Program

Transparent Assignment Design is a powerful approach that benefits all learners, particularly students with disabilities, by making the purpose, task, and assessment criteria of assignments explicit. Coupled with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, this strategy fosters greater clarity, accessibility, and engagement in the learning process. This session will introduce participants to the key elements of transparent assignment design and provide practical strategies to create clear, inclusive and accessible assignments.       Session Overview (20 minutes):   Overview of Transparent Assignment Design and how it overlaps with UDL (5 minutes), Key elements of Transparent Assignment Design & Checklist (5 minutes), Participants collaborate to review & re-design sample assignments using practical strategies given for transparency and inclusivity 

This session provides an overview of best practices for establishing clear expectations and boundaries when providing academic accommodations to students. As the demand for accommodations increases, it is crucial to navigate the complexities of providing equitable support while maintaining consistency and fairness. By the end of this session, participants will be equipped with strategies to ensure a balanced and transparent approach to academic accommodations in the classroom. 

In this interactive workshop, we share key lessons from over a decade of pedagogical innovation offering a thematic based interdisciplinary undergraduate course titled “Introduction to Interdisciplinary Analysis.” Each iteration of the course - organized around a single evocative concept (e.g., DIRT, SECRETS, WATER, GENIUS) - paired rotating guest lecturers from across Arts, Science, and Professional Studies programs with small group seminars to model deep interdisciplinary engagement and sustained curiosity. Workshop participants will consider how the design of the course helped to expand students’ capacity for integrative thinking, intellectual courage, and collaborative inquiry. The workshop will include a micro-modelling of the INTD course structure through a simulated guest lecture/seminar cycle. This experiential activity will illuminate five core pedagogical innovations that drive transformative learning: 1. Strategic Entry Recruitment: Ambiguous yet intriguing course branding leverages diversive curiosity to attract students across disciplines and faculties. Interdisciplinary coding expands and enriches breadth requirement options for a wide variety of students. 2. Concept Anchored Interdisciplinarity: A unifying theme enables emergent, student driven synthesis across disciplinary boundaries. 3. Relational Pedagogy: Faculty as co learners during lectures and facilitators in seminars cultivate an ethic of shared inquiry. Co-teaching as intervention into epistemic power structures. 4. Safe Risk Taking Environment: Removing disciplinary ownership reduces anxiety, empowering students to explore unfamiliar domains. 5. Enduring Transformation: Student evaluations reveal rekindled intellectual curiosity, enhanced critical thinking, and holistic perspectives that persist beyond the classroom. In small breakout groups, attendees will map actionable strategies for adapting these innovations to their own curricula—identifying practical steps for thematic course design, collaborative teaching structures, and inclusive recruitment tactics.

Adaptive note-taking technologies have the potential to enhance learning outcomes for students with diverse learning needs. In this session, various commonly used adaptive technologies for note-taking will be discussed and demonstrated, to foster a greater understanding of how digital note-taking can improve accessibility for many learners.    Session Overview (20 minutes):   Overview of Benefits of Traditional & Digital Note-Taking, Tips for Effective Digital Note-Taking, Demonstration of Commonly Used Note-Taking Technologies 

Student agency requires an instructional design that offers meaningful choices. As I seek to infuse the principles of Universal Design for Learning in my instructional practices, the choice board is an opportunity for students to “engage with information, make meaning, and demonstrate their learning” (Tucker, 2021). A choice board is a menu of tasks allowing students to choose how to practice a skill or demonstrate their learning. Choice boards can enhance student engagement, differentiate instruction, and free up the instructor to conference with small groups or individuals. In this session, I will share two choice boards (one used as an assessment tool and the other as an instructional tool) and discuss how to create choice boards for your classroom. 

“Ungrading” is an umbrella term that includes any attempts to shift focus from marks to learning. As Jesse Stommel suggests, it “rais[es] an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice, distinct from simply ‘not grading.’ The word is a present participle, an ongoing process, not a static set of practices.” The four of us have been employing a variety of ungrading (also called “alt-grading”) techniques in our classes, while tracking the responses of students to these experiments. In this session, we will briefly outline out own ongoing processes to alternative grading, ask two of our students to describe their own experiences, and finally offer the early findings from our research study.

There is a kind of joke among Applied Communications, Leadership, and Culture (ACLC) students that ADHD is a program prerequisite. Friendly exaggerations aside, ACLC is like most programs with a focus on creative practice: we count neurodivergence among the ways we think of diversity in the classroom. It is always surprising, then, to encounter people who are alarmed by the rapid growth of accessibility services and accommodations. Setting aside the “back in my day, we really knew what scholarly rigour was” armchair experts in education, there is a cohort of students, teachers, and community members who think of accommodations as lowering the educational quality of the university. 

This besieged mentality provides a severely limited vantage point into the cultural moment. Rather, accommodations allow us to focus on what we are really testing in our curricula while adding to our toolbelt of teaching tools. Using my own learning about neurodivergence, mental health, and learning disabilities in the classroom and in my own life, I argue that accommodations for some students enhance the curriculum for everyone. By learning about how these students learn, I become a better teacher. And by extending learning accessibility even for students who do not have institutionally identified learning disabilities, all kinds of students become stronger learners. 

Facilitating discussion about sensitive topics has become increasingly challenging in the contemporary university for a variety of reasons. Students have concerns about saying the wrong thing, be it an “incorrect” response or one that, intentionally or otherwise, causes offense in their fellow classmates. Seeking new ways to make weighty course content accessible to students and to facilitate rich discussion, I developed a fourth-year seminar on Gender & Violence (cross-listed in Psychology and Diversity & Social Justice Studies) in the style of a book club. Students read a literary work each week (including fiction, memoir, and short story) that served as the foundation for a discussion-based exploration of course themes. In the early days of the course’s inception, I sought input from peers via an online community dedicated to the teaching of psychology. The feedback I received was both speedy and near universally negative. Commenters deemed the format insufficiently academic in that it did not require reading and analyzing journal articles. Others took offense at what they determined to be far too much required reading. I deleted my post and stepped back. Despite this discouragement, I recognized my own genuine intellectual excitement when so-called academic content cropped up in my “for fun” reading. Since I became a professor, there have been many times that after I read a book, I wished I had a way to integrate it into one of my courses. With this in mind, and in line with the Courage aspect of this year’s conference theme, I went ahead with planning and implementing the course. Having nearly completed the course at the time of writing, I can say with confidence that this was the right choice. The level of engagement from students in this course is, in my experience, unprecedented. Students complete the readings each week, they show up with thoughtful, complex discussion questions that situate the reading in a broader theoretical context, and, perhaps most surprisingly, are comfortable openly disagreeing with one another while maintaining excellent classroom rapport. The medium of literature creates distance between the student and course concepts through the intermediary of authors and/or book characters, which in turn increases comfort to critically engage with sensitive and potentially divisive topics. This leads students to feel their perspectives are valued, creating a positive educational environment that results in more complex, rich discussion.

This session is designed to guide participants through the process of recognizing potential learning disabilities or other barriers to learning and how to make appropriate referrals for support. Participants will gain greater understanding of common barriers to learning and the referral process to support services such as counselling, academic support or accessibility services. The focus is on maintaining a supportive and non-judgmental approach and developing tools to recognize and respond to situations with empathy and professionalism.

Thanks to a student partnership project, the Teaching and Learning Centre is able to provide an updated persona resource for course instructors to preemptively evaluate course learning experiences, assessments, and policies. This session will cover the new personas and how to use them as part of a journey mapping process; discuss universal design for learning; the difference between accommodation and redesign; and have participants engage in scenarios reflecting on how a student persona might experience it.

Research tells us that students’ sense of belonging at university is a critical contributing factor of many students’ academic success. Universities recognize the importance of belonging as indicated by the slogans about belonging on many Canadian campuses, but do we understand what it means to foster a sense of belonging among students. Forming a sense of belonging is an intricate pairing of interpersonal connections, emotional attachments, and personal identification, which are ultimately influenced by external and environmental factors. With university classrooms becoming more diverse, having students of different ethnicities, races, mother tongues, genders, and abilities learning together in one space, it is important for educators and administrators to reimagine what EDIID looks like through belonging. Building a sense of belonging for a diverse group of learners will require permeable boundaries of acceptance, acknowledgment, and a willingness to negotiate meaning. This interactive presentation engages the audience in small group discussions about what impacts students’ sense of belonging in undergraduate courses. Our discussion will be guided by the experiences of current UPEI students who participated in a student discussion group in the fall 2024 semester, with information on the theory of belonging sprinkled into the conversation.