ISETL 2027 Conference
Dialogue Across Disciplines: Active Learning, Meaningful Connection, and Teaching in a Changing World
April 6–8, 2027
Indiana University Capital Campus | Washington, DC
Teaching is changing.
Emerging technologies, evolving student expectations, and expanding understandings of access are reshaping higher education. Yet curiosity, dialogue, connection, reflection, and the willingness to learn together remain at the heart of meaningful educational experiences.
At the 2027 ISETL Conference, educators from across disciplines, institutions, roles, and countries will gather in Washington, DC, to explore these changes together.
Dialogue Across Disciplines invites us to ask important questions about the future of teaching and learning: How can we create learning environments where students actively participate? How can we strengthen connection, presence, and belonging? How should we respond thoughtfully to artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies? And what can we discover when educators with different perspectives bring their experiences into conversation?
ISETL is a place to explore, share, question, experiment, and connect.
What to Expect
Ideas You Can Use
Discover research, practices, experiments, and innovations from educators working across disciplines and educational settings. ISETL sessions are designed not simply to showcase good work, but to generate ideas you can adapt to your own students, courses, programs, and institutions.
An Interactive Conference
We believe a conference about teaching and learning should practice what it promotes.
Alongside traditional presentations, you’ll find interactive workshops, discussions, posters, and opportunities to experience teaching strategies rather than simply hear about them. Expect to participate, ask questions, exchange ideas, and contribute your own expertise.
Meaningful Connection
ISETL is intentionally designed to make conversation and connection part of the conference experience.
Our size makes it possible to meet colleagues beyond your own discipline, continue conversations between sessions, find potential collaborators, and become part of a community committed to improving teaching and learning.
Dialogue Across Disciplines
Some of the most interesting ideas emerge when we move beyond our usual disciplinary boundaries. ISETL brings together educators who might rarely attend the same professional conference—and gives them opportunities to learn from one another.
Who Should Attend?
ISETL welcomes anyone committed to improving postsecondary teaching and learning, including:
- Faculty, instructors, and adjunct faculty
- Educational researchers and scholars of teaching and learning
- Educational developers and faculty development professionals
- Instructional designers
- Academic leaders and administrators
- Graduate students and emerging scholars
- Others who support teaching and learning in higher education
Whether you have attended ISETL for years or this will be your first conference, you are welcome in the conversation.
What Will We Explore?
The 2027 conference will include work addressing teaching and learning across disciplines, institutional types, educational contexts, and career stages. Topics may include:
- Active, experiential, and high-impact learning
- Student engagement, motivation, participation, and persistence
- Presence, connection, belonging, and relationship-building
- Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies
- Assessment and student learning in an AI-rich environment
- Authentic and alternative assessment
- Evidence-based teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning
- Inclusive and accessible pedagogy
- Interdisciplinary teaching and learning
- Faculty development and mentoring
- Teaching across modalities
- Innovative course, curriculum, and program design
- International and cross-cultural perspectives
- Approaches that didn’t work as expected—and what we can learn from them
These topics are starting points, not boundaries. If you’re exploring an important question about teaching and learning, we want you in the conversation.
Share. Do. Discuss.
The 2027 conference offers three ways to contribute.
SHARE | 20 Minutes
Present research, a case study, teaching innovation, program, promising practice, or lesson learned. Share sessions combine focused presentation with opportunities for dialogue.
DO | 40 Minutes
Lead a highly interactive session in which participants actively experience, practice, explore, design, create, discuss, or solve something. If doing is essential to the learning, this is your format.
POSTER
Share research, teaching innovations, works in progress, program initiatives, or emerging ideas through informal conversation and visual presentation. Posters may be up to 36 × 48 inches (91 × 122 cm) in either orientation.
Scholarship and practice are equally welcome. You do not need to have completed a formal research study to make a meaningful contribution to ISETL.
Call for Proposals
Proposal Deadline: December 4, 2026
Notification of Decisions: January 29, 2027
Proposals will be reviewed for their relevance to teaching and learning, clarity of purpose, quality of scholarship or practice, usefulness to participants, participant takeaways, and fit with the selected session format.
Practice-based contributions will be evaluated as practice-based work; empirical research will be evaluated according to the rigor appropriate to the research described.
Why ISETL?
Passionate About Pedagogy. Purposeful About Practice.
For more than five decades, ISETL has brought educators together around a simple idea: we become better teachers when we explore teaching and learning together.
ISETL traces its history to the International Audio-Tutorial Congress founded in 1970. Across changing technologies, educational movements, and even organizational names, the society has maintained a commitment to innovative, interactive approaches to college and university teaching. Its conference has hosted thousands of presentations, demonstrations, conversations, and collaborations focused on improving higher education. ISETL
That tradition continues in Washington, DC.
Come with your research.
Come with your questions.
Come with something you’ve tried.
Come with something you’re still figuring out.
Come prepared to share, prepared to do, and prepared to learn from one another.
Join Us in Washington, DC
April 6–8, 2027
Indiana University Capital Campus