I’m here in Las Vegas, and already my work is done. Genie Scott, Occi­den­tal Col­lege’s Don Prothero, and I did a work­shop at 9am today about Defend­ing Evo­lu­tion in Classrooms.

Plan­ning for this was com­pli­cat­ed, because we want­ed it to be a true work­shop, i.e., to have inter­ac­tive aspects, and time for peo­ple to work through exer­cis­es in small groups. But we did­n’t know what sort of crowd to expect for the first work­shop of the first day. Chat­ting about our plan, we joked about how embar­rass­ing it’d be if only 3 peo­ple showed up, but we planned for about 30, and made 60 copies of the handouts.

About 350 showed up, pack­ing the hall. The idea to split the audi­ence into small groups of 10 who could work through some sam­ple cre­ation­ist work­shops went out the window.

As planned, Prothero gave a great, and great­ly com­pressed, ver­sion of his talk about the impor­tance of evo­lu­tion and the fail­ures of cre­ation­ist attacks. Then Genie took her stan­dard, hour-long talks on the his­to­ry of cre­ation­ism and tools for refut­ing stan­dard cre­ation­ist argu­ments, and scrunched them into 10–15 min­utes total. Then I pre­sent­ed a 20 minute ver­sion of week­end-long train­ings in sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tion and com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­ing that I’ve been part of.

Then we posed a sce­nario to the atten­dees: what mes­sage would they try to bring to a state board of edu­ca­tion meet­ing to con­vince waver­ing board mem­bers to avoid cre­ation­ist revi­sions to state sci­ence stan­dards? What mes­sen­gers would they choose to bring that message?

We got great ideas, and a great dis­cus­sion. For a plan cre­at­ed on the fly, I think it worked rather well, and the parts of the audi­ence who came to chat with us after­ward seemed to think so as well. 

I saw Richard Dawkins come into the room at the begin­ning, but I think he had to bolt some­where in the mid­dle. Dun­no how much he would’ve learned from the pan­el (which was inten­tion­al­ly fair­ly basic), but I’d have been inter­est­ed to get his take on the audi­ence discussion.