STEM Educators Conference: Energize Your Approach to Teaching STEM!
Live: September 23, 2025 — On-Demand through December 19, 2025

Plenaries

Our plenary speakers will bring bold insights and expert perspectives on the evolving needs of STEM instruction in higher education. Stay tuned as we announce our speakers and their thought-provoking session topics.

Opening Plenary

Cultivating Equitable Learning Environments through Inclusive Teaching

Tuesday, September 23, 2025, 9:30 - 10:30 AM CT

Teaching strategies that emphasize structured active learning can create more equitable classrooms and improve learning for all students. As an introduction to inclusive teaching techniques, Professors Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy will guide viewers in reflecting on inequities and diversity in their classrooms. After providing a framework for inclusive design and their own research results, Hogan and Sathy will lead participants through active learning exercises and case studies that explore inclusive techniques. Drawing upon their own teaching experiences and educational research, they will model approaches that can be readily implemented with any discipline or class size to help all students achieve to their potentials.

Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy

Dr. Kelly Hogan & Dr. Viji Sathy

UNC Chapel Hill

Dr. Kelly Hogan, Professor of Biology at Duke University, and Dr. Viji Sathy, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill are both award winning instructors with a combined 30+ years in the classroom. They are passionate about student success, equity, and inclusion. They have expertise on inclusive techniques and active learning in any size crowd, because both have significant experience teaching hundreds of students. They worked for many years together administratively at UNC Chapel Hill in which they led curricular initiatives, institutional grant projects, and helped build a variety of technology tools to support student success. Hogan and Sathy have shared their work with faculty through hands-on workshops at numerous types of institutions. Both have been active in the scholarship of teaching and learning in their respective disciplines of biology and statistics and their work has been featured in a number of national publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times. In 2022, they published a book titled: Inclusive Teaching Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom, sharing practical ideas that often can be implemented quickly.

Closing Plenary

Science, Democracy, and Civic Engagement: A Brief History and Call for a New Pedagogy

Tuesday, September 23, 2025, 3:00 - 4:00 PM CT

The history of science instruction is not simply a reflection of the dissemination of novel ideas, it is littered with scholars who periodically saw an umbilical connection between scientific thinking and the formation and preservation of a socially just society. As challenges to the value proposition of higher education continues, we are called to embrace an opportunity to make the case for the teaching of science to be more than just content distribution. Using examples from history and the current classroom, Dewsbury will make the case for the continuance of this powerful and necessary tradition.

Bryan Dewsbury

Bryan Dewsbury, PhD

Florida International University

Bryan Dewsbury is an associate professor of Biology at Florida International University (FIU). He is the principal investigator of the Science Education And Society (SEAS) research program, which blends research on the social context of teaching and learning, faculty development of inclusive practices, and programming in the cultivation of equity in education. He is an associate director of the STEM Transformational Institute where he directs the Division of Transformative Education. He is also a Fellow with the John N. Gardner Institute where he assists institutions of higher education cultivate best practices in inclusive education. He is the creator and executive producer of the Massive Open Online Course called Inclusive Teaching. He is a co-editor of the book, The Norton Guide to Equity Minded Teaching. He has led faculty development workshops in over 150 institutions across North America, Europe and Western Africa. He is the host of the podcast Knowledge Unbound where he interviews people who do transformational work in education across the globe. Dewsbury grew up in Trinidad and Tobago and immigrated to the United States in 1999.