Teaching in Focus (TiF) conference

The TiF 2024 Call for Proposals is now closed.

York University’s 2024 Teaching in Focus Conference, hosted by the Teaching Commons, invites you to join us in Engaged Teaching in Times of Crisis at this moment in postsecondary education, through scholarship, accounts of teaching practice, reflections on teaching/learning identities, discussion with colleagues, and engagement with student perspectives.  

To submit a proposal, please fill out this form. The deadline for submission is February 29, 2024.

These additional guiding questions may provide further inspiration: 

• What approaches and practices can help us respond to some of the teaching tensions and crises that continue to move to the fore? For example, the tension between a focus on content delivery versus responding to student emotions and reactions to current world events?
• How can we create and sustain equitable, inclusive, and accessible communities and environments that meet and support the needs and voices of all learners and educators? Can we? 
• How can we use our lessons learned to build sustainable and resilient learning spaces, technologies, and communities?
• What might existing frameworks (such as experiential education, critical pedagogy, conceptual and theoretical frameworks, the community of inquiry model, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, among others) offer to support our work in teaching and learning?
• How can we learn from Indigenous and other non-Western ways of understanding and knowing the concept of balance to continue the work of decolonization and Indigenization in postsecondary education? How can we balance this work with the institutional contexts in which it takes place?  

All York University faculty, instructors, administrators, staff, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students, and post-doctoral scholars are welcome to submit a proposal to one or more of the session formats described below.  

Session Formats: 

Note that all session formats are in-person.  

1. Individual or Team Presentation (20 minutes) 

This is a 15-minute presentation with 5 minutes reserved for Q&A. Presentations can be made by individuals or by teams, and should address the conference theme, Engaged Teaching in Times of Crisis, as outlined above. Please indicate which of the following session foci of A Model for Engaged Teaching at York University: Moving Towards Research-Informed Practice your presentation most connects with: 

• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Share your research into teaching, learning activities, and/or conceptual praxis that are implemented and assessed systematically in the classroom or the curriculum (e.g., qualitative, quantitative, theoretical, or mixed methods approaches to describing and analyzing pedagogical initiatives). 
• Scholarly Teaching: Share the results of implementing teaching and learning activities in the classroom or the curriculum based upon best practices or scholarly literature (e.g., sharing student feedback from classroom assessment techniques or a survey following a teaching activity informed by the literature) 
• Practice of Teaching: Share your classroom or curricular strategies, activities, conceptualizations, theoretical frameworks, or reflections based on your teaching experience and/or disciplinary lens (e.g., sharing your favourite teaching tip alongside informal evidence of student learning).  

2. AIF Featured Talks (20 minutes) 

Academic Innovation Fund (AIF) grant recipients are encouraged to submit a proposal for presenting the outcomes of their project. This can be done in a traditional 20-minute presentation unless otherwise specified by the prospective presenters. 

3. Experiential Education/Work Integrated Learning Showcase

Through this event we hope to highlight diverse examples of classroom-focused, community-focused, and work-focused experiential education (EE) and how faculty members have engaged these partners in facilitating innovative EE and Work Integrated Learning (WIL) opportunities. Presentations can be made by individuals or by teams (20 minutes) or may be shared as a panel (30 minutes) and should link to the conference theme, Engaged Teaching in Times of Crisis, as outlined above.

4. TiF Reads 

We invite you to champion the teaching/learning related read that most inspired and engaged you over the past year(s). This might be a book, a chapter, a journal article, or another resource – if it challenged you to think differently and got you excited about teaching in new ways, we want to hear about it! We will select four champions to introduce their chosen reads via the Teaching Commons blog in the weeks leading up to TiF. During TiF, you will also participate in an in-person panel from which only one champion, and one read, will emerge victorious! 

No pre-registration or submissions required – you will be able to join roundtable discussions during the conference. 

If you experience any difficulties with the submission process, please reach out to Teaching Commons or our instructional designer, Robert Winkler, and we will be happy to assist you.