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??
The following streams and questions are intended for inspiration and reflection as you develop your proposal:
- How are we “making space” for everyone to participate, co-create, and co-exist?
- Where do we locate/identify/create spaces of possibility?
- What strategies can be used to create learning environments that actively challenge preconceived notions and biases?
- What roles do physical, digital, and community spaces play in expanding possibilities for teaching and learning?
- How are we designing curricular spaces to integrate culturally responsive teaching, accessibility, diversity and inclusion, Indigenous pedagogies, decolonization, anti-oppressive pedagogies, and anti-racist pedagogies?
- How and where are we creating and using space for teaching and learning, in and outside the classroom?
- How are different teaching modes (in-person, blended, synchronous or asynchronous, land-based) and approaches shaping the ways in which we teach and learn?
- What emerging technologies are enhancing or changing the ways in which we make or use space in pedagogical practice?
- How are our pedagogical practices and student experiences localized or globalized?
- How can we cultivate pedagogical engagement through debate, difficult conversations, and critical reflection?
- How are we actively engaging learners and instructors in reflecting on their own experiences?
- What opportunities do we provide learners to acquire the knowledge and resources they need to move forward in their learning and make change?
- How do we support learners to engage in ways that align with their newly acquired understandings?
- How can technology support interaction, community, learning, and instruction, fostering deeper understanding and self-awareness?
- How does scholarly teaching, the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), and discipline-based educational research (DBER) create, capture, and disseminate possibilities in pedagogy?
- How can we as researchers create space for discourse, creativity, and interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary collaboration?
- What innovations and practices in research present themselves with rich potential for cultivating spaces of possibility?
- What possibilities are arising from our current and emerging landscapes?
- What are the internal and external spaces of possibility? How do social, cultural, and economic spaces affect and impact pedagogy?
- How do we include our instructors’ and learners’ whole selves in the learning environment?
- How are we engaging in authentic wholistic relationship building?
- How do we negotiate power differentials and boundaries in relationships?
Call for Proposals is Now Open
Registration details will be available in early March 2025.
Acknowledgements:
The Office of Teaching and Learning and the 2025 Teaching and Learning Innovations Conference Co-chairs would like to thank the Office of the Provost and Associate Vice-President (Academic) for their support of this conference.
For More Information:
For more information about the conference, please contact us at otl@uoguelph.ca.
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