Foundations & Frontiers of PER Puget Sound Regional Conference

The regional conference Foundations and Frontiers of Physics Education Research: Puget Sound (FFPERPS) will be held March 17-20, 2011 (Thursday night through Sunday morning) on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state.  The conference will provide a forum for examining and articulating the current state of the field, exploring future directions, and discussing ways to pursue promising avenues of research.  The structure of the conference, based on that of the FFPER conference held in Bar Harbor, Maine, includes plenary talks, targeted breakout sessions, a contributed poster session, and substantial free time for informal interactions

We expect this conference to draw participants primarily from the Northwest portion of the US (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana) and from neighboring British Columbia, Canada.  While this region boasts diverse individuals and groups engaged in PER, many are not well acquainted with one another’s work and some are less well known to the broader community.  Major goals of the conference are thus to increase regional communication and collaboration, and to increase the visibility of work that is of high quality but not well known.

The conference will feature a keynote address by Paula Heron of the University of Washington as well as a series of plenary lectures given by emerging leaders in PER in the northwest (or with connections to the northwest).  This year’s plenary speakers will be:

Hunter Close, Seattle Pacific University

Dedra Demaree, Oregon State University

Louis Deslauriers, University of British Columbia

Stephanie Chasteen, University of Colorado

Collectively, the plenary lectures will address the theme of Foundations and Frontiers by highlighting and/or synthesizing important accomplishments in the field and by identifying directions for future research that the speakers consider to be particularly promising.  Afternoons will be devoted to informal discussions.  Evening sessions will include working groups on subjects of community-wide interest, topical groups for specific research issues, and a contributed poster session. The goal of the conference is to foster the type of direct and intense discussion possible in a small (30-40 people) residential meeting of specialists.

We look forward to seeing you in the rain forest this March!

Registration will open on Monday, January 10.

We will be capping registration at 40 participants, so please be sure to register as soon as possible once registration is opened.