Visitors can connect to the wireless network called IU Guest, which is available throughout the IU Campus. For additional connection information, visit https://kb.iu.edu/d/atkx.
Visitors from eduroam subscriber institutions can also connect to the eduroam wireless network on the IU Campus.
Welcome! We'll have a check-in desk in the IMU Tudor Room, starting at 6pm on Tuesday September 10. That's where you'll pick up your name badge, a printed agenda, a map, and some additional goodies. If you can't make it to the Tudor Room on Tuesday evening, no worries, you can check-in (and receive your badge and goodies) when you arrive at the McCalla School Building on Wednesday morning.
Check out the Bloomington Events Calendar for local events and shows. Round up some other incubator members to visit the Get Out Bloomington escape room (last booking is at 8:30pm). If you want to avoid the student scene, Cardinal Spirits has an amazing cocktail menu, or try Atlas Ballroom.
A first-aid kit (minor wound care) and basic health essentials (pain/fever reducer, allergy medicine, antacid, tweezers, nail trimmers) will be available throughout the convening. Kits are available in most meeting rooms of the McCalla School Building, as well as the McCalla Wellness Room, and a kit will also be available at all meals. Don't hesitate to ask a member of the steering committee if you need something.
The nearest urgent care facility is IU Health Urgent Care Bloomington, open 8am to 8pm.
Incubator members' travel expenses (including economy air travel, personal vehicle gas/mileage, parking, and any additional travel costs to/from/within Bloomington) will be reimbursed by Indiana University, along with the incubator honorarium. Travel reimbursement will be managed by Sherry Wampler. You should have received a link to a travel reimbursement form (if you need the link again, please contact Sherry or any member of the steering committee; sorry we're not posting it publicly because we don't want people to be able to impersonate you). Even though this form is designed for IU employees, it will help us stay organized and will speed your reimbursement. In the form, you only need to provide your name, your email address, your contact information (which should be the mailing address where you want to receive a reimbursement check), as well as copies of receipts for travel expenses. Personal vehicle mileage is reimbursed at a rate of $.655 per mile for the first 500 miles, and $.3275 per mile for 501 miles or more. Receipts should show the method of payment (commonly, the last 4 digits of your credit card number). Please submit the form within 60 days after the convening.
Sure can! :) During the September 2024 convening, we’ll collaboratively brainstorm research infrastructure designs that support the needs we identified during the first convening, and that would advance equity in K-12 STEM settings.
Remarkably, across all our working groups at the first convening (as well as our three summer working groups), there was broad consensus about what is needed. All of us were largely in consensus that we need to close the research-practice gap, and we want to do this by conducting research on teacher adoption of evidence-based practices, in collaboration with teachers, and by enabling teachers to participate more easily in research and to directly observe the benefits for their students.
This isn’t a novel perspective. Others have been hard at work addressing the research-practice gap in education for decades. One of the most promising models is the researcher-practitioner-partnership (RPP), which might be defined as a “long-term, mutualistic collaboration between practitioners and researchers that is intentionally organized to investigate problems of practice and solutions for improving outcomes” (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013). In addition to investigating a solution, the RPP has also been viewed as a highly effective mechanism for supporting professional learning among teachers, building strong cultures of evidence-based reform.
However, despite years of investment in RPPs, these efforts generally lack basic infrastructure. Many RPPs encounter difficulties when trying to access student data, and resort, instead, to measuring teachers’ subjective judgments of whether a new practice feels like it’s working. There are also known issues with organization and collaboration, leading most RPPs to involve only a handful of teachers at a single school or district, unable to scale. So even while RPPs have existed for some time, there is no shortage of need for research infrastructure in this area.
We’ll start the second convening by learning more, together, about RPPs. We will then pivot and learn more about research infrastructure and student data, and the challenges and opportunities of using student data for research purposes. Moreso than the first convening, the second convening will start with guest presentations and level-setting. Once we’ve come to understand the current state of RPPs and their infrastructure needs, we will then split into groups to brainstorm how we might accelerate and scale research on equity in education, by designing infrastructure that better-supports RPPs, and that shows promise to close the research-practice gap.
