Who Governs AAPT?

A very simple question. But it is a question that gives me an opportunity to discuss how our organization operates and how any of our members can get involved in influencing decisions at every level of our activities.

From a strictly legal point of view, AAPT is a corporation governed by the AAPT Executive Board, which serves as our Board of Directors. Every voting member of the Board is elected by our full membership or by representatives of our 47 sections.

While service on the Executive Board is necessarily limited to a few members, 14 to be exact, AAPT has a large number of Area Committees, with more than 150 members serving on about 18 such area committees. Elsewhere in this issue of the Announcer, you will see a listing of the names, institutions, and contact information of each of these individual member volunteers.

If you are a current or former member of one of our area committees, thank you for your support, cooperation and involvement in making decisions affecting many of our services and activities. If you are not a member of one of our committees, you should know that all of our committee meetings are open to all visitors and members. Indeed, when some of our area committees meet at the winter or summer AAPT meetings, the room includes well over 100 "friends of the committee" in addition to the nine members of the actual area committee.

Our committee meetings always serve as a forum for a wide ranging set of discussions about issues and opportunities in physics education. Yes, each of the committees must attend to a consideration of sessions to be organized at future national meetings, but they also provide vehicles for raising policy issues and for developing recommendations to the AAPT Executive Board.

If you have an idea or a question relevant to the broad scope of AAPT’s interests, you should feel free to voice that at a committee meeting or to send an e-mail to any member of one of our committees. AAPT’s creativity and responsiveness to needs of the community depend very much on input and advice from our members and others involved in physics education at every level. Without that kind of broad input, there is always a risk that our activities will become sterile and that our services to members will be inadequate.

Of course, many of us are very busy with our own daily activities and responsibilities. It is understandable that we may not have time for ‘involvement’ in our professional organization. At the same time, we need to recognize that AAPT’s activities are inevitably defined and also limited by those who chose to get involved in some way.

Most of our members choose not to join our committees. Nor do they choose to attend our national meetings. Fortunately, all of our members remain closely connected to our central activities by subscribing to our two premier journals, the American Journal of Physics and The Physics Teacher.

Many of our members are more active in their local and regional sections than they are in our national organization or our national meetings. While some members of our local sections are not members of the national organization, that does not prevent their involvement (and even their leadership) in the local sections. The only requirement is an interest in physics and physics education.

Some of our members, and many non-members, derive benefits from programs that are not directly connected to our national meetings or journals. Here I am thinking of the thousands of high school and middle school teachers who have benefitted across the years in our Physics Teaching Resource Agents (PTRA) and its hundreds of workshops across the country; the hundreds of new physics and astronomy faculty who participate in our annual workshops for these groups; the scores of alumni of these faculty workshops who participate in follow-up meetings held in conjunction with meetings of the American Physical Society or the American Astronomical Society; the hundreds of teachers and thousands of students who participate in our International Physics Olympiad or our PhysBowl competition; the scores of faculty who have participated in our reviews of departments and programs at two-year and four-year institutions.

How you participate is less important than the fact that you participate in some way. If you participate, then you are an important part of how AAPT is governed. If you participate, you will derive benefits and you will enhance the benefits received by others. Let us hear your voice, feel your energy, see your face, read your words. We are you.