Submit a proposal for the Teaching & Learning Symposium by September 30.
The deadline to submit a proposal for a poster, individual presentation, or panel discussion for the 2016 Teaching & Learning Symposium is Wednesday, September 30, at 11:59 p.m. Proposals are now being accepted at the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology’s (CTLT) main Symposium page.
This year’s theme is “Imagining the Future, Reflecting on the Past.” While proposals related to all aspects of Teaching and Learning are welcome, we especially encourage proposals that embrace this theme. As CTLT Director Claire Lamonica explains in the official call for proposals:
“We can better prepare for the road ahead by contemplating the road already traveled. That’s the underlying assumption of this year’s theme. As John Dewey asserted decades ago, ‘We don’t learn by experience, we learn by reflecting on experience.’” More recently, a researcher at the University of Toronto created a course called Maps of Meaning, in which “students reflect on important moments in their past, identify key personal motivations, and create plans for the future, including specific goals and strategies to overcome obstacles.” As a recent NPR article noted, “The course showed a powerful positive effect with at-risk students, reducing the dropout rate and increasing academic achievement.”
Importantly, students aren’t the only ones who benefit from acts of reflection and imagination. In their book, Reflective Teaching: An Introduction, authors Kenneth M. Zeichner and Daniel P. Liston argue that “it is through reflection on our teaching that we become more skilled, more capable, and in general better teachers.”
What role does reflection play in your teaching? What role can it play in your students’ learning? This year, we invite proposals that not only showcase the successful best practices of the recent past, but also presentations that can spark new ideas and inspire new approaches to mindful teaching and learning, in 2016 and beyond.
CTLT celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. It feels like a good time to both reflect on our past and imagine the future of teaching and student learning on the campus of Illinois State University. We invite you to do the same.
Learn more about the types of presentations, see sample proposals, and make your submission on CTLT’s main Symposium page.
The 2016 University-Wide Teaching & Learning Symposium will be held at the Marriott Hotel and Conference Center in Uptown Normal on Wednesday, January 6. The event is free to attend for all members of the campus community.
