STLHE 2026

Last week I was at the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) conference and I will be processing all the conversations and learnings from the week for a while. But there were a few things that occurred to me about my time at STLHE that I wanted to share and to see if any of this resonated with other folk as well.

First, STLHE this year allowed me to meet so many people that I have been in conversation with, thought with, and collaborated with in person for the first time. It was actually so interesting that there were some people that I had never met that it never occurred to me that we had never met in person. That feeling is very interesting to me and I feel happens a lot in equity and inclusion spaces, because we spend so much time working towards a common goal that we often forget that the modality of where we are sharing spaces either virtual or on-site is not the important thing, the work is. So there were definitely a handful of folk that I met for the first time like Rammy Saini, Christopher Laursen, Dani Dilkes that I feel I have been part of the conversations I have been having for years but it was the first time I ever met them. And being able to meet them and have more discussions was really a highlight for me this year. I am sure other folk have had this same experience, and I am curious about how that felt for you as well.

Connected to this is that some of these encounters were planned, like I knew I was going to see Rammy and Dani and this was exciting to me. But some were not, like Johnathan showing up at my workshop and having me tear up at just seeing him. Because as I mentioned in the workshop, and to others I was sharing this story with, being able to do a podcast episode with Johnathan Bevan was one of the most rewarding things I have done in the last few years. And one of the reasons it was so rewarding, is that Johnathan deeply understood how important it is to build trust with someone you are approaching for a thing and don't know at all, before doing the work. We had email changes, and a meeting online, even before we recorded the episode, so that we could get to know each other better, see how much our ethics and values are aligned and the work we have in common, before even getting to the episode. So I think the reason seeing him there made me tear up is that this trust building as foundational is so rare in academe right now, it is nice to see someone who cares about it deeply. I am not sure how many trust conversations you had at STLHE either in sessions or in your meet ups with peers, but my STLHE was filled with conversations about trust.

This leads me to my last reflection (for now) about my time at STLHE which is that I was really drawn to sessions that didn't tell me how to do a thing, but rather sessions that set up space to have hard conversations that HigherEd avoids daily. I'm so over solutionism, which is why I actively avoided every AI session at STLHE this year. This is mainly because GenAI conversations rarely talk about accessibility, as in disability, not access as in open, so I wanted to be part of conversations that realized that disability is something we need to think about in our design, facilitation, and engagement, and that it does not have one single answer. 

There were some keynotes that actively avoided talking about disability because it is not part of their scope of practice which demonstrates what happens when only scale matters (you may be interested about my comments about this scaling in my podcast episode). And there were other keynotes that demonstrated that accessibility needs to be in alignment with bilingualism to support the goals of STLHE as a bilingual society. So this is something I am going to think more about over the summer, and had some pretty nice starting conversations about with Patrick Molicard-Chartier a few days ago.

I know that some go to conferences to go to sessions only on a single topic (like for me it is usually accessibility as in disability accessibility and not access as a stand in for open). But this year I really actively sought out spaces where there the ask of the session was not to find the right answer, but to be in community with others. Because there is never one answer, because the work we do is highly contextual, and we need to be okay with there not being one answer as much as that may make folk uncomfortable. This is why I loved that Nasreen Sultana and Holly Gibbs started their pre-conference session with that very sentence, that we are not here to find all the answers, we are here to remember to bring our whole selves to spaces. These are the kinds of conversations and sessions I appreciated the most at STLHE, the ones that reminded us that we are in community and the work is done together. Like Mandy Penney with her deep citational justice in her session and bringing Jennifer Ward back to our spaces, our hearts, and our minds. Kate Brown showing folk how we can do excellent collaborative work between teaching and learning centres and accessibility services. Emma Rupcic providing an excellent paper on the work being done by Dr. Chelsea Jones, Emma, and Jo-Anne Sinnige-Egger as part of the Faculty Fellows in Accessibility at Brock.

The reminder that we are in so many different communities and some of them overlap often, and some only overlap at conferences like STLHE is an important one to the work we do in education. Everything is connected, and when we forget that, we are only working with part of the communities impacted. To be able to see my former UTM colleagues for a bit as well, Amanda, Sherry, and folk I have been so lucky to share space with in other contexts like Alex Davis- those hallway conversations and quick hugs are so important. I am leaving STLHE with a full cup and a lot of thanks to the organizing committee and Matthew Dunleavy, for creating the space that we could all share at a time where we all really needed that space to be held. A space to remind us all how we are interconnected and how important mentoring is for the next generation of folk working in different eduspaces.