The 2026 Teaching and Learning Symposium Planning Committee is excited to announce that Dr. Karen Gravett, an accomplished teacher and scholar, will be our keynote speaker on April 29, 2026 (online). This year’s Symposium theme is Imagining Community: Learning, Belonging, Becoming.
Learn more about participating in the Symposium.
Dr Gravett’s research focuses on learning and teaching in higher education, and explores the areas of digital education, belonging, and relational pedagogies. She is Associate Professor of Higher Education, and Head of Educational Research and Development at the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey, UK as well as Co-Director of the Language, Literacies and Learning research group, an editorial board member for the journal Learning, Media and Technology, and an Executive Editor for the journal, Teaching in Higher Education. She is also a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA) and an Honorary Associate Professor for the Centre for Assessment and Digital Learning (CRADLE) at Deakin University.
Her latest books include:
- Relational Pedagogies: Connections and Mattering in Higher Education (2023).
- Critical Practice in Higher Education (2025).
- Reconceptualising Teaching in Higher Education (publishing April 28, 2026, a day before the keynote).
Keynote Title:
Relational pedagogies in higher education: Connected practice for changing times
Abstract:
This keynote will explore the concept of relational pedagogies, and the implications for teaching and learning in contemporary higher education. Relational pedagogies involve thinking about relationships, connections and care in higher education. Thinking about connections is not a new idea. But what is new are the pressures upon forging connections in universities (and beyond). For example, there is a plentiful literature on the difficulties of academic life where institutions have been described as environments that are both uncaring and unhealthy. Educators are increasingly concerned about how to foster student wellbeing, and experiences of belonging, as well as engaging with new and challenging questions regarding how artificial intelligence will reorientate engagement, trust and connection. This session explores how we might engage in meaningful connections with others in contemporary universities. In doing so, I explore ideas such as partnership, vulnerability, authenticity and trust, and how we might think about these ideas and use them in different ways to develop meaningful ways to engage with diverse students.
A further understanding of relational pedagogies requires us to think more deeply about the concept of relationality. In this keynote, I will also introduce some theoretical approaches to think about relational connections in ways that position the teacher or student as entangled within a web of relations, that includes nonhuman others, spaces and things. For example, never has it been more important to think about digital technologies and the relational role that they play. More than mundane tools, digital technologies such as generative artificial intelligence work to reshape the ways in which teaching and learning is understood and enacted. I suggest that thinking in new ways about relationality and connection enables us to ask different questions, and to engage in a critical practice that enables us to notice our students, institutions and learning spaces anew.
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