and how to make your
workshop relevant and interesting to conference attendees. The quality of the
workshops is how most attendees judge the value of the symposium.
Thank
you for your ideas! We look forward to reading over your workshop proposals and
to seeing you all in November!
Yours
in Learning and Adventure,
Jess
Ross, Director Harvard First-Year Outdoor Program &
Abby Rowe, Director Colgate Outdoor Education
E-mail: Abby and Jess
(outdoor.orientation@gmail.com)
Phone: Abby (315 228-7323)