2026 Inaugural Faculty Showcase Series
Thursday, November 12, 2026 - 2 PM - 5:30 PM
DePaul University - Schmitt Academic Center
Chicago, IL
What to Expect
The Center for Teaching and Learning, in collaboration with the Office of Research Services, invites you to join the Faculty Showcase Series, highlighting the research, creative activity, teaching strategies, and scholarly work taking place across DePaul University.
The afternoon will begin with doors opening at 1:30 p.m. and welcome remarks at 2:10 p.m., followed by three blocks of 30-minute faculty presentations. Presentations within each block will take place concurrently in separate rooms, allowing attendees to choose the topics most relevant to their interests. The program will conclude with student poster presentations and networking from 4:45 to 5:30 p.m.
Attendees are encouraged to review the presentation schedule below to plan their visit and explore opportunities to connect with colleagues across colleges and disciplines.
Faculty Presenters
Session 1
This interactive workshop introduces a practical approach to using artificial intelligence as a reflective partner in teaching. Drawing on classroom-based analysis, the session explores how patterns of student success and failure can remain invisible to instructors, even in courses they have designed and taught themselves. Using a case study from an undergraduate course, participants will examine how data from a course grade book can reveal underlying structures that shape student outcomes, particularly the role of early engagement and sustained participation. Rather than focusing on AI as a tool for generating content or automating tasks, the session reframes AI as a means of amplifying instructor insight and supporting course redesign.
The session will move from narrative to application. Participants will bring or examine a sample grade book excerpt and apply a guided protocol for identifying engagement patterns. They will consider how different students experience the same course in structurally different ways and how those differences can contribute to predictable patterns of success or failure. The session will conclude with a guided process that participants can adapt to their own teaching contexts.
This teaching strategy and best-practice session examines approaches to using artificial intelligence in graduate-level writing assignments while providing clear guidance to students, supporting fair assessment, and maintaining academic integrity. The presentation begins with an overview of the Artificial Intelligence Assessment Scale (AIAS), a framework developed by a group of educators from multiple countries and adopted across educational levels. The framework provides a way for educators to design assessments that explicitly account for students’ use of AI tools.
The session will then examine how the Master of Public Health program has adopted writing assessments using the AIAS model. Participants will engage in discussion about their own or their departments’ efforts to develop assessments aligned with AI use. Key themes from the discussion will be shared so that participants can begin developing plans for implementing what they learn within their own academic units. Although the examples are drawn from graduate-level education, the presentation is also intended to be applicable to faculty working with undergraduate students.
Session 2
This teaching strategy and best-practice presentation examines the use of oral exams as an alternative approach to assessing critical thinking in the age of artificial intelligence. Creating assessments that effectively evaluate critical thinking without sacrificing limited instructional time in a 10-week course can be challenging, particularly in asynchronous and hybrid asynchronous courses. Williams & Gillespie will discuss the implementation of oral assessments across three different course contexts, highlighting strengths, limitations, lessons learned, and student perceptions of satisfaction and difficulty.
By the end of the session, participants will be able to describe practical considerations and logistical factors involved in implementing oral assessments across hybrid and synchronous instructional formats. They will examine the strengths and limitations of oral assessments as both formative and summative assessment methods and consider student perceptions related to satisfaction, anxiety, and perceived difficulty. Participants will also explore how oral assessments can assess reasoning, application of knowledge, and critical thinking and will apply lessons learned from oral assessment implementation to the design of other assessments within AI-influenced learning environments.
This research presentation and community-engaged session presents findings from Chris Chukwuedo’s current book project, Brick City Children: The Early Roots of Legal Estrangement. The project introduces Early Childhood Legal Estrangement Theory (ECLET), which extends Monica Bell’s legal estrangement framework, originally developed to explain adults’ relationships to law, into middle childhood. The session will address the methodological and ethical dimensions of conducting research with young children on policing and trauma.
Participants will leave with a working understanding of legal estrangement theory and its extension into childhood, practical and ethical considerations for conducting qualitative research with child participants on difficult subject matter, and a sense of how today’s student researchers are building on and pushing beyond established frameworks in criminology.
The session is particularly relevant to faculty who conduct research with children, youth, or other vulnerable populations, as well as those who teach qualitative methods, research ethics, or IRB navigation. It also offers a case study in interdisciplinary theory-building that may be useful to faculty in education, social work, psychology, public health, law, criminology, and sociology.
Session 3
This session explores approaches for fostering information-seeking and questioning behaviors that support curiosity, critical thinking, and continuous learning to help students develop confidence in the inquiry process.
Students have nearly unlimited access to information, yet many struggle with determining where to begin, identifying who/what to trust, and how to navigate the information ecosystem. In this interactive session, participants will reflect on instructional practices that can create classroom environments where questions are welcomed, uncertainty is normalized, and intellectual risk-taking is encouraged. The ability to seek, evaluate, and use information effectively is foundational to learning across academic disciplines. Whether students are interpreting scientific evidence, analyzing historical artifacts, evaluating data, or engaging with creative works, curiosity, questioning, and information-seeking are important skills for academic success and lifelong learning.
By the end of the session, participants will be able to explain how instructional practices influence students’ information-seeking behaviors, curiosity, and willingness to ask questions; apply instructional strategies that encourage questioning, uncertainty, and intellectual risk-taking; and design or adapt a classroom activity or assignment that promotes information seeking, critical questioning, and independent learning.
A 10-week quarter moves quickly. Students are learning course content while also navigating feedback, building confidence, developing new skills, and making meaning of their experiences. Faculty and staff make decisions throughout this process about what students need, how they interpret student engagement, and which opportunities they create for learning.
This interactive session explores how educator mindsets influence the learning environment and how students experience that environment over time. Drawing on research on faculty expectations, growth mindset, self-efficacy, and asset-based teaching, participants will examine the assumptions that shape learning and consider how small changes in teaching, feedback, and student support can create more opportunities for students to thrive.
Through collaborative scenarios and reflection, participants will explore how to recognize student strengths, maintain high academic expectations, and support both the visible and less visible work of learning.
Event Schedule
Note: Attendees may come and go throughout the event.
1:30 p.m. — Doors Open
2:10 p.m. — Welcome & Introductions
2:30–3:00 p.m. — Faculty Presentations 1
3:00–3:15 p.m. — Break
3:15–3:45 p.m. — Faculty Presentations 2
3:45–4:00 p.m. — Break
4:00–4:30 p.m. — Faculty Presentations 3
4:30–4:45 p.m. — Break
4:45–5:30 p.m. — Student Poster Presentations & Networking