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To meet complex modern challenges, graduate education in the USA aims to educate future leaders in relevant knowledge and innovation to advance specific fields (Wendler et al., 2010). As part of a holistic set of educational experiences, academic and professional conferences are often viewed as central to the graduate student experience (Kuzhabekova and Temerbayeva, 2018) and one of multiple factors that socialize students in their future professions (Weidman and DeAngelo, 2020). Existing research suggests academic and professional conferences are valuable as venues for exchanging ideas and innovations, providing professional development opportunities and building participant networks (Chapman et al., 2009; Cherrstrom, 2012). Moreover, for many graduate students and aspiring professionals, conferences are viewed as a place to seek job opportunities, hold interviews and expand professional networks.
However, the types and topics of learning at academic and professional conferences and how this learning connects with on-campus learning has yet to be deeply explored in the higher education literature. Questions about the importance of conferences have taken on additional significance during the COVID-19 crisis, when many conferences were either cancelled or rapidly shifted to a virtual platform, raising questions about what types of knowledge and experiences were lost, or how programming should be replicated virtually. Virtual conferences may alter the conference experience, yet they also may broaden the audience who can attend (Wilkinson and Hemby, 2000).
This qualitative research examines the experiences of USA master’s students who attended either an academic or professional conference to better understand what and how they learned during their conference participation, as well as how they connected it to the learning in their graduate degree program. In this paper, we use the term “field” to represent either a scholarly (e.g. comparative education) or professional (e.g. educational administration) area within the larger sphere of higher education research and practice, and the sites of the study are these fields’ annual meetings.
This research suggests that graduate learning at education conferences is not limited to gaining specific subject knowledge during sessions. It extends to students observing the diversity of voices and ideas among the conference attendees, navigating their own role and identity within the scholarly or professional fields and connecting new insights with previous knowledge and experience. These findings provide insights for scholars, administrators...