2026
Symposium for
Scholarship OF Teaching and Learning
Brave Scholarship: SoTL as Practice, Intervention and Influence
October 22–24, 2026 | Banff Park Lodge
Keynotes
Opening Keynote: Beyond Good and Great: What Makes SoTL Brave?
The Mokakiiks Centre for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is delighted to announce Dr. Jessie L. Moore as the Opening Keynote Speaker for the 2026 Symposium for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
At a moment when higher education is being called to respond to profound change, this year’s Symposium asks us to consider what it means to engage in SoTL bravely: to ask difficult questions, challenge assumptions, build meaningful partnerships, and move our scholarship beyond inquiry toward action and influence.
Dr. Moore’s work embodies that invitation.
What does it mean to practice the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) bravely? Building on established principles of good SoTL practice (Felten 2013) and principles for moving from good to great SoTL (Hamilton and McCollum 2024), this keynote invites participants to consider what makes SoTL brave—and why bravery matters in a changing higher education landscape.
Brave SoTL remains grounded in understanding and improving student learning experiences, but it also challenges us to examine the assumptions, perspectives, and practices that shape our inquiries. It asks us to attend to context and constraints; honor counterstories and perspectives that complicate dominant narratives; collaborate across disciplines, institutions, and research paradigms; and engage learners and other educational partners as co-inquirers. Brave SoTL also requires methodological courage: expanding our research approaches, experimenting with unfamiliar methods when warranted, and maintaining ethical commitments throughout the research process.
Importantly, bravery extends beyond how we conduct our inquiries to how we share and act on what we learn—including unexpected findings, setbacks, and failures. Together, we will explore how Brave SoTL moves beyond generating knowledge to informing practice, fostering meaningful partnerships, and influencing higher education across local, regional, and international contexts.
What does bravery ask of us as SoTL scholars—and what might become possible when we answer that call?
We look forward to welcoming Dr. Moore—and all of you—to Banff this October as we gather to explore what becomes possible when we approach SoTL not only as scholarship, but as practice, intervention, and influence.
Jessie's Bio
As Director of the Center for Engaged Learning and Professor of Professional Writing & Rhetoric at Elon University, Dr. Moore has spent her career advancing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as a collaborative, engaged, and consequential scholarly practice. Her work explores how we create meaningful learning experiences, how knowledge moves across contexts, how students and educators learn in partnership, and how scholarship can travel beyond an individual classroom to influence our broader educational communities.
Dr. Moore is the author of Key Practices for Fostering Engaged Learning: A Guide for Faculty and Staff and co-editor of five collections on engaged learning. She coordinates the Center for Engaged Learning’s international SoTL research seminars, co-edits two book series focused on engaged learning and teaching, and co-edits Teaching & Learning Inquiry, the open-access journal of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Her longstanding contributions to the international SoTL community were recognized with the 2019 ISSOTL Distinguished Service Award.
We are particularly excited to welcome Dr. Moore because her scholarship invites us to think beyond simply conducting SoTL toward what our scholarship can do: how it can shape practice, foster connection, create opportunities for meaningful learning, and contribute to change across classrooms, programs, institutions, and scholarly communities. Her work offers a compelling way into the questions at the heart of Brave Scholarship—and an inspiring place to begin our conversations together. Learn more about her work at www.jessiemoore.net and connect with her on LinkedIn.
Keynote time
Thursday, October 22 at 7:30 pm
Closing Plenary: Brave Spaces — Partnership, Possibility, and the Work Ahead
We are delighted to welcome Dr. Cherie Woolmer as the Closing Plenary Speaker for the 2026 Symposium on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
Dr. Woolmer is a leading scholar of pedagogical partnership whose work explores what becomes possible when students and faculty come together to examine, question, and reimagine teaching and learning. In this closing plenary, she will be joined by student and faculty partners for a facilitated conversation that brings their experiences into dialogue with the ideas, questions, and extraordinary scholarship shared throughout the Symposium.
What does it mean to practise brave scholarship together?
Partnership offers a particularly powerful space in which to consider this question. When students and faculty come together as partners, they enter spaces that can be liminal, transformative, and sometimes uncomfortable. Traditional roles become less certain. Different forms of knowledge and experience come into conversation. Questions of power, vulnerability, trust, and responsibility become visible. Working meaningfully in these spaces requires more than collaboration; it asks us to listen differently, remain curious when certainty is unavailable, and be open to having our assumptions and practices changed through encounter with others.
Drawing on experiences of pedagogical partnership, Dr. Woolmer will invite student and faculty partners to explore what it takes to create and remain in these brave spaces: the conditions that make meaningful dialogue possible, the tensions and discomforts that can accompany partnership, and the possibilities that emerge when students and faculty share responsibility for understanding and improving teaching and learning.
As our Symposium draws to a close, this plenary will also turn our attention toward the year ahead. Building on our exploration of Brave Scholarship: SoTL as Practice, Intervention, and Influence, Dr. Woolmer will help us gather the threads of our time together and consider what we will carry forward. Where might our scholarship ask us to be braver? Whose knowledge and experiences might we invite more fully into our work? And what might become possible if we are willing to enter the uncertain spaces between inquiry and action, reflection and change, scholarship and partnership?
Rather than closing the conversation, this plenary invites us to leave Banff ready to continue it—in our scholarship, our institutions, our classrooms, and the teaching and learning communities we create together.
Cherie's Bio
Dr. Cherie Woolmer is an Associate Professor, based in the Academic Development Centre at Mount Royal University. She describes herself as a ‘disciplinary nomad’, having completed her undergraduate degree in Linguistics, an MBA in public sector leadership, and a PhD in Education at the University of Glasgow.
Cherie moved to Canada in 2017 to complete her postdoc at McMaster university and then joined MRU in 2020 as the Canada Research Chair (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning), based in the Mokakiiks Centre for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, which completed in June 2026. Her research program focuses on student-faculty partnerships in higher education, which is informed by critical pedagogy, socio-cultural approaches to change, and the impact of pedagogical partnerships on institutional culture. Her recent publications focus on approaches to co-creating curriculum with students, issues of equity and risk in partnerships, knowledge mobilization of SoTL for students, and using participatory methodologies in SoTL.
She co-facilitates Mount Royal’s SoTL programming, runs workshops and book studies on issues relating to pedagogical partnerships and SoTL, and offers consultations with faculty and students engaged in partnership work. She leads MRU’s flagship Student Partners Program, creating opportunities for faculty and students to together on teaching observations, curriculum redesign, and SoTL.
Session time
Thursday, October 24 at 12:00 pm
