MYFest 2026: Schedule

Join me for a short calming and reflective journaling session designed to help you reconnect and recharge. Through thoughtfully written prompts and individual quiet reflection time, we’ll journal about gratitude, self-love, loving-kindness and wellbeing. Whether you’re a long-tome journaler or just getting started, this space invites you to slow down, tune in and leave feeling lighter, clearer and more connected. Bring a notebook, an open heart and come just as you are.

When your/the title is gone, what values, relationships, and humanity remain?
We often define ourselves by what we do, the roles we hold, and the titles we carry. But what happens when those titles are removed?

This reflective session invites everyone from facilitators, educators, learners and leaders to look beyond their professional identities and reconnect with the values, purpose, and humanity that define who they truly are. Because while titles may change, who we are at our core remains.

The way students read has changed, and classrooms are feeling it. This session introduces the Biliterate brain as a framework for understanding how print and digital reading shape cognitive pathways differently and what that means for teaching and learning. Participants will leave with practical strategies to improve reading comprehension across both modes and the tools to embed them into their own classrooms.

Liberating Structures (LS) offer 43 versatile patterns designed to replace or complement conventional ways of teaching and learning. LS distributes participation, forges deep connections, and ignites collective intelligence, ensuring everyone belongs and contributes. This session will focus on content from the new LS Fieldbook: stringing LS together, evaluating developmentally as you go, and shared modular DNA across the repertoire.

In this session, participants will have the opportunity to think collectively about biases and cultural assumptions that underpin the genAI products that are so ubiquitous. We will explore deeper understanding of biases, literacies, and fluencies; talk about the importance of culturally-centred AI; understand the cultural assumptions that underpin these AI products; and begin to imagine strategies for broaching these topics in our communities.

Digital Wellness: Manual of Me – Protecting Your Space While Navigating Connections invites participants to reflect on how digital expectations, communication practices and cultural contexts shape well-being and connection. Through guided discussion and a reflective “Manual of Me” activity, participants will explore strategies for protecting their space, navigating communication differences while building more caring and sustainable learning communities.

Do you feel truly seen and valued in your work, and are you helping others feel that way too? Join us for a six-session book circle exploring “Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose” by Jennifer Breheny Wallace hosted by Theresa Destrebecq.

What helps educators stay rooted in their values when the academic landscapes around them begin to change? This interactive workshop explores how the pressures of university life can shape the ways we measure success and understand our place in higher education. Together, participants will reflect on the values that guide their work and consider what it takes to remain connected to those values over time.

In the middle of busy days, even a few moments of stillness can make a big difference. This recurring 10 minute guided meditation offers a space to pause, breathe, be mindful and gently reconnect with yourself. Whether you are new to meditation, looking to build a steady practice or long-time meditator, you’ll be guided through a calming experience designed to reduce stress and help enhance your presence. Come as you are – no prior experience needed, just a willingness to slow down and be.

This session will introduce the concept of Crip and Neurodiverse Wisdom: the knowledge, practices, habits, and hacks that disabled and neurodiverse learners, educators, and staff have developed for navigating ableist educational environments. We will consider how disabled and neurodivergent experiences of space, time, and productivity may offer ways of creating more inclusive educational spaces.

In this interactive workshop, participants will explore creative mapping and visual storytelling to explore the hidden networks of care that underpin knowledge creation. Through guided reflection and creative exercises, we’ll make visible the often overlooked care work of relationships, practices, and infrastructures that enable ideas to emerge, circulate, and endure.
No artistic experience is required, just curiosity and a willingness to reflect, create, and engage in conversation with others to explore how knowledge is produced, valued, and sustained.

AI is reshaping education, threatening critical thinking through cognitive offloading. Teachers must redesign tasks to embed iterative thinking, from planning and prompting to evaluating and defending, ensuring students engage deeply with AI rather than surrender their thinking to it. The goal is not to restrict AI but to reposition it as a tool that supports but never replaces student thinking.

Join me for a short calming and reflective journaling session designed to help you reconnect and recharge. Through thoughtfully written prompts and individual quiet reflection time, we’ll journal about gratitude, self-love, loving-kindness and wellbeing. Whether you’re a long-tome journaler or just getting started, this space invites you to slow down, tune in and leave feeling lighter, clearer and more connected. Bring a notebook, an open heart and come just as you are.

In this highly interactive session, we will explore craft and material practice as a form of identity- and meaning-making. In community and through discussion of personal experience and craft pedagogy theory, we will explore crafting as a liberatory practice. This is a space where everyone is considered a crafter, regardless of skill level or access to materials.

Teaching with a chronic illness means belonging to a profession that demands always being “on” while navigating a body that needs constant rest, stillness, and care. This facilitated reflective workshop uses prompted free writing and open discussion to examine that tension honestly and to build practical strategies for teaching with greater agency and resilience. It welcomes educators living this experience and those who want to support them.

In the middle of busy days, even a few moments of stillness can make a big difference. This recurring 10 minute guided meditation offers a space to pause, breathe, be mindful and gently reconnect with yourself. Whether you are new to meditation, looking to build a steady practice or long-time meditator, you’ll be guided through a calming experience designed to reduce stress and help enhance your presence. Come as you are – no prior experience needed, just a willingness to slow down and be.

Put aside 15-20 minutes when you chose for no stakes creative challenge that is pure fun. Since January 8, 2012 the Daily Create (https://daily.ds106.us/) published each day a media creation challenge meant as playful thing to do and also to explore online creative tools. For MYFest 2026, this is an ongoing activity in July and August. You can find the newest one each day added to our Discord channel where participants share and cheer on each other’s responses. Or join us for our drop in Create Together sessions where we can brainstorm ideas, and create/share together.

Can a machine make us feel seen, understood, or cared for? This session explores the psychology behind our growing attachment to AI, examining how technologies designed to respond like humans can activate powerful emotional connections and reshape the way we think about relationships, intimacy, and belonging.

An interactive critical AI literacy workshop that uses the concept of khilafa (stewardship) as a framework for thinking about AI responsibility, guided by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s visionary story “Sultana’s Dream.”The workshop offers practical tools for understanding AI systems while centering values of justice, accountability, and collective wisdom.

In this session, we use the term Vibe Accessibility to describe accessibility practices that prioritize automation over genuine understanding. We argue that when access becomes automated, it reduces access literacy, diminishes collective responsibility, and ultimately leads to access-washing.