Marianne Barker, our guest blogger this week, is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. Her research focuses on the social integration of Canadian immigrants, investigating how sense of belonging and identity develop in the context of language programming for newcomers. She filled the role of conference co-chair during her fourth year of doctoral studies as a way to get involved in a leadership role and to gain experience in academic conference organization. The EGSS Conference is an entirely graduate student led annual conference with the goal of peer mentoring, support and collaboration. See the 20th annual conference website here and keep up with other EGSS news and events here.
Have you ever watched a bee hive abuzz in the heat of a summer day? If so, you will likely have observed the innate synergy of the hive, with each bee whizzing along on its own path and somehow contributing to a cumulative ‘hum’ of productivity and collective energy. This spring, I had the privilege of ‘humming’ among a team of student leaders involved in organizing the 20th Annual Education Graduate Student Society (EGSS) Conference within McGill University’s faculty of education. The conference took place on March 25-26th, 2022, with both presenters and attendees joining in-person on McGill’s campus and online via Zoom.
In true conference form, those in attendance felt energized and excited at having shared ideas, networked, and plugged into the community. The purpose of this blog post is twofold: (1) To offer some reflections on chairing a student-led conference through the lens of belonging, identity; and (2) to promote the diverse and high-quality work of the presenters at this year’s conference.
As a co-chair on the conference organizing committee, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to build a team of volunteer student leaders who gave generously of their time and knowledge. The call for volunteers to join the committee was put out just 7 months prior to the conference, and the team ‘whizzed’ into action, meeting bi-monthly to vision out, plan, and execute the two-day event. While each committee member had their own role, we supported each other by working together frequently to decide on a conference theme, brainstorm speakers to invite, and strategize how best to process submissions and schedule events. Although most of our meetings took place on Zoom, there was a sense of teamwork in working towards a common goal that propelled us forward. It is my belief that this opportunity for involvement and role-filling enabled each committee member to feel a sense of belonging within the faculty of education, and to stake their identity as ‘contributors’ to a broader goal, which was to serve our community of peers. It was equally rewarding and exciting to observe how this feeling of belonging and identity-staking extended into conference events, where attendees and presenters connected within a network of students, peers, and developing researchers. I cannot recommend highly enough the enjoyment of getting involved in student leadership and participating in organized events as a way of having experiences and interactions that nurture belonging and identity.
It is worth noting the wonderful diversity reflected through the presentations at this year’s conference. Presentations featured unique research contexts and interests, a wide range of topics, methodologies, and frameworks across the three departments in the faculty, and attempts to address diverse research problems in various geographical and social contexts. Even with all this diversity (each ‘bee’ on their own path), when ideas were presented among colleagues within the community, there was a sense of symbiosis in the idea-exchange that connected our community. Presentations also had resonance in their link to the conference theme, Challenge, Change, and Resilience. Graduate student work filled a program with 45 oral presentations, 8 Fast-5 presentations, 8 poster presentations, 3 panels, and 3 ‘other’ format presentations. While watching the presentations during the conference, it was astounding to see how presenters identified diverse challenges, adjusted to change, and responded with resilience in their own research contexts. Resilience emerged in the form of perseverance, curiosity, boldness, originality, zeal, and most of all, hard work. The inspiring dedication of presenters is reflected in the abstracts of the presentations that occurred over the weekend, which are featured in our Conference Proceedings, linked on the conference website.
Involvement among the graduate student community during the EGSS Conference—and among the graduate student leaders involved in organizing the event—is highly recommendable. The event was marked by idea-sharing, innovate frameworks and research plans, synergy among like-minded peers, excitement from connecting with others, fun from gathering in person and flexibility of gathering online. At the root of it the notion that belonging to a community of graduate student researchers just involves taking steps to participate and get involved—to become part of the buzz.
