2025 Winter Institute

This workshop invites faculty, instructors, and staff to explore how care can be intentionally designed into teaching and learning practices. Drawing on Nel Noddings’ ethics of care and relational pedagogy, reflect on how to create learning environments that support both students and instructors. Through dialogue and hands-on activities, participants will identify barriers, prototype equitable design interventions, and leave with practical tools to embed care as a foundation, not a response, in their pedagogy.

University educators are uniquely positioned to cultivate what Paulo Freire called “education in hope”, a critically aware, action-oriented understanding of our shared challenges. Yet, in times of uncertainty and crisis, sustaining hope can feel difficult. In this keynote, Dr. Kari Grain examines the concept of critical hope and how transformative pedagogies can inspire both educators and learners. Through creative teaching practices, explore how hope itself can be a form of resistance and renewal in higher education.

This session shares insights from a Student-Faculty partnership that redesigned a year-long History course into two distinct term-length courses. Together, we transformed an institutional directive into a collaborative, relational learning experience rooted in care and connection. Participants will explore how the “Students as Partners” approach can foster creativity, shared ownership, and meaningful pedagogical change within and beyond the classroom.

Kindness-informed pedagogies offer transformative ways to cultivate compassion, critical awareness, and connection in teaching and learning. This session introduces frameworks such as pedagogy of kindness, care, trauma-informed, resilience, embodied, and eco-pedagogies. Through guided reflection and practice, participants will consider how these approaches can foster relationality, deepen learning, and advance justice-based, compassionate education in contemporary classrooms.

Flexible Assessment empowers students with choice in how their learning is evaluated while supporting inclusion and academic integrity. In this session, presenters will demonstrate how this Canvas-integrated tool can be used to design adaptable assessment options in large classes. Participants will explore setup strategies, boundaries, and student feedback, then engage in a live design activity to create a flexible assessment scheme for their own teaching context.