Call for Proposals: NEFDC 2025 Fall Conference

50-Minute Interactive Sessions, 25 Minute Teaching Tips Sessions, and Poster Sessions

Deadline to Submit: August 15, 2025

Submit Your Proposal
(Please check the important notes below before you submit your proposal.)

NEFDC Fall Conference at College of the Holy Cross on October 17, 2025 features keynote speaker Dr. Tracie Marcella Addy, a national leader in inclusive and evidence-based teaching. As co-author of What Inclusive Instructors Do, Dr. Addy’s scholarship centers on practical strategies that help educators create equitable, student-centered learning environments. Her keynote, Teaching That Aligns With Our Values, will invite participants to reflect on how our teaching choices reveal, reinforce, and sometimes challenge our most important values.

We invite college faculty, staff, instructional designers, and educational leaders from across New England to submit proposals for both 50-minute interactive sessions, 25 minute teaching Tip sessions, and Poster sessions that offer practical, transferable teaching ideas grounded in your values.

Each session proposal should:

• Present a concrete teaching tip, strategy, or practice
• Be interactive and participatory (not a lecture or panel)
• Demonstrate alignment between values and instructional choices

Proposal focus could include:

• Inclusive course design and creating compassionate, brave learning spaces
• Role of Teaching Centers to support faculty during complex times
• Navigating tensions between values and institutional or external constraints
• Rethinking grading for equity and learning
• Collaborative learning rooted in community-building
• Active learning strategies and metacognition as tools for inclusion
• Trauma-informed teaching practices
• Authentic assessment
• Culturally responsive teaching and content design
• Teaching reflection tools or rituals
• Navigating classroom tensions, perspective taking, and unbiased teaching
• Other inclusive teaching practices using technology

Proposal details:

• Session Length: 50 minute interactive session OR 25 minute teaching tip OR Poster sessions
• Deadline to Submit: ( August 15, 2025)
• Submission Form: (Submit Your Proposal Link)
• Decisions Announced: (Decision dates by mid September)

Share your best ideas:

This conference offers a space for educators at all stages and from all disciplines to learn from each other’s teaching wisdom. We especially welcome proposals from voices that are underrepresented in faculty development and higher education scholarship. Let’s collectively explore how teaching can be a reflection of what we most believe.