Developing a Proposal

Conference Tracks

• Creative Courage: Innovation and Emerging Trends in Reimagining General Education

  • How can the structures of general education be reimagined to enhance its relevance and vitality as a hallmark of American higher education?
  • How general education curricula be more explicitly connected to careers?
  • What emerging strategies are enhancing student engagement and success in general education— e.g., prior learning assessment, microcredentialing and badging, alternative credit hour structures?
  • What would general education look like if it were a high-impact educational practice?
  • How can the traditional “breadth versus depth” paradigm be redefined to demonstrate the centrality of general education for connecting student learning with critical issues that matter to students and to society?
  • How can the courage to engage in reflection and self-critique be fostered as individuals and institutions innovate?
  • What innovative approaches from the international community can and should serve as exemplars and models for reimagining general education in the US?

• Pedagogical Courage: Challenging Ourselves and Our Students in the Classroom

  • What pedagogical strategies most effectively meet the mission of general education curricula?
  • How can the wealth of resources available from the learning sciences be leveraged to support teaching?
  • How can teaching praxis be reimagined to center students’ agency in their own learning?
  • How can students’ own misconceptions about learning be addressed most effectively within and beyond general education?
  • How can students be prepared to engage ethically and effectively with generative artificial intelligence (AI)?
  • In reflecting upon and improving their own teaching, how can educators model the learning they expect of their students?

• Methodological Courage: Evidence-Based Truth Telling through Assessment and Evaluation

  • What creative, novel, and transformative mechanisms exist for evaluating general education?
  • How can the learning sciences be leveraged to effectively define and measure student success?
  • How can assessment processes be enhanced through instructional design and pedagogical innovation?
  • How can assessment endeavors be designed to ensure all students are represented in the evidence used to tell the complete story of student success?
  • How might design thinking, developmental evaluation, and other frameworks inform the assessment of student learning outcomes?
  • How can students be engaged in codesigning the assessment and evaluation of their own learning and success?
  • How is the assessment of student learning manifesting within the international community of colleges and universities?

• Compassionate Courage: The Role of Empathy, Kindness, and Care in Campus Change

  • How might frameworks like design thinking recenter and refocus gen ed reform efforts on student agency and learning?
  • What would it mean to position general education as a student wellness strategy?
  • How could efforts to reform general education, pedagogy, and assessment be reframed to encourage a “reciprocity of kindness” between students, faculty, and other educators?
  • How might educators reinforce the primacy of learning—versus credentialing—in undergraduate education through strategies like ungrading?
  • Many educators fear for their jobs and for the future of their institutions, which, in turn, can lead to a fear of change. How should solutions to the vexing problems now facing higher education account for these stressors?
  • What more can and should be done to support the mental health and well-being of those tasked with engaging in significant campus change?
  • What strategies can be used to privilege listening as a critical design element for reimagining general education?

• Disciplinary Courage: Integrating Across Siloes to Enhance the Relevance and Meaning of General Education

  • How can general education be meaningfully connected to the majors in order to enhance its relevance for students?
  • Can “employability” and “career preparation” be reframed as empowering students to seek and find their vocation through the disciplines and general education?
  • What disciplinary habits of mind can and should inform general education curricula?
  • How can integrative learning be centered as an attainable and measurable student outcome, not just an aspiration for a curricular structure?
  • In the midst of declining enrollments and limited resources, how can turf wars and retrenched, defensive thinking in curricular (re)design be avoided?
  • What role can and should experiential learning and the cocurriculum play in general education in concert with the disciplines?
  • How can general education expose students to the best of the disciplines without overemphasizing disciplinary paradigms that might seem too precious?

• Moral Courage: Promoting Equity within General Education, Pedagogy, and Assessment

  • What possibilities emerge when general education is reframed as a part of larger retention, persistence, and graduation strategies?
  • What evidence-based solutions exist for addressing the multiple layers of digital inequity that students and institutions face?
  • How can high-impact educational practices and other impactful general education offerings (i.e., open educational resources, transformative texts) be leveraged to diversify course content, materials, and instructional approaches?
  • How can the promise of a liberal education be delivered for all students when academic freedom is increasingly called into question?
  • Given the various ways students earn credits toward a college degree—e.g., dual enrollment, AP, transfer credits between institutions—what would be the effects of recognizing all students as transfer students requiring multiple on-ramps and pathways toward a baccalaureate degree?
  • What are successful models and/or strategies for interinstitutional collaboration to address access and affordability?

• Collective Courage: Leading Change Collaboratively Within and Across Institutions to Demonstrate the Relevancy and Value of Higher Education

  • How might a “framework for courage” be built to guide and shape the work of undergraduate education?
  • How can threats to academic freedom be addressed collectively?
  • What constitutes courage in today’s social, political, economic, and cultural climate?
  • How can we champion the inherent value of higher education while addressing valid critiques regarding issues of access, affordability, and fairness?
  • What must academic and institutional leaders do to encourage collaboration versus siloed competition between colleges and universities to scaffold, scale, and align the most effective value-added innovations?
  • How can academic and institutional leaders identify, recognize, and reward emerging leaders who engage in the real work of reimagining general education, pedagogy, and assessment—especially those with little positional power?
  • How can barriers to courageous change be dismantled?

  Submissions for the Collective Courage track will be considered for sessions held in collaboration with the Forum on Transformational Leadership.

Pre-Conference Session Formats

• Focused Workshops

  Engage participants in cultivating new skills, identify alternative approaches to their own work, and connect with previously unexplored resources, such as new practices, theories, frameworks, and/or research.

• Strategy Sessions

  Designed to guide participants as they develop plans of action for significant work aligned with one of the conference’s tracks. Presenters should provide resources and templates to help participants structure their planning.

Conference Sessions Formats

• Poster Session

  In-person Only (60 minutes; 1–3 presenters)
  Poster presenters share visual models of research findings; general education course, program, and curricular or cocurricular designs; concept maps; assessment rubrics and feedback loops; faculty development, support, and reward programs and policies; frameworks for design thinking and strategic planning; and high-impact practices. The poster session provides an opportunity for presenters to talk with attendees about how to apply findings to their own work.

• Pecha Kucha

  In-person Only (6 minutes; 1 presenter recommended)
  Pecha Kucha (“chit chat” in Japanese) sessions combine visual and oral presentations to convey a creative endeavor, research finding, or other interesting activity related to a particular conference track. A Pecha Kucha presentation, which consists of 20 slides running for 20 seconds each, is carefully orchestrated to articulate key elements featured in each slide. Two Pecha Kucha presentations will be combined with 30 minutes of discussion time to create one 45-minute session. The following link provides an overview and guidelines for designing a Pecha Kucha presentation: http://avoision.com/pechakucha.

• Theory-to-Practice Workshops

  In-person Only (75 minutes each; 2–4 facilitators)
  Workshops provide opportunities for participants to bridge theory and practice. Facilitators should guide participants in examining critical theories and scholarly evidence that support the mechanics of how to develop purposeful general education courses, curricula, pedagogies, practices, pathways, or strategies that integrate learning with the majors in the context of real-world issues. Facilitators should provide scholarship and evidence related to the topic and engage participants in reflection, discussion, and design work.

  Please note: Space is limited as there are only two bands of Theory-to-Practice Workshops. Reviewers will give priority to proposals that model excellent active learning strategies and high-impact practices, such as collaborative and hands-on activities, those that include a diversity of facilitators, and those that explain how the work applies to a range of institutional types.

• Design Thinking in Real Time Sessions

  In-person Only (1-4 facilitators)
  BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!
  This is an exploratory effort to design a space for participants to share their iterative thinking and learning. Facilitators will be available during three specific, hour-long time slots (Thursday afternoon, Friday afternoon, and Saturday morning) to engage participants in iterative thinking to develop new approaches to key aspects of general education, pedagogy, and assessment in “real time.” Participants are invited to visit the session tables at any time (whether facilitators are present or not) to share and examine their own evolving ideas with and problem-solve questions posed by colleagues. In the last time frame of the conference, participants will gain the latest thinking on these key issues and action steps, and strategies will be made available to all conference participants on the conference platform.

  The facilitators will be provided with resources/tools that will enable participants to share ideas and theories throughout the conference, collectively developing new approaches to any and all aspects of the three pillars of the conference—general education, pedagogy, and assessment.

  Please clearly describe the concept, theory, or practice that you would like to explore with participants and how you will present the idea as a point of departure for participants to discuss, explore, and develop. It is important that you describe how you would like to engage participants in this exploratory conversation. For example, you might create a large template (paper, white board, or electronic) for participants to fill in and build on each other’s ideas. Outcomes will be shared on the conference platform following the conference.

• Dialogue for Learning

  In-person or Virtual (45 minutes; 1–4 facilitators)
  Dialogue for Learning sessions provide time for colleagues to examine timely and potentially provocative topics of similar interest through the iterative sharing of expertise and experiences. They provide an opportunity to work through issues, ideas, and challenges from multiple perspectives. The facilitators’ job is to kickstart small group conversations through a brief presentation based upon their own work/research/praxis that then feeds into a collective discussion of the question at hand, dedicating at least 20–25 minutes to discussion. Proposals for Dialogue for Learning sessions should briefly set the context for the conversation related to one of the conference tracks and should clearly articulate the intended audience in terms of institutional type, position, or area of practice. Facilitators assist the group in examining new ways of thinking about the topic and strategies for moving forward given the professional reality and expertise of everyone in the room.

  These dialogues may address the following questions:

  • How can general education be organized to result in student integration of learning across content areas?
  • How can general education designs improve students’ ways of knowing?
  • How can siloed organizational structures be made coherent and purposeful?
  • How can general education be a sense-making and meaning-making experience for students?
  • How can academic structures and systems that were created for a different time and place be critically examined and reshaped?
  • How can faculty professional development for student success be supported and recognized?
  • How can we address the “elephant in the room”—the dearth of active learning and empirically supported pedagogy in our classrooms?
  • How can assessment processes and results be made to matter for students and faculty?
  • What if the critics are correct, and much of how assessment is currently conducted is wrong?

• Critical Thinking through Case Studies

  In-person or Virtual (45 minutes each, 1–3 facilitators)
  NEW SESSION FORMAT!
  This session format is designed to stimulate conversation and help participants engage in creative problem-solving using a case-study approach. Facilitators will create a case study (no more than three pages) problematizing a specific incident/issue related to general education, pedagogy, and assessment (re)design, one grounded in the actual experiences and/or expertise of the authors/presenters (institutions/individuals in the case study should be de-identified). The case study will be posted to the conference platform one week in advance of the start of the 2024 GEPA Conference.

  Participants will be given time to read the case study in the live session before collaborating in small groups to “solve” the case study by (1) identifying the key problems/focusing on the right questions; (2) examining assumptions and addressing contextual factors; (3) exploring multiple solutions, including naming advantages and disadvantages for each; (4) selecting the best, most appropriate solution; and (5) discussing implications, including possible limitations. After groups present their proposed solutions, facilitators will help the group synthesize the information shared, reveal—if appropriate—what actually transpired, and discuss the actual “lessons learned” from the event that inspired the case study. The following link to the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching provides a clear, concise description of case studies as well as guidance on what makes a good case study that may be helpful: https://bit.ly/casestudy_guidance

• Crowdsourced Conversations

  In-person Only (45 minutes each; 1–3 facilitators)
  NEW SESSION FORMAT!
  Less formal and less scripted than Dialogue for Learning sessions, this session format is designed to seed the conference with opportunities for colleagues to connect over emergent and pressing issues, through which smaller groups of participants meet new colleagues, build connections, and potentially lay the foundation for future collaboration. Borrowing from the more traditional “roundtable” format, facilitators are assigned a table for the duration of the session. Participants may move among tables. Facilitators should provide a brief description of the proposed topic for conversation, along with a brief rationale for its inclusion at the conference. Facilitators must plan to the context for the conversation related to one of the conference tracks. Contexts may reflect institutional type, position, or a particular area of practice. Please clearly state any defining contexts to clarify your intended audience. Facilitators will assist the group in examining new ways of thinking about the topic and strategies for moving forward given the complications associated with the professional reality and expertise of everyone around the table. Facilitators are expected to provide a summary of the conversation for posting in the conference platform and suggest mechanisms for making future connections throughout the conference based on the outcomes of the conversation.

  For Crowdsourced Conversations there will be no A/V provided.

• Innovation/Ideation Sessions

  In-person and Virtual (15 minutes; 1–4 facilitators)
  These moderated sessions will feature cutting-edge advances in general education; equity-focused, design-thinking frameworks; courses, programs, curricula, and/or high-impact practices; faculty development, support, and reward approaches; teaching and learning research; and assessment models and feedback loops that are still exploratory in nature. Presentations with promising, yet minimal, outcomes data are encouraged. Sessions should describe the institutional context and guiding theories, and they should offer the opportunity for audience questions and discussion. Two sessions will be included in each 45-minute time slot.