#NACTA25 Poster & Oral Abstracts Due January 15, 2025

North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture (NACTA) is pleased to announce the call for abstracts for poster and oral presentations for the NACTA Conference to be held in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, from June 2-6, 2025. The NACTA conference provides opportunities to connect with and learn from others who share the same passion for the improvement of teaching and learning in agriculture, food, and natural resources. The Annual NACTA Conference will provide you with new teaching techniques, ideas, and resources. It is also one of the best professional development activities for networking with other teaching professionals where the common discipline is “teaching.”

To streamline the categorization process to types of abstracts in 2025 we are asking authors to identify if their submission is scholarship or practice. These two categories closely reflect the differences between research manuscripts and teaching tips published in the NACTA Journal.

1. Scholarship abstract – the systematic study and investigation of teaching methods to gain deeper understanding and improve practice; scholarship generally includes the collection of evidence and analysis of the results to inform future practice. This category includes quantitative, qualitative or mixed-method studies and may be small- or large-scale projects.
2. Practice abstract – the day-to-day actions and methods a teacher uses in a classroom to deliver instruction. Practice is often based on what we have learned from scholarship or may be a pre-cursor to a future scholarly process. This category provides the opportunity to share a teaching practice with reflection on how it could be implemented in other classrooms/disciplines but relies on the instructor’s first-person perspective rather than using systematic evidence, similar to a NACTA Journal Teaching Tip.

Guidelines and Format for NACTA Abstracts
Your 300-word abstract should be a concise summary of factual information and not simply a general description of what the author plans to present. Abstracts must be over a completed project with conclusions and not an in-progress or yet-to-begin project. A high-quality abstract contains the following key elements (without designating them as such):

1. A brief introduction, including objectives of the presentation.
2. Relevant conditions indicating the scope of study, survey, or use of techniques in existing coursework (authors of predominately philosophical works should use appropriate criteria).
3. Evidence may include observations, reflections, results, or data (however, data should be in summary form and not presented in tables or graphs) - philosophical abstracts must demonstrate application of said philosophy.
4. A concise summary.

Please note if you use Microsoft Word to write your abstract: Microsoft formatting sometimes adds hidden characters that will throw off the word count. We have found that if you paste your work into Notepad, then copy from there to the abstract form, it will clean up the formatting and the word count will be accurate. Please DO NOT include your title/author information within the abstract body.

Although you may submit as many abstracts as you wish, acceptance of more than one oral presentation or poster per presenter may result in scheduling complexities. We are unable to take requests for specific presentation days/times.

Questions? Contact NACTA at support@nactateachers.org

Deadline: January 15, 2024

All abstracts will be peer-reviewed and considered for poster presentation. If desired, authors may indicate a preference for oral presentation upon submission. Based on peer reviews and indicated author preference, the Review Committee will invite a select number of abstracts to be presented as oral presentations. Abstracts not invited for oral presentation will automatically be considered for poster presentation. Authors will be notified of presentation mode in their acceptance. The corresponding author will be notified of its status in April 2025. Feedback on rejected abstracts will be available by request only. If accepted, the presenter must be registered for the conference by the Early Bird Deadline of April 25, 2025. Failure to do so will result in your presentation being pulled from the conference program.

Thank you,
Julie Weathers & Will Doss
NACTA Associate Editors, Conference Abstracts