CFP: Extended Deadline: Possible Futures: Imagining What Education Can Be (summer 2026 conference)

The deadline for proposals for the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning’s 2026 annual conference, Possible Futures: Imagining What Education Can Be, has been extended to Monday, December 5 by 5pm Eastern. Full details and a link to the submission form follows below. Please join us!

Nate MickelsonAEPL Chair
Clinical Professor and Director of Faculty Development
Expository Writing Program
New York University

Possible Futures: Imagining What Education Can Be

Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (AEPL)

Thurs, June 25 – Sun, June 28, 2026

University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)

**EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Monday, December 5, 2025**

In a time of uncertainty and institutional retrenchment, we gather to explore how confusion can become generative, how resistance can nurture belonging, and how collective imagination can light the way forward. Meeting on the edge of the California Coast and peering into the mighty Pacific Ocean, we’ll imagine how we might best meet the challenges and possibilities of the present while acknowledging and reckoning with the personal and shared wounds we carry. Through experiential workshops, collaborative writing, engagement forums, exhibitions and performances, and encounters with wilderness, we will explore our roles as teachers, writers, and colleagues. This conference and scholarly retreat invites college and K-12 educators, writers, artists, and learners to create individual and collective stories that can best serve the present moment and the contested future. With your contributions, the gathering will offer space to pause, reflect, and imagine what education can become when we refuse to turn back nostalgically and choose, instead, to invest in each other. Come ready to write, think, and dream together as we cultivate unexpected resources and strategies for resilient teaching and invest in each other. Join us at the edge of possibility!

Invitation & Call for Proposals: Our goal is to merge the nourishment of writing and spiritual retreats with the knowledge-sharing and knowledge-making of scholarly gatherings. In addition to the general themes of reckoning with the wounds we carry, reimagining the present, and framing the possible futures, we invite proposals addressing how we can:

• Write (and narrate and create) to nurture ourselves and our communities

• Expand learning beyond traditional sites—into community, activism, performance, and healing

• Employ alternative ways of knowing, including storytelling, art-making, mindfulness, and embodied practice, as forms of pedagogical dissent

• Bridge divides–of disciplines, literacies, identities, grade levels, emotion and reason–to perceive the oneness that connects us all

• Navigate the emotional and ethical labor of teaching in hostile or compromised environments

• Invest in each other when the institutions in which we have invested are failing us

• Make what’s good in our classrooms and institutions feel good while continuing to confront what’s bad

• Activate the legacies of AEPL elders Peter Elbow, James Moffett, Sondra Perl, and others from whom we’ve learned to value all students’ voices and perspectives

• Cultivate experiences of home and belonging for ourselves, our students, and our colleagues, wherever we are

To propose: Please submit a session description and short biography (max. 250 words each) through the form linked here (or at https://forms.gle/mnno1uE4ChnUYtNT9). The form asks you to indicate the type of session you are proposing and the length you prefer. The extended deadline to submit is 5pm Eastern on Mon, Dec 5. Notifications of acceptance will be announced by Mon, Dec 19.

Session formats: We seek proposals from individuals and groups–K-12 educators, college educators, artists, writers, and others–for experiential workshops, lesson demonstrations, engagement forums on emerging research and teaching approaches, exhibitions and performances, roundtables, and other activities that invite participants to write, think, and collaborate together. Sessions will be 30 or 60 minutes. The organizers will facilitate collaborations among individual presenters engaging related questions and topics.

• Experiential Workshop: Lead participants in activities that prompt personal or/and pedagogical engagement, writing, and reflection

• Lesson Demonstration: Guide participants through a lesson, assignment, unit, or class you’ve designed and highlight successes, questions, challenges, and insights

• Exhibition or Performance: Share creative work in your preferred media: visual art, a reading of poetry or prose, a dramatic performance, and others.

• Engagement Forum Contribution: Share preliminary plans or findings from a new research project or teaching approach in a small group setting

• Roundtable: Join (or lead) a focused discussion on contesting what the future of writing, reading, literature, or literacy education can be

Special invitation to students: We are keen to welcome undergraduate and graduate students from across disciplines, majors, and specializations as participants and workshop leaders. To make participation possible, we offer scholarships and discounted registration and membership rates.

Estimated Costs: Registration and membership costs are used to fund publication of AEPL’s award-winning, peer-reviewed journal JAEPL. Given the nature and location of this in-person conference, we want to be as clear as possible how you might estimate your expenses, including registration and membership fees, lodging, and meals related to this event.

We are committed to making participation accessible. To this end, we are partnering with UCSB to offer single or double-occupancy rooms in the new San Joaquin apartment complex on campus, a short walk from the meeting rooms. No-cost shuttle service will be provided to/from the rooms.

While there is no requirement that conference participants stay or eat at the USCB facility, we do encourage staying on site. We have reserved a block of rooms for attendees near the meeting rooms and the dining hall for your convenience. These modern, apartment-style rooms include three bedrooms (single or double occupancy) and two private bathrooms, accommodating up to 6 persons. We will be happy to help you if you need assistance in finding a roommate, just indicate so on the registration form.

Transportation: The Santa Barbara Airport is a 10-minute drive from the conference venue and often costs the same or less to fly to than Los Angeles (LAX). The organizers will arrange vanpool transportation from the Santa Barbara airport to the conference venue. For those flying to LAX, there is a regular shuttle service (the Santa Barbara Airbus) that offers free wifi and a comfortable ride.

Make a Vacation of it! For those wishing to come early or stay later, the UCSB campus is ideally located for a range of family and personal excursions. Stunning public beaches, state parks, and forests are accessible within minutes, including Goleta Beach Park, Refugio State Beach, and Los Padres National Forest. Other nearby sites include Chumash Painted Cave State Historic Park, which documents and preserves the culture of the indigenous Chumash people; and the 19th century Santa Inés Mission; and the Danish enclave of Solvang. The Pacific Coast Highway, Greater Los Angeles, Joshua Tree National Park, and the Mojave Desert are within driving distance!