NEXT CONFERENCE: MAY 23-28, 2025
NEXT CONFERENCE: MAY 23-28, 2025
We’re doing teaching conferences differently.
Bring together faculty, graduate student instructors, undergraduate students, and other education professionals who are devoted to inspirational teaching and learning. Take everyone away from campus, from their phones, from offices, and from professional obligations. Surround them with forests, water, and wildlife. Offer them full days of workshop activities exploring teaching through highly interactive large and small group presentations, discussion groups, and hands-on experiential sessions. This is the recipe that the Conference on Inspiring College Teaching (CICT) uses to inspire education professionals to become better teachers in and out of the classroom.
CICT is five days of programming that inspires college educators to inspire learners. The support for teaching and learning at CICT comes from research, personal experience, and collaborative thinking. The camp setting is deliberately informal, with no paid presenters and no distinction by academic rank. Most activities occur in small groups, facilitating learning, building trust, and fostering networking. Participants are encouraged to spend time in nature during the conference, and there is time set aside for reflection on teaching and for professional rejuvenation.
CICT is sponsored by the Wakonse Foundation, whose mission is to support, promote, and share the excitement and satisfaction of teaching– to inspire students and ourselves.
What is the Conference on Inspiring College Teaching?
Not just informative but transformative
Longtime participants and newcomers alike report that sharing strategies, challenges, and innovations with colleagues rekindles their passion and replenishes their emotional reserves for teaching.
Participants return to their home institutions to share what they’ve learned with their peers. The insights they gain at the conference not only transform their own classrooms but also ripple out to enhance their colleagues' teaching, reshaping students' experiences across the university.
Who attends the CICT?
CICT is for new and experienced faculty, graduate student instructors, administrators, and staff who work with college students. Concurrent with the teaching conference is an undergraduate leadership conference that periodically brings educators and students together to share ideas about effective and inspiring education.
Conference Programming
Everyone who attends this conference takes an active role in the presentations and conversations about teaching and learning. There are five ways of presenting at this conference, and most participants engage in two or more of them.
Community Forums
These are plenary sessions in which one person or a panel presents a topic of interest or facilitates an activity for all participants. These typically last 45 to 60 minutes.
1
Concurrent Sessions
In concurrent sessions, one person or a panel gives a workshop or demonstration on a given topic. Or two or three participants present more traditional papers or studies on a topic and then facilitate discussion afterward. These sessions typically last about 45 minutes.
2
Concurrent Discussions
Similar to concurrent sessions; concurrent discussions are not presentations by any designated individuals. Rather, they are a time for people to come together to talk about issues they have in their own teaching or other aspects of professional life. These are great opportunities to brainstorm solutions and, if the group comes up with particularly interesting ideas, they may choose to present these in later concurrent sessions. Concurrent discussions generally last about 45 minutes.
3
Activity Sessions
In activity sessions, a participant or group uses their personal or professional talents to organize and host an activity for other participants, such as ceramics, yoga, geocaching, cemetery tour, dune hike, meditation, musical performance or lesson, printmaking, board games, camp trail run, beach walk, etc. The duration of activity sessions can be extremely flexible and can be arranged for early morning, afternoon, or evening activity times.
4
Dialogue Groups
All conference participants belong to a dialogue group that meets regularly throughout the conference to reflect on challenges and strategies for conquering them. These are guided by two dialogue group facilitators who have attended the conference previously and who train before the conference to support participants.
5
Wondering what life at CICT looks like?
After attending in 2023, I encouraged my son, who works in the Educational Opportunity Center (TRIO Programs) at Western, to attend the 2024 conference with me. He said it changed his life (no small feat) and he plans to attend next year – and he’s recruiting his co-workers to join us. Not only that, he’ll also have the treasured memory of his dad rapping a Run-DMC song at the Sunday night Chautauqua (talent show) for the rest of his life.
From the meals that were provided in an environment that promoted lively and engaging conversations, to the sessions that motivated us to leave our comfort zones and think outside the confines of boxes that we didn’t even realize we were in, to the dialog groups that encouraged everyone to speak their truth in a relaxed, completely safe and nonjudgmental setting, I learned more at Wakonse than probably I did at the previous ten conferences or professional meetings I had attended. And I made friends with some phenomenal folks that I’ll probably cherish until my time on this planet comes to an end.
It’s one thing to sit around and discuss potential application of theory to practice in a conference room or while holding a glass of wine at the reception before the keynote, it’s another to dissect those same concepts in a laid-back exchange where the total focus is on the efficacy of the ideas themselves. If you teach at a college or university, if you are a graduate student interested in teaching – or if you work in higher education in any capacity, my sense is that you’d enjoy the Conference on Inspiring College Teaching.
-Aaron W. Hughey, EdD University Distinguished Professor Department of Counseling and Student Affairs Western Kentucky University
I am from Ghana, and I am currently finishing up my Master's in Language Teaching (Spanish). My first time attending the conference was in May 2023. My experience was so amazing that I had to bring seven of my colleagues to the next one in 2024.
This conference has allowed me to speak with well-resourced personnel across various fields of study that cut across a broad spectrum. The location of the conference, Camp Miniwanca on Lake Michigan, also played a vital role in setting the tone for the amazing conversations, debriefing sessions, dialogue groups, and community-building sessions we had. I got to learn from and be mentored by amazing teachers.
Although this conference is principally geared towards teaching, I also learned about the brain and human development. I understood the dynamics of how teaching and learning can be related to various fields of interest. I also contributed to the various discussions, which were so amazing.
I highly encourage you to join us to benefit from this rich body of knowledge.
-Matteo Totime, Graduate Instructor Spanish Department; Secretary Missouri International Student Council (MISC), University of Missouri
