Hyatt Regency St. Louis at The Arch
St Louis, MO
November 3-7, 2010

You are invited to take part in the 35th Annual POD Conference to be held in St. Louis, Missouri on November 3-7, 2010. We are pleased to announce the 2010 conference theme: Gateways to New Directions.

St. Louis is a setting that resonates well with this year’s conference theme. Known as the gateway to the west, the city has a longstanding tradition of being a thoroughfare for groundbreakers and sojourners. It is an area rich in the pre-European, Native American history of the Illini Confederacy, the Missouri, and the Osage. More recently, many people who have impacted the direction of American culture come from St. Louis. St. Louis natives such as Mark Twain, Charles Lindbergh, Tennessee Williams, Josephine Baker, T.S. Eliot, William Burroughs, Tina Turner, Miles Davis and Maya Angelou not only framed modern America, they are iconoclasts who pushed beyond traditions to create new paradigms of practice and thought.

The iconographic Gateway Arch is a fitting visual symbol for the conference theme, for POD has served as a gateway to the educational development community since its inception. Though the past decade has seen significant changes to POD - the community has grown immensely, it has become more of an international organization, and its members reflect an increasingly diverse range of disciplines and interests - it remains a place for remembering past accomplishments, realizing current initiatives, and discovering new possibilities. We invite POD attendees to engage in a larger discussion about the many opportunities and challenges we face, such as budget cuts, incorporating technology effectively, and being more responsive to our diverse students’ needs. Let us share our research outlining the ways in which we have successfully created new passageways at our institutions and in our practices. We encourage the POD membership to reflect on the people and forces that have framed and continue to frame our professional culture. Where have we come from and where do we intend to go from here? What needs to be done to create new paradigms within our practice and our thought?
The 2010 conference theme asks POD attendees to take a fresh look at our past, present and future as we consider new directions for our profession and our organization. In the longstanding tradition of POD camaraderie, we look forward to seeing you at this year’s Annual POD Conference in St. Louis as we all consider this year’s theme Gateways to New Directions.


Shaun Longstreet, Conference Co-Chair (shaun.longstreet@utdallas.edu)
Suzanne Tapp, Conference Co-Chair (suzanne.tapp@ttu.edu)
Michael Palmer, Program Co-Chair (mpalmer@virginia.edu)
Martin Springborg, Program Co-Chair (martin.springborg@csu.mnscu.edu)

View the call for proposals and submission guidelines.

Proposal Deadline: March 26, 2010, 05:00PM Eastern Time

For questions, please call 303-258-9521 or email podoffice@podnetwork.org