Closing Plenary: Hope Circuits at a time of Seismic Change: Re-wiring our classrooms and institution for Human and Ecological Flourishing

12:45pm-1:45pm: Hope Circuits at a time of Seismic Change: Re-wiring our classrooms and institution for Human and Ecological Flourishing Dr. Jessica Riddell, Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence, Full Professor, Department of English, Bishop's University, 3M National Teaching Fellow (2015)

Universities are anchors of hope in our communities. As we grapple with unprecedented pressures—from the climate crisis to geopolitical instability, political polarization, and other crises—hope is more essential than ever. Hope is not just an abstract ideal but a mindset we can cultivate and deploy within our institutions and communities. As educators, staff, and leaders in the academy, we are wired to foster hope: to teach it, share it, and collectively imagine a better future. Yet universities, as complex organizations with strong social missions, are often slow to change and hesitant to innovate.

The 2025 Teaching and Learning Symposium plenary will outline ten conceptual tools to “rewire” our systems with hope circuits, equipping us to better fulfill our mandate at a time when human and ecological flourishing are increasingly endangered. By focusing on the areas of learning, teaching, and gathering, this session will offer actionable strategies to help build hopeful systems for individual and community flourishing. Through an interactive approach, we’ll connect across U of T’s campuses, disciplines, and career stages, building on shared best practices in teaching and learning to create sustainable and hopeful academic spaces.

What will happen during the Closing Plenary?

This year’s closing plenary will open with a keynote address from Jessica to introduce some core concepts from Hope Circuits to situate our work and subsequent conversations. The Hope Summit, which immediately follows, is an interactive and collaborative session where we’ll work together to ideate practical tools and theoretical frameworks to consider institutional change in the higher education sector and the world more broadly.

Upon entering MY150 for the closing plenary, participants will have the opportunity to self-select into three different themes to guide small group work for the second half of the plenary. Participants will work with a table facilitator and team note taker to "rumble" on a series of guiding questions to share experience and wisdom to begin the process of collective sense making and imagining a creative future.

Each table will have one of the following labels (based on chapters from Hope Circuits):

How to Learn
“Fundamental difference between student and learner: one is a unit, and the other is a person. You can say, without risk of dismemberment, that the average class size is 26.7 students; people are indivisible, and add abundance to learning environments. They each contribute something unique to the ecosystem that is better than the sum of its parts [...] Students can be learners. Learners do not have to be students.”  (How to Learn chapter summary) 

How to Teach
“What does teaching  mean? In one model, conveying skills involves the transmission of expertise from teacher to student. Transactional in nature, the teacher produces and transfers knowledge then assesses students’ ability to master the information. In another model, creating contexts for growth intermingles teaching and learning that moves towards something new and yet unarticulated, where knowledge is made and shared in transformational ways.”  (How to Teach chapter summary) 

How to Gather*
“Even as we deploy celebratory rhetoric around cross-disciplinary collaborations, the structures themselves are built for solitudes and silos [...] gatherings forge the path towards wholeness and healing; AND: it is also true that some gatherings expose the integrity gap between what universities say and what we actually do.”  (How to Gather chapter summary) 

*New chapter

1:45pm-2pm: Break

2:00pm-2:10pm: Remarks from Trevor Young, Vice-President & Provost, University of Toronto 
Myhal 150

2:10pm-3pm: Small Group Breakouts/ “Rumbles”
Myhal 150 

3pm-3:30pm: Large Group Debrief 
Myhal 150

3:30pm-4pm: Closing Remarks and Prize Draw
Myhal 150