A short, at times tongue-in-cheek, step-by-step of what I did to present at the GA 2022 Conference; Everyday Geographies.
Hey everyone, it has been almost three years in the making but my first conference session was a success! After my initial conference session back in 2019 was cut due to the switch to an online conference I did not think I would find myself here. Nevertheless, I finally have completed my first GA presentation and hope to support some people who may be thinking about doing their first one next year.
The GA conference this year was particularly inspiring so hopefully there is a diverse collection of people who have been given some confidence to present next year!
Here is a step-by-step of how it happened for me:
- Get involved with areas of Geography I’m interested in and engage with the communities of people who are actively involved in it. For me, that was the Decolonise Geography group.
- Look at what others are doing and take part in collaborative endeavours using opportunities to work with other teachers and connect with other people.
- Validate my ideas through discussion, writing a piece for the TES and taking a more active role in CPD and staff collaboration at my school.
- Have a wonderful peer (in my case Briley Habib @Map_Addict and Chris Winter) who encourages me to take the final step and jointly submit a proposal to the GA. Encouragement from your group or community is useful as well; just take the first step and make it official!
- Anxiously await a response and then joyously celebrate upon the receipt of an acceptance email a month later!
- Forget about it for three months.
- Have a mild panic session somewhere around 2 months before the conference when people in the Decolonising Geography group mention the upcoming conference.
- Frantically contact my partner to arrange a Zoom chat and put something together.
- Let my cool-calm-collected partner allay some of my fears and get a realistic perspective — A presentation is just a lesson for adults, putting together a lesson is easy, and you wouldn’t worry about a lesson two months in advance, just get on with it and agree what you are each going to do and schedule a practice session a week or so before the real thing…
- …realise that the adults I may be presenting to are my peers, PHD’s, textbook writers, experienced teachers, and more who are looking to me for expertise…
- Panic.
- Procrastinate.
- Spend an hour agonising over the self-introduction slide.
- Briefly meet with my partner and agree that it is a pompous waste of time and no one cares, lets just focus on the topic and just do little ad-lib intros.
- Actually start and get basically the whole presentation ready with my partner in less than two hours plus some editing because I am a professional with rich experience and research and do actually know what I am talking about… I swear…
- Take at least a week away from what I have prepared and then look at it with fresh eyes — consider if I have included my personal opinion clearly, left room for participant input, ensured the voices of the people concerned are included equitably, placed relevant references for participants who might want to dive deeper into the topic of the presentation, etc.
- Arrange a practice run-through with some valued peers.
- Go through all the nerves in preparation for the practice and get it out the way.
- Do the practice run, and identify what went well and what needs changing. Take on the feedback from the participants and make necessary changes.
- Despite the practice, go through the same rollercoaster of emotions leading up to the actual presentation.
- Meticulously set up my computer space, check what is open on my computer, check and recheck the audio, video, and that my internet service provider doesn’t intend to cut my connection in the next hour or so.
- Do the real thing — get lost in the experience and have a great time.
- Get kicked out of the video conference before I can meaningfully respond to the final comments and questions from the participants.
- Blink and be back sat in front of my computer in my apartment with a weird empty feeling as the adrenaline rapidly subsides to be replaced with a dry mouth, aching eyes, an awareness of the thin layer of sweat on my brow, and a subtle tremor in my hands.
- Quickly touch base with my partner to celebrate what we just managed to achieve and the brilliant thing that we just did.
- Immediately start considering what we could do next.
- Write an article to process my experience…
So there you have it.
A lot of work, but a key realisation was that the hard work is already done if you are thinking about doing a session. I wanted to present something that would support other teachers and to do so I simply needed evidence of what we had done, to share resources that I used to allow me to do it, and to share my knowledge in a curated way.
Everyone passionate about teaching Geography has a GA conference session within them. Tell your story and share your expertise to support the development of the Geography community, you will have a lot of fun doing it and may make many new connections with communities which will help you become a better teacher.
Best of luck to you and please share the story of your experiences, I would love to read it!
Click here to see what we presented during the GA conference 2022.
1 thought on “How I Completed My First GA Conference Online Presentation”