How can universities create the right conditions for faculty to engage meaningfully in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)? While SoTL can enhance teaching quality, foster professional growth, and raise the profile of teaching, faculty often encounter several challenges when engaging in SoTL. This poster examines how institutions can create more favorable conditions for SoTL and identifies effective strategies for supporting faculty. It presents findings from a study of a two-year SoTL program at the University of Amsterdam. The program, co-funded by the university’s teaching and learning centre and participants’ departments, offers mentoring, interdisciplinary dialogue, and allocated time (one day per week) to participants conducting SoTL projects. To explore participants’ experiences, the research team conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 members of the first cohort. We then analyzed data thematically: we coded transcripts inductively iteratively refined those codes, and grouped patterns into overarching themes. Participants valued the combination of individual mentoring and peer exchange, yet many struggled to protect their allotted time and engage colleagues in their projects. Unfamiliarity with SoTL and its norms appeared to underlie several of the participants’ challenges, including uncertainty about expected outputs and impact. We argue that two support strategies are key: building collective understanding of SoTL’s purposes and quality standards, and involving stakeholders to embed SoTL within departments. These principles reinforce each other, enabling SoTL to take root institutionally. The poster further outlines the program design and lessons learned. Findings may be transferable to institutions seeking to strengthen SoTL engagement, helping them anticipate challenges and design powerful support structures.

While SoTL has solidified into a more well-defined field, scholarship on teaching and learning has continued in a range of disciplinary sites. This discipline-based work has not always been fully integrated into the SoTL field. In an attempt to combat this research siloing, this narrative literature review examines co-creation practices in publications about feminist pedagogy. Looking across six feminist journals from 2016 through 2023, the review finds many examples of whole-class co-creation in the curriculum which fall into four broad categories: co-creation of knowledge through discussion, co-creation of knowledge through student work, co-creation of assessment through ungrading, and co-creation of the classroom environment itself. Ultimately, the review finds that whole-class co-creation can be accomplished through a series of small practices, while still maintaining some of the valuable benefits to students found in wider pedagogical partnership literature. More broadly, however, the review calls for more attention to scholarship that may not self-identify as SoTL but which can offer invaluable lessons to the field nonetheless, such as disciplinary-based research and writing about teaching.

The concept of public SoTL, aimed to extend the field’s influence beyond academia, challenged writing group facilitators to redefine their expectations and actions as traditional approaches fell short, prompting a reevaluation. This essay chronicles the journey of the facilitators in the inaugural ICWG-Public SoTL cohort, exploring what it means to facilitate a project with influence beyond academia. The facilitators of this public SoTL writing group encountered numerous challenges, including redefining their roles and expectations, engaging with public audiences, and applying critical pedagogy frameworks. This reflective essay shares their facilitation story and the importance of understanding public SoTL’s purpose, audience, and products, which led to a framework for future ICWG-Public SoTL facilitators. Their public SoTL facilitation framework with a critical lens emphasizes the need for a collaborative, iterative approach that prioritizes the needs of the public over traditional academic outputs, ultimately advocating for a more inclusive and impactful form of scholarship.

This article offers a circular framework for teaching and learning about resilience in higher education contexts. In order to navigate considerations of resilience as both potentially problematic and helpful, our framework stresses the importance of distinguishing between two different sets of questions: a) questions about the possibilities that humans have for cultivating qualities and skills that promote their flourishing, such as attention and mental balance, and b) questions about system change and social design from a social and ecological justice perspective. These questions are deeply implicated with one another, so one of the aims of our framework is to encourage students to explore the unity and mutual interdependencies between the two sets, as well as the possibilities of creating virtuous circles where the quest for nature restoration, social justice, and mental health sustain each other. In combining elements of “learning how” and “learning about,” this framework aspires to provide students with tools to make up their own minds about resilience, a term that has become all too present in public discourse and yet remains contentious. Alongside this framework, we also offer a summary of our pedagogical approach, one that stresses reflection, situated learning, and the use of the university campus as a playground to test ideas and build communities of learning.

This paper contributes to SoTL by critically examining the literature on the nature of interpersonal relationships across global higher education settings through narrative inquiry, focusing on both online and in-person learning. Drawing on previous literature (to show patterns of inquiry) and fictional student cases (to give concrete details and examples), this paper examines how educators’ relationships with students shape learning outcomes and experiences and looks at the intricate role of trust in fostering interpersonal relationships within educational settings. The impact of trust is examined across various dimensions—from student-teacher dynamics to peer interactions and institutional structures. Key themes of deliberate interaction, clear communication, and activities for belonging emerge as crucial for fostering supportive learning environments. The analysis underscores the significance of empathetic communication and culturally responsive pedagogies in enhancing student engagement and well-being. Trust, foundational to all those themes, is analyzed through lenses of honesty and benevolence, two essential perspectives for establishing reliable educational environments for students from a variety of societal and educational backgrounds. Through the fictionalized cases, the authors investigate how trust, as cultivated through reflective practices such as the 5Rs framework (Bain et al. 2002), enhances student engagement and inclusivity. By integrating personal reflections and scholarly literature from SoTL, this paper advocates for pedagogical practices that prioritize inclusive, relational approaches in education across diverse contexts.

Active learning pedagogies’ benefits for academic outcomes are well-established (Prince 2004). There is, however, evidence of individual differences in outcomes (Richardson et al. 2012). The present study considers whether gender, race, and socio-economic status (SES) relate to academic self-efficacy, perceived learning, and student engagement during the intense active learning experience of Reacting to the Past (Reacting). Students from three US universities (N = 211) completed a survey after participating in a Reacting game. The survey assessed academic self-efficacy, perceived learning, and engagement and collected student-reported demographic characteristics. Female students perceived more learning, more achievement of learning outcomes, and more enjoyment than their male peers; they also reported more engagement with the game. Students from minoritized racial groups were generally more positive about their Reacting experience than White students, especially with regard to perceived learning. Students from low socioeconomic status groups reported more engagement with the game than those from higher SES status groups.

This in-progress study explores the integration of play sessions into higher education classrooms as a strategy to reduce student stress and enhance overall well-being. With increasing levels of stress and mental health challenges among college students, faculty often struggle with providing adequate support, particularly as most are not trained mental health professionals. Through initial play sessions conducted in two different courses, students reported significant shifts from negative emotions, such as stress and overwhelm, to more positive states of happiness, excitement, and calmness. This aligns with existing research suggesting that structured play and wellness activities can improve mental health and reduce stress. The study also considers the potential for play sessions to offer a low-barrier, creative approach for faculty to foster a more supportive and engaging learning environment. Over the next academic year, routine play sessions will be implemented across five courses, with pre- and post-surveys used to assess their impact on student stress levels, focus, readiness for class, and overall engagement. The findings from this study aim to contribute to the growing body of research on wellness pedagogy, offering insights on the long-term benefits of integrating play into higher education settings. Further exploration is needed to systematically gauge the levels of impact over time and determine the broader implications of this approach for student well-being and academic success.

Inclusive teaching is a potentially transformative mindset and approach to reimagining education. To realize its full potential, we must be willing to redefine what it means to teach. In this essay, I draw on the lessons learned during the civil rights work of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) to make the case for a new paradigm for teaching college classrooms. SNCC identified three key principles that guided their work: — 1) families and organizing, 2) grassroots leadership, and 3) casting your bucket where you are. The late Robert (Bob) Moses, recalls these very principles in his post SNCC years when he founded the Algebra Project across the country. Similarly, I consider here how these principles, and their focus on centering relationships and trust, can be transformative for teaching in higher education.

This SoTL study aimed to discover how teacher education students engaged with a 30-minute unstructured break during a weekly three-hour lecture. Cognitive fatigue and resulting stress accumulation have negative effects on wellness. Education students can accumulate significant stress when studying and preparing. This, in turn, affects their career outlook and may affect teacher retention. Pausing a cognitively demanding task and taking a break can reverse the strain reaction and support sustainable, long-term wellness. However, taking an effective break is often difficult because it can be perceived as a waste of time and a loss of productivity. Research shows the opposite effect. If we educate higher education students about the benefits of taking effective breaks and then model this practice in class, can we promote an accessible and realistic stress management strategy? Can student teachers potentially take this strategy with them into their teaching careers and classrooms? Using pre- and post-surveys as well as “Weekly Break Logs” during class (N = 70), followed by a post-course focus group (n = 4), the study found that 100% of participants post-course valued the break. They spent it socializing or going for short walks and did not spend it on their devices. The majority felt refreshed and motivated to return to learning following the break. Focus group findings revealed the value of taking breaks, and participants were motivated to continue this practice in their professional lives.

The didactic class is a pedagogical tool meant to increase classroom interactivity by encouraging student discussion of real-life cases in connection with theory. This paper evaluates the pedagogical impact of using a one-off didactic class where an external expert is brought in to discuss how to relate a cognitive psychology course’s content to real-life problems. Using a mixed-methods approach, we measure the undergraduate students’ sense of conceptual understanding, their perspective on applying cognitive sciences, their sense of belonging to the department, and their motivation to work. Students’ sense of understanding and their perspective in applying cognitive sciences to real-world problems significantly increased after this class. However, we found no significant differences in their sense of belonging to the department or their motivation to study. This suggests didactic classes may further course-specific content but do not change broader aspects of motivation or belonging. The qualitative interviews support the quantitative results. Students reported that didactic class made them think laterally about content from other modules and how they could apply theoretical insights to real-world problems, which boosted confidence. Students reported great satisfaction with the didactic class. Of course, the speaker must be relevant to the course content, and students should feel empowered and able to speak in class. However, these are practical concerns that should not discourage lecturers from exploring didactic classes as a fun and instructive tool that has significant pedagogical benefits.