Teaching and Learning Innovations Conference 2025

Teaching and Learning Innovations Conference 2025

May 14 - 15, 2025

At the University of Guelph’s 36th Teaching and Learning Innovations Conference, we will come together to explore the theme of Cultivating Spaces of Possibility as it weaves through the learning experiences of students, faculty, and staff.

On Wednesday, May 14th, we will connect in person at the University Centre for speakers, interactive sessions, and presentations. On Thursday, May 15th, we will connect synchronously online with a different set of interactive sessions and presentations.

As educators, researchers, students and changemakers, we strive to look critically and creatively at the spaces in which teaching and learning unfold. When we actively cultivate these spaces, we can explore the possibilities that emerge with intentionality. This year’s theme, Cultivating Spaces of Possibility, invites attendees to reflect on the environments, mindsets, and practices that foster innovation, change, exploration, and growth. 

To cultivate is to work to improve or develop something, through care, training or study and requires long-term investment, collaboration, and nurturing. Spaces may be literal, conceptual, or communal with creative definitions and expansive boundaries. Possibility indicates potential, change, innovation and opportunity. Cultivating Spaces of Possibility underscores the potential of learning beyond the traditional classroom, the opportunity for breaking boundaries and inspiring transformative learning experiences, while reminding us of our shared active investment, responsibility and care in creating these spaces. It challenges us to consider the broader pedagogical ecosystem by investing in communities, fostering partnerships, and creating access to resources and knowledges. 

Spaces of possibility can encompass a literal space, such as a physical or virtual classroom, a learning space designed for community and collaboration, or a conceptual one, such as a teaching approach that values student agency, adaptability, and resilience. In these spaces, learners are empowered to take ownership of their journeys, guided by educators who serve as facilitators and co-creators of knowledge. By leaning into the unknown – into possibility - instructors and learners alike can explore new methods of interaction, assessment, and self-expression. These spaces are not merely containers for information transfer; they are dynamic spaces where knowledge, discourse, identity, and potential coalesce. 

In Teaching to Transgress (1994), bell hooks asserts, “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” What does the classroom in its diverse forms look like today? Within the broader contexts of our campuses, communities, and society, we must ask ourselves what spaces of possibility look like, and how we can create, maintain, and foster their emergence in our work.  

What spaces of possibility are now possible? How can we best cultivate our capacity in pedagogy, practice, community, and leadership?