What does neurodiversity mean for chemistry education?

Now, that was a little bit of a, of a spoiler, but do you wanna give a more overview of your community conversation topic?

Absolutely.

So we're very, very, um, blessed to have the platform, I can tell you that.

We have a 60-minute platform to basically do whatever we want, and the team, um, which includes some, some real heavy hitters besides, uh, uh, Molly, um, Audrey Gay, who is currently graduate student at University of North Carolina Greensboro.

We have Professor Katie Hosbine from Middle Tennessee State.

Uh, we have, uh, Professor Kristen Monroe, who's, uh, newly of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, uh, Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, which is awesome.

Uh, we've got Professor, uh, Jocelyne Nardo, uh, Josie Nardo from The Ohio State University, and Professor Paulette Vincent-Rouse from New Mexico State.

We brought this group of people together with this sort of bifurcation of what we have planned in mind.

We want to bring to the fore, and to be quite frank, we're not gonna be able to do some in the weeds style things here.

It's really about bringing people into the cone of, uh, knowledge with regard to interactions with your students of neurodiversity, which is sort of our fabulous first half.

And then the second half is, um, going from the experience, the lived experience of being a faculty member, um, with some kind of neurodiversity.

I've never really gotten that phraseology correct, but you-- I think that you're listeners [chuckles] and hopefully you know what I'm getting at here.

Everyone's on the spectrum.

It's just a matter of where they are and, uh, you know, how things, uh, manifest day to day.

And I think that just with those two sort of buckets to fill, um, we probably could do about 100 hours [chuckles] of a community conversation.

Our plan is really to do it panel style, to have people talk about what the early research into, in particular, learning chemistry is about.

We know chemistry is very mathematical, chemistry is very three-dimensional, chemistry is very conceptual, and a million other modifiers.

What influence does the subject itself, BCCE after all, have on students' experience in our classrooms? And then some bridge over to what does it mean to be interacting with faculty members who are neurodiverse, and then more, what is it like to be a faculty member that's neurodiverse in a department of a great diversity of other different kinds of, um, ways of thinking and doing? And I think, again, the more that I bring it up, the more I smile because there's just no way to put that into a tiny little box labeled 60 minutes.

But I'm still very excited about the fact that we're gonna be, um, sort of a little bit headlining on the first day so that people can continue the conversation for the rest of the conference.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think there's so many little things I wanna pull out.

So first I'll say Katie Hosbine, Josie Nardo, and Paulette Vincent-Rouse, those are all three women who have had a very big impact on me and my journey as well, going through graduate school and into my postdoc.

They're all sort of mentors who are around who had gone through it before me, [chuckles] you know?

Sure.

And Katie especially was one of the first people who ever recommended that I get tested to see if I have ADHD, and it was a very timely recommendation because as the deadline of my dissertation was weighing on me, sort of all my defense mechanisms broke down.