Plenary Sessions
Illuminating the Fractures: Small and Mighty Interventions Toward Structural Repair
“The healing was from the light.
The wound is where the light enters you.”
— Rumi (translated by Omid Safi)
“There is a crack/a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.”
— Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”
Higher education is morally wounded. We see the fractures in our classrooms, in the exhaustion of our students and colleagues, in the growing mistrust of the public, and in educational systems that too often ask people to endure rather than flourish. If we are going to move forward, we have to do more than continue naming what is wrong. We have to ask what it might mean to repair the conditions that create and sustain these wounds.
Inspired by Rumi’s image of light entering through the wound, echoed centuries later in Leonard Cohen’s lyrics, this session invites us to look closely at both the wounds we carry in higher education and the possibilities for repair that those fractures present. We will explore how the cultures we create in higher education shape not only how students learn, but also how they understand themselves and their relationships to stress, success, and worth. Drawing on neuroscience, liberatory psychology, systems thinking, and original research with undergraduate students, we will consider responses that address not only individual stress but also the conditions that help produce it.
Recent research with undergraduate students offers one window into how academic cultures shape students’ experiences of stress, success, and worth. Students described a pattern referred to in this research as the “Stress Olympics,” a culture in which sacrificing sleep, food, wellbeing, and self-care can become evidence of dedication and academic seriousness. Their stories, together with physiological data collected around academic stress, invite us to consider an important question: What happens when the very environments supposedly designed for learning repeatedly activate systems associated with threat and survival?
The purpose of this plenary is not simply to diagnose another problem in higher education, but to move from possibility to probability by exploring which small, intentional actions within our spheres of influence can make repair more likely. If our classrooms and institutions can help create the conditions for wounding, they can also help create the conditions for repair.
Mays Imad, PhD
Joyful Teaching in Every Class: Find Your Fizz to Boost Learning and Success
Sunday, June 13th | 11:30 am
Let’s face it. Teaching these days is tough. We’re exhausted, burned out, and frustrated by the societal challenges (think politics or AI) we’re navigating today. Yet our work is important, meaningful, and worthwhile.
We’re changing lives and helping dreams come true. Based on Flower Darby’s forthcoming book, The Joyful Online Teacher: Finding Our Fizz in Asynchronous Classes, this plenary will help you see how to promote flourishing—your own and your students’—and rediscover the joy inherent in transformational teaching and learning. You’ll hear about topics such as the number one finding from almost a century of research on human flourishing; a theoretical framework to help promote well-being for everyone in class—starting with yourself; and practical, evidence-based strategies for every class, every discipline, and every mode.
Flower Darby, PhD