2027 Spring Conference for Wisconsin Educators Call for Proposals

Call for Proposals

Proposal submission deadline: Noon on Wednesday, January 5, 2027 via this online form. 

OPID, the Universities of Wisconsin’s Office of Professional and Instructional Development, welcomes your proposals for the 2027 Spring Conference : Teaching Matters. Join us in sharing and celebrating lessons learned from teaching in Wisconsin.

     Submit a proposal that shares emergent, evolving, or sustained teaching & learning practices in areas such as, but not limited to:

• Adapting to new technologies and pedagogies
• Becoming AI-Aware educators
• Exploring alternative assessments
• Maintaining equity-minded teaching approaches
• Sparking curiosity, agency, and empowerment in your students
• Strengthening relationships, resilience, and reflection
• Co-constructing community in courses – face-to-face/online/hybrid
• Practicing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to ensure that all students succeed
• Advising and mentoring as teaching practices
• Open Educational Resources (OER)
• Formulating meaningful Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL) questions
• Engaging High-Impact Practices (HIPs): ePortfolios, community-based learning, internships, first-year seminars and experiences, common intellectual experiences, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, diversity/global learning, capstone courses…
• Ensuring mental health and wellness for students and faculty  
• Practicing mindfulness
• Cultivating a pedagogy of kindness – “justice, believing people, believing in people” (Cate Denial)

Formats:

• Workshop – 10-minute presentation followed by hands-on work – 60-90 minutes
• Panel presentations – 60 minutes
• Round-table discussions – 10-minute framing followed by discussion – 60 minutes
• Lightning talks –-short  presentations on a teaching approach to a common challenge or problem
• Individual presentations– 15-20-minutes – You will be scheduled with presenters with similar topics in a 60-minute session
• Poster presentations

We welcome:

• Multi-speaker presentations representing 2-3 universities and/or community partners
• Multi-media and performative presentations
• Inclusion of student voices

Proposal Review and Acceptance

Proposals will be anonymously reviewed by UW faculty, instructors, and teaching & learning center directors on OPID’s Advisory Council, with invited reviewers from UW’s Learning Technology Development Council (LTDC) and the Office of Online & Professional Learning Resources (OPLR). Criteria for review: alignment with conference themes and aims, opportunities to spur participant engagement and learning, feasibility to accomplish goals given session format, grounding in relevant scholarship.

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