MYFest 2025: Schedule

This session explores the dynamic intersection of artificial intelligence and Arabic language education. Recognizing both the transformative potential of AI in educational settings (Grassini, 2023) and the current gap in teaching multi-dialectical practices within classrooms (Masaeed, 2023), I aim to demonstrate how AI can bridge this divide.

This session will show how AI is used in Arabic language peer teaching sessions to help peer teachers (i.e. language learners) develop their own activities. It also presents learners’ perceptions of this experience. This session participants will use AI to learn/teach weather vocabulary at A1 level.

This lively session will start with a brief panel conversation exploring how assessment design can actively support student self-regulation. We will consider practical ways to rethink (1) assessment task design, to (2) enhance assessment briefs, and to (3) make feedback more usable for learning. You will be invited to share your reflections, challenges, and examples via an interactive wall. Come ready to think critically and collaboratively about how to make assessment truly work for learners.

Take ten minutes to be mindful and reset your mind with a simple, calming and grounding guided meditation. Open to all levels, this biweekly practice helps you carry more calm and mindfulness into the rest of your day.

Inclusion is not a buzzword. It’s a commitment. A call to restructure our systems, not just our slogans. Too often, academic spaces are built for the “average” student, leaving behind those who think differently, come from different backgrounds, or walk a different learning path.

A gentle, prompt-based writing workshop that encourages creative expression and connection. No experience needed, no pressure to share—just come as you are, write anyway, and leave feeling more grounded and inspired.

Student/staff partnerships are a powerful way to build community, learn together and work collectively towards equity and justice. Building these communities, however, requires reflection on structures and practice that not only support those within them but also actively fight against the systematic barriers inherent in the world. Join a panel of the University of Manchester Library Student Team to discuss how prioritising student agency can act as a foundation for collective action.

In this session, we’ll look at haiku as a mindful writing practice, along with other short-form poetry. Then we will write some poems together. All ages welcome!

In the “Joy Centered Pedagogy” Book Circle, we will be exploring the depth of the ideas from the book in community with other participants. Unlike a traditional book club, the purpose is read deeper, and spend time connecting with the ideas, with each other, and with our work in experiential and engaging ways. Space will be made for introspection, play, laughter, debate, conflict, reflection, and so much more.

This book circle requires separate registration through the google form linked inside. Please note that there is a limited number of participants that could join, so please sign up if you plan to participate.

The DS106 Daily Create is a daily challenge involving 15-20 minutes of creative digital art making and storytelling. Participants will try a few Daily Creates and explore how to incorporate brief creative activities and daily challenges into teaching and learning.

This combination of practical synchronous and asynchronous sessions equip you with tools to immediately apply TIP-based actions with each other, and to develop or adapt an aspect of education to support TIP in your local environment, perhaps through an upcoming class, webinar, student group, library training session, or whatever educational approach you want to take!

In this interactive workshop, we will explore how academic writing works as a vehicle for thinking and knowledge-making in the process of research, exploring what is at stake when researchers from across the disciplines delegate the “writing” part of the research process to AI tools. With hands-on activities, we will assess how using AI “to write” might enhance or undermine academic rigor, originality, responsibility, then crating personalized rubrics and flowcharts to guide ethical uses of AI in field-specific ways for ourselves. Scholars of any discipline who want to approach writing with (or without) AI more thoughtfully are invited.

Religion, politics, climate change, migration, injustice, algorithms and more; in the modern world there are many forces that push us towards polarized viewpoints. In this two-part series we will explore what works and what doesn’t in trying to work effectively and ethically with people holding opposing viewpoints. We’ll draw on intercultural theory (a little), conflict resolution (a little) and even practice navigating differences without fear or anger.

This is a recurring, short and guided journaling session. Through thoughtfully written prompts and individual quiet reflection time, you’ll journal about gratitude, self-love, loving-kindness and wellbeing. Bring a notebook, an open heart and come just as you are.

Alt tags and text provide a necessary bridge for accessibility, but who is better at making these: handcrafting humans or machine learning bots? Can we move from expanding access to building community? Join us for a playful rumble!

This session will introduce different approaches to inclusive design, exploring both benefits and deficits of different approaches. We will spend time focusing on the principles of Universal Design for Learning and applying these principles to our own educational designs or examples.

In the “Joy Centered Pedagogy” Book Circle, we will be exploring the depth of the ideas from the book in community with other participants. Unlike a traditional book club, the purpose is read deeper, and spend time connecting with the ideas, with each other, and with our work in experiential and engaging ways. Space will be made for introspection, play, laughter, debate, conflict, reflection, and so much more.

This book circle requires separate registration through the google form linked inside. Please note that there is a limited number of participants that could join, so please sign up if you plan to participate.

What can a zany, age-old, theater comedy tradition based on human nature teach us today? Come write, play, and laugh i
as we make a humorous improvised script.

You are cordially invited to join this co-exploration of the critical connection between wellness and justice!

Please join us for another co-facilitated book circle on the book “Burnout from Humans.” As part of this book circle, we will explore the depth of the book and it’s implications over a series of sessions together, where we will move beyond simply consuming the ideas with our heads, to connecting them to our heart and hands in experiential ways.

This book circle requires separate registration through the google form linked inside. Please note that there is a limited number of participants that could join, so please sign up if you plan to participate.