Plenary Sessions
Normalizing Failures and Finding Agency: CTL Programs for Polycrisis Times in Higher Ed
Tuesday, August 18 | 9:30 - 10:30 am
A “polycrisis” is more than just a bunch of bad things happening at the same time. A polycrisis occurs when multiple crises—such as climate change, authoritarianism, and increasing economic disparity—fundamentally intersect in ways that multiply the harms to humanity at unprecedented and overwhelming scale and scope. In addition to the global polycrisis of the 2020s, we are also in the grip of a polycrisis specific to higher education.
Outside political attacks on our institutions, public skepticism about the value of a college degree, low enrollment and financial pressures, and the acceleration of artificial intelligence are taking a toll on everyone’s ability to thrive and succeed in higher ed, including everyone working in Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTL). In this plenary session, participants will examine specific ways the higher ed polycrisis is undermining the efficacy of educational developers. The session will then introduce two frameworks for CTL programming in this era, drawing on discussions of failure and agency from Snafu Edu: Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom (University of Oklahoma Press, 2025).
First, we can promote individual pedagogical learning, even in the most difficult teaching contexts, with support for course design and classroom practices that normalize and even celebrate failure, flops, and missteps. Second, we can help educators identify sites in their teaching context where they are able to exercise their own agency as educators and act in ways that align with their values and goals, even when outside factors constrain and limit agency. Participants will also have the opportunity to brainstorm and crowdsource a list of CTL programs that normalize failure and promote agentic teaching.
Jessamyn Neuhaus, PhD