TEACHx 2026

Can a mandatory, reading-heavy course actually be the highlight of a student’s week? In many required courses, students often feel like passive containers for information—what Paulo Freire calls the “banking concept” of education. This session explores how the Ways of Knowing course at Northwestern University in Qatar flipped this script. 
By integrating Freire’s problem-posing method, faculty and students transformed a daunting syllabus on colonial knowledge into an interactive laboratory for student agency. Presenters (faculty and students who have taken the course) will share how they utilized student-led facilitation (using Kahoot and role-play), sensory-based learning (field trips to the Bin Jelmood House), and creative expression (collaborative drawing) to build a community of inquiry. Attendees will benefit from the lessons learned of teaching a course in a postcolonial framework and how activities such as reading outside the classroom or visiting museums can balance the growing use of AI in education by prioritizing deep learning shared spaces experiences.  

As generative AI tools increasingly shape how students approach writing, instructors face a key pedagogical question: how do we preserve the cognitive processes essential to learning while still preparing students to use emerging technologies responsibly? This session explores a teaching approach that intentionally balances AI-assisted ideation with handwritten in-class journaling to cultivate deeper thinking, ownership, and academic voice. Rather than banning AI or fully embracing automation, this model sequences technology alongside deliberate moments of cognitive pause. Participants will examine how structured notebook journals—where students sit with an empty page before drafting—can foster metacognition, reduce performance anxiety, and strengthen confidence. The session will also demonstrate how AI can be productively integrated for brainstorming, outlining, and idea generation without replacing critical thinking. Attendees will engage in a brief reflective activity that mirrors the journaling practice and leave with adaptable prompts, timing strategies, and classroom frameworks that can be applied across disciplines. This presentation reframes uncertainty not as a barrier to learning, but as a skill that can be intentionally taught through pacing, structure, and pedagogical design.

Changing a culture doesn’t happen overnight, nor is it a solo venture. Historically, in academia, ensuring that educational materials are accessible has been an afterthought or seen as an add-on that leads to extra work. Knowing that accessible materials are necessary for many, beneficial for all, and legally required, Northwestern and the University of Chicago set out to change the culture around digital accessibility at their respective institutions to a more proactive approach that’s integrated into workflows…and it’s working!
This session will explore both universities’ journey toward creating a more accessible digital environment. Discussion will focus on each university’s unique, flexible, agile, data-driven approach that not only created initial success, but quickly adapted to amplify the success and build a movement that’s put the Chicago area at the forefront of accessible digital learning environment design. The presentation will also discuss the importance of partnerships both within and across institutions, and how to cultivate and sustain them. The lessons learned in creating this culture shift can be applied beyond accessibility and across course development.   

The claim that "crisis" and "opportunity" share a common root in Chinese is widely repeated but factually incorrect. Even so, crises carry a dual character: capable of genuine destruction while simultaneously compelling a reexamination of prevailing assumptions.


This webinar takes that duality as its premise. Rather than treating the so-called "reading crisis" in the age of AI as cause for alarm, the session approaches it as an invitation to more rigorous thinking. Drawing on current evidence about reading performance and evolving literacy practices, it redirects attention toward the fundamental question of what reading is for, a reframing that, in turn, opens more productive avenues for response.


The session concludes with concrete, classroom-ready strategies for higher education practitioners, offering substantive approaches to deepening comprehension and sustaining meaningful engagement with texts, as well as a demonstration of how AI, when thoughtfully integrated, may function as a resource in support of reading rather than an obstacle to it.

This interactive 45-minute session invites educators to actively build accessible learning materials using AI. Participants will follow along as we use tools like Claude and other AI platforms to create accessible PDFs, documents, and simple accessibility-focused apps that can be freely shared. Drawing from ongoing research and real-world consulting, the session emphasizes practical workflows grounded in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and core accessibility principles. Attendees will leave with concrete examples, reusable prompts, and a clearer understanding of how AI can support while not replacing ethical, inclusive teaching practices focused on human-centered critical thinking.

Graduate students in AI courses face a paradox: the very technology they are studying is generating an overwhelming flood of learning materials, making it harder, not easier, to learn. For working professionals balancing demanding careers, families, and graduate coursework, "overwhelm fatigue" is real — and it is undermining engagement with one of the most important topics of our time.
This session introduces a structured solution: a Claude-powered learning repository designed to give time-constrained graduate students a navigable, personalized entry point into generative AI concepts. Rather than confronting students with an undifferentiated mass of videos, blogposts, and references, the repository uses carefully designed prompts to help each student find their own path through the material.
The session includes a live demonstration — attendees will watch an actual interaction between the presenter and Claude in real time — and participants are invited to engage directly during the session. Attendees will leave with a replicable framework, available as a downloadable PDF, that faculty across disciplines can adapt to build their own Claude-powered course repositories.

Engage with innovative tools to master course and program design—plan learning with purpose, align objectives, and create courses and programs that work for both instructors and students. The Course Design Helper, Instructional Design Wizard, and Program Design Wizard are three free, user-friendly, publicly available tools that provide step-by-step guidance for course and program planning and development. See how they were created, how they have been implemented, and how you could use these tools and the principles behind them to support your own course and program design. Collaborate with colleagues to experiment with these tools, analyze case studies, and share best practices for course and program design. 

As generative AI increasingly automates the "final product," higher education faces a crisis of cognitive atrophy. When AI provides solutions instantly, it skips the "earned struggle" essential for long-term retention. This session introduces Somagraphic Learning™: a human-first visual cognitive framework designed to bridge the Clarity Gap between AI data volume and human sense-making capacity.


Moving beyond traditional "AI-first" workflows, this interactive presentation demonstrates how to reposition AI as a "Follower" rather than a "Leader". Participants will engage with the Shape-Emotion Grammar™, a pre-verbal language that uses perceptual cues like circles for safety, boxes for structure, and arrows for movement to anchor understanding before a single prompt is typed.


We will workshop a virtual "Attempt → Map → Refine" process, where learners externalize ideas through hand-drawn motion (on paper or digital whiteboards) before utilizing AI for optimization. By the end of this session, educators will possess a replicable strategy to protect the "Human Edge", ensure academic integrity through somatic principles, and foster a "soul-made" environment where technology supports, rather than replaces, the human mind.