CLT Symposium Keynote II: Connection, Curiosity, and Care: Practical Strategies of Teaching Today

The intersecting crises facing higher education – and our world – raise fundamental questions about the purposes and practices of teaching in higher education today. Can faculty trust students to use generative AI appropriately in their academic work? Do students trust faculty to teach and assess in ways that support meaningful learning? Can students trust each other enough to engage seriously in class discussions and group activities? And in radically dynamic and disrupted world, what’s the point of undergraduate education at all? This session will explore practical, research-informed strategies for teaching in ways that cultivate connection, curiosity, and care – which are foundational to learning and well-being for students, and for us. You will leave the session with ideas you can adapt and use in your teaching – without requiring you to devote even more of your time to your students. Speaker Biography: Peter Felten is a professor of history, executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, and assistant provost for teaching and learning at Elon University. He has published nine books about higher education, including Connections are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education (2023) and The SoTL Guide: (Re)Orienting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (2025). Both of those co-authored books have an open-access online version free to all readers. His next book, Scaling Relationship-Rich Education: How Institutions Builds Cultures Where Students Thrive, will be published next year by Johns Hopkins University Press. He is on the advisory board of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and is a fellow of the Gardner Institute and of the Centre for Belonging in Education.