Conference Session Submissions: 3 Things You Need To Know
By National Trust Staff | From Forum Bulletin | February 9, 2012 |
What do you get when you bring a group of preservationists to one city?
Answer: The potential for great ideas, new solutions, and engaging discussions on current and future issues in historic preservation.
But wait! How many times have you attended a conference and been stymied by rambling panelists and uncommunicative moderators or experienced a hijacking of the discussion portion by a well-meaning audience member? It may be a part of conference culture, but it is time to shake things up.
To foster excellent session development and management, we’ve developed several different session types and made changes to the submission process to encourage new and high-level thinking around session presentation.
Preservation Priorities
This year we are asking that sessions be developed with the following preservation priorities in mind: Building Sustainable Communities, Reimagining Historic Sites, Promoting Diversity and Place, and Protecting Historic Places on Public Lands. Below you will find a brief description of each theme and some sample topics to use as a guideline for creating your session proposal. These sub‐topics are meant to help you in the creative process, not to limit your thinking, so please use them as a guide only.
Building Sustainable Communities: How historic preservation supports economic, environmental, and cultural sustainability in communities.
Reimagining Historic Sites: Innovative, replicable strategies that create new models for historic site interpretation and stewardship.
Promoting Diversity and Place: How we help people in diverse communities save places that matter to them.
Protecting Historic Places on Public Lands: How we identify, protect, and interpret historic and cultural sites controlled by government agencies.
Session Format
All education session content should target experienced and emerging preservation leaders (professional and volunteer) and be appropriate for an advanced audience. But that doesn’t mean you should restrict yourself to a standard three panelist + moderator session. To get you thinking about innovative approaches we are providing eight options for session formats. The goal for the National Preservation Conference is to up our game, provide inspiration, and create opportunities for debate, discussion, and sharing of best practices. While full descriptions of the eight options are in the guidelines at www.preservationnation.org/conference they are as follows:
- Inspire
- Good vs. Good
- Single Speaker
- Panel
- Interview Style
- Debate
- Role Playing
- Double Block or Series
Learning Objectives
Specific, tangible, and measurable are the three essential ingredients to creating the learning objectives for your session—especially if you want your session to be eligible for continuing education credits. More so than previous years, having strong learning objectives will determine the success or failure of your session. Is it valuable for attendees? Are the skills being presented replicable on the ground?
With these three powers combined—great learning objectives, an excellent session format, and focus on higher level content—there is nothing that preservationists can’t achieve.
More information is available at www.preservationnation.org/conference where you can read the submission guidelines which expand upon the three main ideas above and get tips on picking the right moderator and the approval process. Questions can be sent by e-mail to conference@nthp.org.
But don’t wait too long, submissions are due March 1.
