Call for Invited Session Ideas for March and April 2021 Meetings

Catherine H. Crouch, FEd Chair-Elect and Program Committee Chair

We are eager to hear your ideas for Forum on Education-sponsored invited sessions at the American Physical Society’s March and April meetings! We are seeking ideas for sessions (and potential invited speakers) that would be interesting and beneficial to the members of the American Physical Society, particularly undergraduate and graduate students and early-career members, whether or not they are members of FEd. We encourage ideas for sessions that might be co-organized by another APS unit (https://www.aps.org/membership/units/) or the APS Committee on Minorities or Committee on the Status of Women in Physics, which also have the ability to organize sessions.

In addition, we are eager for your feedback on the ideas generated so far by the Program Committee, including ideas for speakers on these topics. Our current ideas include:

Either meeting (or possibly both):

• Inclusive, equitable pedagogy and mentoring, and/or supporting diverse faculty (potentially co- organized with CSWP, COM, and/or other suitable APS units)
• The TEAM-UP report (potentially co-organized with COM and/or other units)
• Remote learning (potentially co-organized with GPER)

March meeting:

• Examples of physicists contributing to solutions for COVID-19 and other public health challenges (co-organized with the Division of Biological Physics)
• Quantum Information throughout the curriculum (co-organized with the Division of Quantum Information)
• Computation throughout the curriculum (potentially co-organized with DCOMP, DMP, DSOFT, and GSNP)
• Data science education (co-sponsored with GDS)

April meeting:

• Computation throughout the curriculum (potentially co-organized with DPF and DGRAV)
• Teaching gravitational physics (potentially co-organized with DGRAV)

Two of the sessions at the April meeting are co-organized with AAPT and the tentative plan is to offer one of those sessions on remote learning and one on some aspect of diversity, equity, and inclusion in physics education.

Please submit your ideas for sessions, as well as any input on the committee's ideas, to Catherine Crouch, APS FEd Chair-Elect and Program Chair for 2021, by email to ccrouch1@swarthmore.edu. Any ideas submitted will be considered by the Program Committee. The FEd is allocated a limited number of invited sessions at each meeting, based on FEd membership attendance at the previous year’s meeting, so we may have to postpone good ideas to a later year.

The deadline for session ideas and feedback is July 24.

FEd also sponsors contributed sessions at both these meetings, and APS members are permitted to contribute a talk or poster to the education sessions (using the physics education sorting categories) in addition to one on a technical physics topic. We invite you to consider contributing to one of these two meetings.

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.