MYFest Schedule: All Years

Session 1: Worlding the Future (90-120 minutes) Higher education globally is in a state of seemingly endless disruption and change. In this session, we will spend time examining our hopes and fears for the future of education, including, but not limited to, the impact of Generative AI. We will start with micro-storytelling activities to introduce speculation and help participants start thinking about the future. Then, in groups, we will collaboratively construct three future worlds: a world of hope, a world of despair, and a world of possibility, interweaving the good and bad. Session resources and recording now available!

In this session, Professor Sarah Elaine Eaton looks at the ethical implications of advancements in artificial intelligence and neurotechnology for education. We will look at threats to human dignity and mental integrity, as well as how advanced technology can be used to catalyze equity, inclusion, accessibility, and learner agency. This is not a session about how to use specific tools, but rather how to think broadly about the ethics of advanced technology for learning.

Join us for an hour of supporting each other's writing... quietly... where we will kick off with 5 minutes of inspiration, give everyone about 50 minutes to work on what is important to them right now, and have 5 minutes to celebrate what we've accomplished today. This group is dedicated to anyone who is working on a writing project of any kind: you can work on a peer-reviewed paper, grant application, syllabus, even a really tricky email, even your creative work, a poem you want to capture, lyrics for your next song 🙂

Inspired by frameworks from Nan Wehipeihana (2019) and the Anti-Racism Network (2021), this session will share a framework for decolonizing academic integrity policies and practices that asks us to question western epistemologies and consider multiple ways of knowing. Session resources and recording now available!

Healing circles are a means for people to come together for meaningful connection through deep listening and compassion. Using poetry, and other forms of creative expression, healing circles invite participants to move out of intellectual consciousness into emotional consciousness, connecting more deeply with what’s in their hearts as well as their minds. Spaces are limited so separate registration is required. Please click on the session name to find the link of the registration form.

This session explores reflective teaching, focusing on critical pedagogy and diverse student needs, leveraging lenses and tools (including AI) for actionable insights and fostering incremental pedagogical changes.

Many Generative AI conversations focus on academic integrity and preventative measures so that established assessment practices remain secure. However, it could be argued that rather than viewing generative AI as a detriment to assessment, it could be seen as a tool for revealing the hidden curriculum of assessment and identifying ineffective assessment designs (the assessments that are not doing what we think they are). This session will explore how Generative tools can be used to interrogate and improve assessment designs. Session recording now available!

This session will be a case study of how College Unbound worked with students to develop their institutional policy on the use of generative AI for students and faculty. From there, the session will explore through conversation, activities, and sharing how we can think and learn with students about how to critically use generative AI in general and in our respective disciplines. Session recording now available!

For details, see the MYFest Readers Theater website https://sites.google.com/view/ccreaderstheater/myfest24 All ages welcome!

This is an invitation to participate in a live Zoom session. The session is part of a research study whose purpose is to include student, educator and educational developer perspectives in the process of co-creating guiding principles for academic integrity AI policies by exploring equity pedagogies. *Separate Registration Required. Click on the session name to get the link to register

During my own personal journey to find belonging, it has been instrumental to be involved in, to create, and to nurture communities of practice and transformation. The mathematical foundations of networked ecosystems, with its relational and complex adaptive systems perspective, has informed this STEM community building work. However, for many years, undertaking social justice meant personal activism, teaching, service, and education research and excluded “mathematics research.” But mathematical and computational research for social justice is now gaining exciting momentum. Our greatest challenge and our greatest opportunity is that we are both shaping the future of mathematics, computation, STEM and STEM education as well as redefining the community that should shape it. Creating mathematical research communities for social justice offers an exciting moment to build an inclusive and mutually supportive community focused on nurturing belonging, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, openness, and innovative mathematics. Session resources and recording now available!

This session will be hands on where you'll get the chance to draw/create art. Though there is absolutely no experience required and it is open to all skill levels, we ask that you prepare to be fully immersed! This means preparing a few materials in advance and blocking out time in your schedule for the entire session so you can get the most out of this experience. Neuro-Art is a form of sketching or doodling that can be used to relax and shift perceptions and experience around a particular issue, belief, emotion or bodily sensation. This introduction will show the simplest method/technique in order for you to have an insight into the process. It will not give you a complete experience of the full method, but is designed to offer a sense of the possibilities so that you can go and explore further for yourself or with a trained therapist if you enjoy the practice. This is an interactive session and you will get the most benefit if you engage with the process and let it unfold.

Join us for this reflective and creative workshop based on the Higher Education for Good chapter, Counters to Despair. This collection of prose poems will form the basis of our thinking and actions. How do we manage to outwit or outrun our creeping despair in the face of so much gone awry in education and the world? What stands between us and despair? And even more importantly, how do we build and sustain counters to despair that keep us moving towards more peace, equity, and care in ourselves, our institutions and the world. We'll use structured dialogues, free writing and open dialogue to articulate, share and bolster our defenses against despair. Session resources now available!

This interactive workshop will open a dynamic conversation about open and liberatory education design. How does our work help to accelerate liberatory ed, or maintain current structures and slow it down? How might we start to envision important integration work in order to create a more powerful foundation for an anti-oppressive educational landscape — one that allows all learners to become self-actualized shapers of a more just and sustainable world? Session resources and recording now available!

This session is the first of three in a pathway, though participants can attend one without attending the others. Come along and explore, discuss and reflect on elements of partnership. Join Heather and Jennie and student-partner guests to consider how partnership might work as a driver for social, institutional and individual change. This session will focus on framing partnership around ideas of space, power and impact and combine individual, group and follow up activities into discussions and a reflection on what it might mean to work in partnership. Note: This session is part of a track but you can attend it on its own without attending the full track.

A Bring Your Own Book (BYOB) Circle, is an opportunity for individuals to come together virtually to share their love of reading. Unlike a traditional book club, where everyone brings a commonly read book, these BYOB circles invite anyone to come with any book that they have read, or are currently reading, based on a central theme. With the support of a facilitator, these events are meant to create community, inspire new reading and learning, and engage with one another in fun and unique ways.

This session will start with a short mindfulness meditation and then a short discussion about the benefits and different types of journaling. We will have a short activity on the ways each of you can incorporate a journaling practice in your life. Afterwards the remainder of the session will be dedicated for journaling alone (but together) using prompts provided by the facilitator and beautiful, relaxing background music. Come and join us for a self care, wellbeing and joyful hour that you dedicate to your self. You can bring your family with you.

Being in the Future (90 minutes) We will start with new micro-storytelling activities to introduce speculation. This session will focus on the personal and what existing in our speculative futures means. Participants will spend some time reflecting on who they are in the present and how much of that is contextual. Then we will explore the three worlds constructed in the first session. Each participant will choose a world and write a letter from the future, explaining who they are in this future, what they do. The goal of the session is to empower participants to understand where/how they will retain their sense of self in uncertain futures. Session recording now available!

This session is a follow on from Partnership: Space, Power, Impact though participants don't need to have attended the first to engage. For this session, join Jennie and Heather and bring along your own conceptualisations of knowledge and experience on working with students, and others, in partnership. This session will include multiple ways to engage with the topic and also give participants a chance to bring some new thinking back to their own work, context and partnerships. Session recording now available!

Join us for a 4 day collaborative writing experience. Using a prompt, you are invited to add your part of the story. This is a collaborative story with multiple authors including you. Drop in at any point between 21 July and 24 July and add your part of the story. Come back throughout the period and see where the story goes.  This is an open novel writing experience for MYFest participants. Held- July 21-July 24 Click on the name of the event to get the link for the collaborative document we will all work on.