Program Dimensions

2026 BCCE attendees can engage with five dimensions of programming. There are opportunities for collaborative dialogue (birds-of-a-feather and community conversations) and individual contributions (poster sessions, symposia, and workshops). BCCE attendees can submit program proposals to organize birds-of-a-feather, community conversations, symposia, and/or workshops (beginning August 1, 2025); they can also contribute abstracts to poster sessions and symposia (beginning February 1, 2026). 

Opportunities for Individual Contributions

Symposia are collections of contributions intended to showcase and ignite discussion on the latest developments around a specific aspect of chemistry education. Symposia organizers are encouraged to use both distillation and talk formats thoughtfully to achieve the session’s goals. Symposia may be “invited” to curate a specific collection of expertise or experience, or may be “contributed” to allow attendees to self-nominate potential contributions.

• Talks are 15 min long, followed by 5 min of questions/discussion. Talks are intended to showcase scholarly approaches to chemistry education and present robust findings, tried and tested learning activities, and other developed work. Talk abstracts will be limited to 250 words.
• Distillations are new for the 2026 BCCE. They are 5-minute mini-talks ideal for sharing new or developing projects/ideas, soliciting advice on a particular data set, sharing a learning/teaching activity, etc. A distillation could also be a good option for studies with promising (yet minimal) data or observations, or with inconclusive results. Distillation sessions will occur within symposia, each lasting 40 min; the format will be four distillations grouped by topic followed by a 20-min open discussion. Distillation abstracts will be limited to 100 words.

Poster presentations are ideal for engaging in informal, deep, and extended discussions of your work. These are good ways to present a new or developing project, but they can also be useful for presenting the results of mature projects. No matter your topic, posters are an excellent way to get rich and meaningful feedback from the community. Poster abstracts will be limited to 250 words.

Workshops are opportunities to engage in activities or have conversations with the broad goal of supporting chemistry learning. These activities or conversations might involve the exploration of lab pedagogies, brainstorming assessments that leverage empirical data or computational outputs, reflecting on written or video-recorded classroom data, etc. Workshops can also support the growth of scholarly activity in chemistry education, by providing training in proposal writing, publishing/reviewing, research methods, etc. Importantly, workshops are meant to be interactive; workshop leaders and participants should work together and reflect on ways to improve chemistry teaching and learning. Workshops can be 1.5 hrs, 3 hrs, or a full day.

The BCCE follows a “rule of two” concerning talks, posters, distillations, and workshops. Attendees can contribute a maximum of 2 presentations for these types of engagements. For example: 2 talks; 1 talk and 1 poster; 1 workshop and 1 distillation; etc. To allow conferees to more meaningfully engage with each other and the Conference Contexts, abstracts submitted for talks, posters, or distillations may be recommended for an alternate engagement format during the review process. This is in response to not only previous conference feedback, but also efforts by the ACS to limit the number of concurrent sessions at meetings.

Opportunities for Collaborative Dialogue

To facilitate discussions around common areas of interest, BCCE attendees can engage in Birds of a Feather sessions (informal/unstructured) and Community Conversations (structured discussions, replacing plenary sessions at the 2026 BCCE). Attendees may engage in any number of birds-of-a-feather or community conversation sessions.

Community Conversations are 60-min facilitated collaborative dialogues on forward-looking topics of broad interest. Conversations have a moderator and will begin with 5-min mini-presentations by 2-3 people, who can provide both researcher and practitioner perspectives on the topic. These short presentations are intended to be a catalyst for interaction, discussion, and critique, as the remaining time will be devoted to small/large group discussions and feedback from the community. The BCCE 2026 organizing team will host Conversations centered on each of the Conference Contexts; proposals for additional Community Conversations are welcomed.

Birds of a Feather (BoaF) sessions are great ways for conferees to gather informally to network around and/or discuss a topic of shared interest (e.g., online chemistry learning, online laboratory, AP chemistry, organic chemistry, capstone laboratory experiences, inclusive pedagogies, etc.). One-hour BoaFs can be proposed in advance, in which case the topic and location will be available in the program. As topics of interest arise at the 2026 BCCE, BoaFs can also be proposed on-site.

Opportunities for Cross-Program Engagement

Cross-program topic clusters are intentional combinations of program components (symposia, workshops, BoaFs, community conversations, etc.) centered around specific topics. For example, #AdvancingEquity at the 2022 BCCE was a combination of workshops and symposia.