Concurrent Sessions

Facilitator: Evelyn Chan (she/her), Bernie Gaidosch (he/him)
Student Panel: Vraj Soni, Sabina, Luma Yousif

Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 401

Description: This panel presentation explores what happens when students are given clear guidance on how to use AI instead of being told to avoid it. Drawing on a Winter 2026 online film studies course at George Brown Polytechnic, the session focuses on how students experienced and responded to structured AI use in their learning.

The session brings together the faculty member who implemented the approach in an online course environment, a TLX project lead connected to a broader initiative that has recently received Research Ethics Board (REB) approval and builds on this initial pilot implementation, and students reflecting on their learning experiences.

Rather than demonstrating the AI guidance itself, the panel centers on how students engaged with structured expectations for AI use, including how these were communicated and interpreted in practice. Panelists will discuss why guidance was needed, how students navigated AI as a supported learning tool, and how this shaped their confidence, critical engagement, and understanding of academic integrity, authorship, and creative processes.

Student perspectives will be shared through a combination of live student participation and recorded reflections drawn from the course experience, ensuring that student voice remains central to the session. Through these perspectives, participants will gain insight into how students interpreted AI expectations, made decisions about AI use, and reflected on the relationship between learning, authorship, creativity, and academic integrity in practice.

This session builds on a series of recent presentations at major teaching and learning conferences and ongoing cross-institutional conversations on AI in education, extending that work through a focused online course-based experience.

Framed within the theme of Resilience in Action: Turning Complexity into Opportunities, this session highlights how starting small and listening to student experience can help educators respond meaningfully to the complexity of AI in postsecondary education.

Participants will leave with insights into student perspectives, practical considerations for introducing AI guidance, and lessons learned from an early-stage pilot that will guide the next phase of this work at TLX. 

Facilitator: Larysa Kalyta, MBA (she/her), David Cogdell (he/his), Manis Pandey (Mah-Neesh Paan-Day) (he/his), Jenny Yen

Format: In-person and online interactive

Room: WFL - 431

Description: ISSUE:  Learners would not always be particularly motivated to study the course material and work on complex assignments.

APPROACH:  As a new teaching approach, Learners created groups and at the beginning of each business Course worked on creating and branding of their own imaginary consulting company related to the Course subject matter:  original name, logo, mission statement, website, an account on social media platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram), a team photograph or an avatar, happy Customer testimonials, a theme song, a mascot, uniform with a logo, and some marketing materials.

Along with branding, Learners were encouraged to study consumer behaviour of their target market and work on data, statistics and analytics of their competition, in order to better communicate their uniqueness in a segment.

In this process studying Course theory in a fun and interactive manner with a purpose became meaningful and impactful.

Any Course assignment had to align with the group’s company objectives with a sharp focus on their Prospects’ needs, wants, demands and expectations.   The group offers products and services that would fulfill one of the 2 main marketing goals - selling a positive experience or offering a solution to their problems - and therefore ensure those Potential Customers’ positive purchase decision.

As a result, Learners became motivated to apply their passion and creativity when working on assignments, along with studying the course theory in a fun and interactive manner. 

To summarize this marketing and branding activity for 6 business Courses crystallized Learners’ true calling.  Our brilliant Students became more confident in communicating their objectives to their audience.  Their critical thinking, self-esteem developed, and ultimately - their career objectives became crystallized.

2 GBP Alums 1  GBP Student are co-presenting their imaginary companies’ branding in Special Events Planning and Delivery Course, and Marketing and Entrepreneurship Course 

Facilitator: Joanna Friend (she/they), Karen Jongedik (she/her), Dorothy Van Grootheest (she/her), Laura Pastrik (she/her), Katrina Kieley (she/her), Dawn Lovas (she/her)

Format: In-person and online interactive

Room: WFL - 408

Description: Student success work is often distributed across programs, services, and localized initiatives, which can lead to uneven access, duplication, and limited institutional impact. At George Brown Polytechnic, Student Success Specialists were initially embedded within select academic programs to provide targeted, localized support. Building on insights from this model, the institution is now transitioning toward a more coordinated approach by centralizing this work within the Teaching and Learning Exchange (TLX) to broaden impact across the polytechnic. 

This session introduces an emerging Academic Success Model that expands beyond program-level interventions toward a more integrated, institution-wide framework. The model aims to strengthen alignment between academic and student support areas while maintaining responsiveness to faculty and student needs. Academic Success Specialists from the Teaching and Learning Exchange (TLX) will outline the development process, including methods for gathering and synthesizing institutional input, key design principles, and proposal for implementation strategies. Attention will be paid to how the model advances equity, accessibility, and shared responsibility for academic student success across roles. Participants will engage in structured discussion to reflect on their own contexts, identify opportunities for alignment, and provide feedback on the model’s priorities and implementation approach. This session is intended as both a knowledge-sharing opportunity and a collaborative feedback loop to refine the model before broader rollout.

Facilitator: Professor Dr. William Wang

Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 436

Description: Career transition in professionally oriented postgraduate programs is increasingly non-linear, especially in supply chain management cohorts that recruit learners from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Such learners bring valuable transferable capital but often require structured support to reposition prior experience toward entry-level roles in a new field.

This paper develops a UDL-informed scaffold framework for career transition in postgraduate supply chain education. The framework integrates scholarship on Universal Design for Learning (UDL), experiential learning and work-integrated learning, scaffolding, career adaptability, professional identity, and supply chain competency requirements.

The model conceptualizes transition as a staged and recursive process involving Stage 0 (current learner profile), Stage 1 (entry-level role readiness), and Stage 2 (longer-term career progression).

A key contribution is the distinction among skill type (hard vs. soft), skill status (built vs. new-learning), and career-stage relevance, allowing job-title requirements to function as a demand-side benchmark for gap analysis and scaffold design.

AI tool, Copilot/ChatGPT is utilized for analysis. A Case Study will be discussed to show how supply chain career transition is defined and developed from accounting background, and how AI can save our time to build postgraduate career pathway.

Facilitator: Dr. Christopher Willis, Jen Porter

Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 536

Description: As colleges and polytechnics in Ontario expand into graduate education, many faculty and leaders are entering unfamiliar territory. This session shares our experience developing George Brown College’s first master’s degree, offering a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to design, approve, and implement a credential at this level.

We focus on the unique challenges and opportunities of master’s development in the Ontario college context, including navigating the Postsecondary Education Quality Assessment Board (PEQAB) process, aligning with provincial expectations, and translating institutional strengths into graduate-level outcomes. Participants will gain insight into how requirements around research, academic rigour, and quality assurance reshape program design decisions.

Beyond process, the session explores the conceptual and pedagogical shifts required when moving from undergraduate or post-diploma programming to master’s-level education. What distinguishes a master’s credential in terms of curriculum, assessment, and learner expectations? How do faculty adapt to supporting advanced inquiry, knowledge production, and professional application?

We will also reflect on tensions encountered throughout development—balancing innovation with compliance, institutional identity with external standards, and applied learning with scholarly expectations. Practical examples and lessons learned will be shared to support others considering or currently engaged in similar initiatives.

Facilitator: Elena Chudaeva

Format: In-person and online interactive

Room: WFL - 538

Description: This session explores how purposeful, UDL informed course design in D2L can guide learners, reduce cognitive load, and foster engagement throughout a course. Grounded in Universal Design for Learning principles, the session highlights five practical design elements that can be embedded into any D2L course to support motivation, comprehension, and self-regulation.

Participants will begin by examining how presenting the big picture of the course - including the “why” behind learning outcomes - helps learners understand relevance, set goals, and stay meaningfully engaged over time. The session then explores the use of a mind map at the beginning of each topic to provide context, clarify expectations, and articulate clear learning goals before students engage with content and activities.

To support learner independence, the session showcases how a module checklist at the end of each learning module can scaffold self-regulation by helping learners track progress, manage time, and reflect on completion. Participants will also learn how to integrate low stakes self-checks, such as short quizzes in D2L, to give learners frequent, low-pressure opportunities to monitor their understanding and identify gaps early.

Finally, the session highlights the value of an introductory discussion activity to build learning community, encourage social presence, and create connections among learners from the start of the course.

Through examples and discussions, participants will leave with ideas they can immediately apply to design more inclusive, learner centered courses.

Facilitator: Seanna Kryger (she/her), Dr. Caitlin Scott (she/her), Chef Luciana (lucy) Godoy (she/her)

Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 505

Description: In the busy and fast-paced nature of teaching and learning at a polytechnic, student perspectives are of critical importance, highlighting unique insights that can sometimes be missed by faculty. 

Engaging student voices in SoTL research and innovation processes demonstrates a great opportunity to empower them to take ownership of their own learning, teach them new research skills, and build evidence for better teaching and learning. 

This presentation will share lessons learned from a recent SoTL grant that demonstrated the value of student-led research. The research emerged as a student noticed that many classmates seemed to experience very high levels of stress in their culinary classrooms, and through a SoTL grant, the student collaborated with faculty to further understand the degree and prevalence of students' stress during culinary labs, making recommendations to improve student well-being in lab classes and better prepare student to manage stressors in the industry.

Facilitator: Rebekah Glendinning (she/her), Librarian, Digital Literacy & AI and Christa Lochead (she/her), Librarian, Faculty Partnerships

​​​​Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 508

Description: Over the past few years, generative AI and related technologies have transformed how students and faculty conduct research and, in turn, how librarians approach the research environment. 

One significant development is the integration of AI tools into specialized databases. GBP librarians have developed a set of criteria and processes for evaluating these tools that reflect a distinct perspective, informed by in-depth research, analysis, and ongoing conversations with colleagues at other institutions. Along with directly influencing the resources provided by the library and our instructional practices, this work also informs how we assess more widely recognized AI tools. This practice has prompted a reconsideration of how to support the information literacy skills of students preparing for the workplace, and continued innovation around how to teach these skills.

In this session, we will share our unique perspectives as information practitioners on AI tool assessment and use, allowing faculty to take away key considerations for supporting and conducting research in a college setting.

Facilitator: Dr. Bahar Mousavi Hejazi (she/ her), Professor & Academic Coordinator, Art & Design Foundation Program, School of Design

Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 531

Description: This session explores the integration of research practices, collaborative learning, museum-based inquiry, and generative AI within first-year studio-based art and design education. Drawing from the Art Culture course in George Brown Polytechnic’s Art and Design Foundation program, the session examines how scaffolded research activities can support students in connecting historical inquiry, critical analysis, and creative production.

Many first-year students enter art and design programs with strong creative potential but limited experience in academic research, source evaluation, and translating historical knowledge into visual and conceptual work. To address this gap, research practices are embedded into collaborative and individual assignments through activities such as research question development, visual and historical analysis, concept mapping, timeline building, museum visits, and reflective writing. Museum-based learning encourages students to engage directly with artworks, visual culture, and curatorial contexts while strengthening observation, interpretation, and critical reflection skills.

The session will demonstrate how generative AI tools such as ChatGPT Edu can function as structured research companions that support ideation, organization, visual analysis, and reflective practice while maintaining student authorship and critical engagement. It will also highlight the role of library collaboration in supporting ethical and research-informed learning through librarian-led workshops, source verification, image licensing guidance, and information literacy instruction.

Participants will explore strategies for integrating AI into studio learning environments while reinforcing academic integrity, transparency, and responsible creative practice through evidence mapping, prompt documentation, and human verification processes. This session offers a forward-thinking and adaptable model for combining emerging technologies with experiential and polytechnic learning approaches to strengthen research literacy, collaboration, and ethical AI engagement in contemporary art and design education.

Facilitator: Anh Le-Noronha (she/her)

Format: In-person and online interactive

Room: WFL - 501

Description: Supporting diverse learners in postsecondary classrooms often brings a level of complexity that is not always visible in course design. Through my work as a classroom assistant supporting students registered with Accessibility Services at George Brown Polytechnic, I have observed how students engage, participate, and navigate learning in different ways across multiple courses.

This session draws on those classroom experiences to show how everyday teaching situations can reveal patterns in student learning. Rather than viewing these differences as challenges, the session reframes them as opportunities to design more inclusive and responsive learning environments. In this way, it connects directly to the conference theme by showing how classroom complexity can lead to meaningful instructional change.

The session highlights several recurring learner patterns, including students who work independently, those who benefit from structured guidance, learners who experience challenges with sustained attention, and students whose engagement may be less visible. Even with consistent note-taking support, some students may continue to struggle with focus, task initiation, and assignment completion. I have observed that when expectations are broken into smaller, clearly structured steps with direct guidance, some students are better able to begin tasks and participate more actively, while still needing support to work independently.

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of learner differences and with 3 to 4 practical strategies they can apply immediately. The session also models accessible and inclusive practices through clear structure, plain language, and multiple ways to engage.

Facilitator: Jennifer Lamarre (she/her), Professor and Lab Coordinator, Practical Nursing Program and Karen Olivero (she/her), Professor, Practical Nursing Program

Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 405

Description: This interactive session will showcase the development and implementation of a progressive lab case study model within the Practical Nursing skills lab. Designed to bridge the gap between classroom learning and clinical practice, this approach immerses Semester 1 nursing students in realistic patient care scenarios that evolve weekly throughout the semester.

Using a low-fidelity simulation model and faculty-led facilitation, students are guided through increasingly complex clinical situations that reflect the authentic role of the practical nurse. Rather than focusing solely on isolated skills, the progressive case study encourages students to think and act like novice nurses from the very beginning of their program.

Participants will explore how this teaching strategy supports the development of foundational nursing competencies, including:

• Clinical judgment and critical thinking
• Therapeutic and inter-professional communication
• Nursing assessment and documentation
• Team collaboration and patient-centered care
• Confidence and professional identity formation

This session highlights how early exposure to realistic, evolving clinical scenarios can promote student engagement, deepen understanding, and help new nursing students recognize the level of knowledge, responsibility, and clinical reasoning expected in contemporary nursing practice.

Facilitator: Dr. Viji Vibhu Prakash

Format: Online interactive

Room: WFL - 438

Description: As education evolves in response to increasing complexity and uncertainty, developing resilient, self-directed learners has become a critical priority. Recently, these points where highlighted in our PAC discussion as a critical need within the education domain.  This session introduces a practical approach using a Flipped Learning Companion that is intentionally designed for student engagement, adaptability, and resilience.

Participants will explore how repositioning direct instruction outside the classroom creates opportunities for deeper engagement, reflection, and active learning. The session will highlight how structured pre-class preparation, in-class application, and guided reflection can foster resilience and empower students to take ownership of their learning.

Drawing on classroom-based examples, this presentation will provide a clear framework that educators can adapt across disciplines to support future-ready learners.

Learning Outcomes: By the end of this session, participants will be able to: Identify key elements of flipped learning that support student resilience and engagement. Participants can apply a simple framework to design flipped experiences that promote active engagement, integrates reflective practices that strengthen student ownership and adaptability

Intended Audience: Post-secondary educators, instructional designers, and academic leaders interested in active and student-centered learning approaches.

Facilitator: Leslie Wexler (she/her), Tara Zabella (she/her)

​​​​Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 408

Description: Work-integrated learning is often described as a bridge between education and employment, yet many students are prepared mainly for securing placements rather than for the relational, ethical, and identity-shaping realities of work. This session shares early design conversations at George Brown Polytechnic between WIL curriculum development and Indigenous ways of knowing and being, shifting the focus from employability alone toward relational readiness.

Drawing on critical pedagogy and Indigenous-informed relational approaches, we ask how WIL might prepare students not only to enter workplaces, but also to participate in them thoughtfully, interpret them critically, and build relationships within them responsibly. We focus on five areas of consideration: introduction to WIL, networking, workplace professionalism, ethics and inclusion, and reflective practice. Across these familiar areas, we introduce relational considerations such as reciprocity, belonging, power, feedback, workplace culture, and values alignment.

Rather than treating WIL as a neutral pathway into existing workplace norms, this session asks deeper questions: What counts as professionalism, and who defines it? How might networking be reconceived as relationship-building rather than self-promotion? How do students respond when workplace expectations conflict with their values or sense of justice? What kinds of reflection help students and educators understand not only what they can do, but who they are becoming through work?

Participants will leave with practical ideas for moving WIL and design conversations from an add-on model toward a more integrated, relational, and critically engaged pedagogy. 

Facilitator: Desi Di Nardo, Student panel: Hanna Nucci, Daniel O'Connell

​​​​Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 431

Description: Poetry is a luminous pulse capable of transforming scattered classroom tension into collective, focused presence. In this interactive session, we explore how a single, vibrant poem—paired with a low‑stakes reflective prompt—spurs students to arrive grounded, curious, and ready to engage. This brief ritual recalibrates the emotional and intellectual climate of a learning space, easing anxiety for multilingual learners and strengthening authentic connection.

Scholarly grounded in an IGNITE‑funded exploration of imagination‑based pedagogy and informed by equity‑driven, trauma‑aware teaching, this practice offers an adaptable framework for turning classroom complexities into opportunities for intellectual belonging across both physical and digital polytechnic environments. Join us to gather a flexible, creative toolkit designed to anchor student attention, deepen curiosity, and make learning spaces come alive.

In this vibrant session, we will:

• Experience a multimodal poetry ritual that lowers performance anxiety while elevating human substance.
• Bridge theory and practice by learning to integrate this grounding pulse within any discipline.
• Leave with dynamic strategies to support student resilience and help every learner thrive.

This work extends my Ignite‑funded study by translating imagination‑based pedagogy into a scalable, low‑barrier practice that faculty across disciplines can adopt immediately.

Building on this research, I demonstrate how the ritual promotes belonging, reduces anxiety, and strengthens participation. Grounded in EDI‑informed practice, the approach lowers linguistic and performance barriers, supports multilingual learners, and validates students’ lived experiences as meaningful sources of knowledge. As students share interpretations, they begin to recognize echoes of themselves in one another, building community and a growing sense of belonging.

Over time, this imaginative entry point generates a dynamic classroom “buzz” — a subtle cohesion that enhances interaction, comprehension, and overall academic performance. Participants will experience the ritual firsthand, consider its theoretical foundations, and leave with adaptable strategies for integrating creative, inclusive, and resilience‑building practices into their own teaching.

Facilitator: Wren Alden (they/them)

​​​​Format: In-person and online interactive

Room: WFL - 436

Description: 2SLGBTQIA+ students are here. Our choices, intentional and not, make it harder for them to succeed. In this workshop, we’ll explore three main barriers that our curriculum and pedagogy choices produce, their impacts on all our students, and how to address them, using lenses of anti-racism and UDL. We’ll move from individualizing, deficit-based models to challenging our ideas of what’s “normal”, so everyone can show up as they’re comfortable. We’ll learn to use our power as instructors collaboratively to shape more equitable classroom norms, whether online, in-person, or hybrid. We’ll interrogate our curricula to find ways to meaningfully represent 2SLGBTQIA+, disabled, and many racialized experiences, integrating multiple ways of knowing throughout, rather than just as one-off special topics or weeks. Engage with our scenarios to discover insights and tensions and bring your course outlines to apply these tools to your own work. Together, we can make our learning environments work better for everyone.

Facilitator: Howard Gerhard

​​​​Format: In-person 

Room: WFL - 401

Description: Almost from the beginning, one of the aims of educational technology (perhaps unintended) has been to distance members of the teaching/learning exchange from each other, teacher from students, student from student and administration from all. This has led to the death of the classroom as a site where education takes place. This presentation and discussion review the history of this relentless separation at GBP and seek some understanding as to whether the disappearance of the classroom is what we all want or whether steps need to be taken to resurrect it.

In 1995, the City College News proclaimed “Attention cyberspace men and women: George Brown has made a first step into your world. The college recently posted its first world wide web site listing college programs and services. The site, which is accessible instantly from around the world by people with the right computers and software, is at www.gbrownc.on.ca.”

By 2024, almost 40% of the Polytechnic’s courses were online. The percentage is growing annually. And even within the classrooms that are still in use, participants remain anonymous, separated from each other with technologies from iClickers to Padlet, as machine talks to machine. Furthermore, students are diverted and removed from a common physical space through the Sirens’ call of their devices. What is lost? What is gained? There seems to be no going back.

Facilitator: Jen Porter, M.ADS, EdD, Jen Donnelly, M.ADS, RBA (Ont.), BCBA, Marina Jiujias, MS, RBA (Ont.), BCBA

Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 505

Description: AI use in classrooms is often framed as a problem of consequences—cheating, overreliance, and loss of critical thinking. This talk takes a different approach, using a behaviour analytic lens to argue that we design the contingencies that shape student behaviour, yet too often focus only on outcomes we cannot directly control.

Rather than reacting to AI use after it occurs, this session examines the antecedent conditions and setting events that make certain uses of AI more likely. What features of curriculum design, assessment practices, and pedagogy inadvertently reinforce surface-level engagement? How do time pressures, task structures, and evaluation methods function as establishing operations that increase reliance on AI tools?

Participants will explore how shifting from consequence-focused thinking to antecedent and contingency-based design can promote deeper learning and more intentional AI use. The session will offer practical examples of how small changes in instructional design can alter behavioural patterns, encouraging critical engagement rather than passive outsourcing.

This talk invites educators to reconsider their role not as enforcers of academic integrity after the fact, but as designers of environments that make meaningful learning—and responsible AI use—the path of least resistance.

Facilitator: Silvia Caicedo (she, her, elle), Professor, Pre-Health Sciences Programs and Associate, Teaching and Learning Exchange

Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 508

Description: Stop–Start–Continue is commonly used in classrooms as a feedback tool for students to evaluate teaching practices. While useful, this approach can unintentionally reinforce a model in which responsibility for learning is placed primarily on the instructor. This presentation reframes Stop–Start–Continue as a 360-degree reflective practice in which students, peers, and instructors all examine their contributions to the learning environment.

In this approach, Stop–Start–Continue is implemented within a classroom culture that intentionally suspends judgment, blame, and shame, and instead emphasizes responsibility, agency, and the conditions required for success. Students are asked not only what the instructor should stop, start, or continue doing, but also what they themselves and their peers should stop, start, and continue doing to support learning.

This shift transforms the activity from a feedback exercise into a reflective practice that encourages student ownership, vulnerability, and commitment to learning. The presentation will outline the pedagogical philosophy behind the approach, demonstrate how the activity is implemented, and share examples of student reflections that illustrate how responsibility for learning can be redistributed across the classroom community.

This strategy represents an adaptable and reflective teaching practice that supports polytechnic-ready learning by fostering student agency, shared responsibility, and deeper engagement in the learning process.

Facilitator: William Rose (he/him)

​​​​Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 501

Description: The facilitator will demonstrate a process of incorporating random AI / Google searches, and pre-determined / curated, AI searches, to engage students more in the lecture. This process visibly impacts students’ self-confidence, and willingness to engage in class discussion, when they are asked questions because they have “just in time” knowledge regarding the assigned topic(s). 
 
Near the end of the class time students are required to answer one or more short answer questions, from recall, based on what has been discussed during the class time.  The question(s) are in Brightspace with Lockdown Browser enabled, and students are not allowed to use their cell phones / another device, to look up the question(s).

Once students finish the question(s) they close Lockdown Browser and use their device to look up details / concepts from the question(s) they just answered, from memory, using AI. 
 
After several minutes of research time, students are given a second attempt to answer the same question(s) and focus on providing additional information they found during their research. Once again Brightspace with Lockdown Browser is used, and students are restricted from looking at any other device, which requires them to use their memory more fully.

Students must answer the first attempt at the question(s) to be eligible for a mark on the second attempt at the question(s).

For the Midterm and or Final, test questions are generated, from the weekly curated search questions, using Google NotebookLM to supplement existing test questions from the publisher and or the Professor’s materials.

Facilitator: Sujoy Paul (he/him)

​​​​Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 536

Description: By combining Retrieval Augmented Generation with the BLOOM methodology, the custom GPT moves beyond content delivery. Students interact with lecture materials(in PDF format) through ChatGPT Edu. However, the system will dynamically generate questions and tasks aligned to BLOOM’s cognitive levels—from remembering definitions (e.g., “What is clustering?”) to creating analytical models (e.g., “Design a forecasting solution for this case study”). RAG ensures answers are grounded in course material, thereby reducing hallucinations and reinforcing accurate, contextual knowledge.

While technology (RAG, GPT) enables this, the core transformation is pedagogical: shifting from passive reading to active, scaffolded reasoning. It supports differentiated learning, instant feedback, and higher-order thinking—key in analytics education, where application and synthesis matter most. This helps with digitizing existing resources. It also helps to redefine how students achieve mastery. Thus, it exemplifies innovation in teaching and learning, not just technology-driven change.

Facilitator: Dr. Linda Gillis, Professor and Chef Warren Ford, Professor

Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 436

Description: Get ready for an energizing session! We’ll share key insights from a college and community research partnership that included focus groups and a randomized control trial that uncovered the impact of Food for Mood. You’ll see how we helped young adults build confidence in the kitchen while learning how nutrients fuel the mind. With mental‑health waitlists growing longer and support often hard to access, giving young people simple, food‑based tools they can use right away has never been more important. While food isn’t a substitute for professional care, it can nurture resilience and a sense of empowerment during the wait. You’ll explore mind‑fueling foods through a cooking demonstration and hands on activities. You will walk away with practical strategies to help young people bring these habits into daily life. Join us to inspire healthier choices and empower brighter futures—one meal at a time.

Facilitator: Taciano Messias Moraes (he/him), Professor, Digital Product Management

Format: In-person

Room: WFL - 401

Description: AI in education is genuinely complex, raising real questions about academic integrity, evaluation, equity, and what learning is actually for. In recent years, students have been using AI regardless of policy; the real question isn’t whether they use it, but whether we can design learning experiences where using it well becomes the real challenge. This session doesn’t sidestep those questions, it starts with them.

At the same time, AI is disrupting long-established, multi-billion-dollar industries, and education is no exception. How we choose to integrate it, and how openly we debate and engage with its impacts, will be critical to navigating this moment as a society.
In the Digital Product Management Capstone at George Brown, AI is embedded across a two-semester experiential sequence where students build real products: validating problems, writing PRDs, developing MVPs, and getting feedback from real users. This session shares what that integration looks like in practice, what worked, what didn't, and what it revealed about students, tools, and teaching.

For educators at any stage of thinking about AI. Skeptics welcome.