Welcome Back Symposium
Virtual Welcome Back Symposium 2025: Practical Strategies to Enhance Student Learning
Held virtually on Friday, August 22, 2025, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
This symposium, hosted by CETL, provides attendees the opportunity to learn about strategies, tools, and resources current Virginia Tech faculty find meaningful in supporting student learning. Faculty presenters represent a diverse group of disciplinary backgrounds and a wide range of teaching experience. Sessions will offer practical ideas and suggestions that can be integrated into a variety of course contexts. In addition, the event’s keynote speaker, Kevin Gannon, author of Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, will speak about strategies for connecting and reconnecting with students while encouraging them to take steps toward learning challenges instead of pulling away.
The goal of the symposium is for teaching faculty members at Virginia Tech to gain information, inspiration, and ideas for strategies that they can implement in their teaching to increase student engagement. We hope you can join us.
Keynote Speaker
Kevin Gannon is Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence (CAFÉ) and Professor of History at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina. He is the author of Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto (West Virginia University Press, 2020), and the co-editor of the forthcoming collection The Campus Crisis Toolkit: Strategies and Solidarity for the Rest of Us (SUNY Press). His writing has appeared in outlets such as Vox, CNN, and The Washington Post, and he is a regular contributor to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Agenda
A Pedagogy of What? Finding Hope in Higher Ed
This just in: it is not easy to work in higher education right now. Whether it’s the larger political-cultural environment, the increasing complexity of student needs, or the difficulties of finding balance for ourselves, there’s no shortage of things making us tired and stressed. Disconnected students, silences instead of discussions, a sense of atomization across campus—these and other obstacles have littered our paths since “pandemic pedagogy.” But these difficulties also demonstrate how important the work we do really is, and our students need our support and care more than ever in order to be successful in college. How do we balance all of this? One way is to conceive of our work in terms of a Pedagogy of Hope. This vision of Hope isn’t some vague, “warm fuzzy” performance, but rather an ongoing project centered on agency and community. This talk will look at some of the psychological and pedagogical research on Hope to see how it might inform our day-to-day teaching and learning practices. We’ll pay particular attention to the ways connecting (and re-connecting) with our students serves as a foundation for a hopeful pedagogy. Finally, the session will also suggest some specific tools and strategies to incorporate a Pedagogy of Hope as part of a sustainable approach to successful teaching and learning.
Information coming soon
Information coming soon
Information coming soon
Information coming soon