ISLS 2026 Agenda

Tuesday, June 16 · 14 sessions

1:00 PM

1 option

Plenary Session · Barclay

Keynote: Imagination, Impact, and Epistemic Justice

Artist and educator Marisa Moran Jahn shares two decades of socially engaged work, arguing that joyful, playful, and imaginative approaches drive broad-scale social impact and epistemic justice. Examples range from the Bibliobandido literacy movement in rural Honduras to the CareForce project amplifying domestic workers' voices through mobile studios and film.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency

2:00 PM

1 option

Arts Gallery & Performance

Arts Gallery & Performance - Static Installations All Week

A week-long static gallery of arts-based installations exploring learning through the body, culture, materials, and emerging technology. Works span trans body politics and abolitionist imaginaries, immersive VR/AR and digital reading, and craft-based math via crochet, paper, and youth creative computing with community data art.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

30 talks

2:30 PM

7 options scroll

Short Paper · ALP 1100

Collaborative learning with sociocultural considerations

Short papers on collaborative learning shaped by cultural and social context, from board-game redesign grounded in distributed cognition and culturally relevant pedagogy to belonging for minority computer science students. Several examine partnership-based work, including student-AI problem-solving, cross-disciplinary mentorship, and a 16-year Japanese lesson-study RPP.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

5 talks

Symposium · ALP 1300

Learning With and Against Place Towards Spatial Justice

A symposium on how learners conceptualize and engage with places, highlighting the gap between learning with a place versus about it and complicating notions of places as good or bad. Cases range from shifting ideas of a "developed" place to children resisting visions of their school as policed and communities resisting simplified representations.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency

Short Paper · ALP 2200

AI Human Interaction

Short papers on how learners interact with AI across higher education and accessible STEM contexts. Topics include student-AI relationships and shared agency, generative AI for design iteration, accessible games for blind and low-vision learners, and AI-enabled dialogic leadership training.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

5 talks

Long Paper · ALP 2600

Communities and Contexts

Long papers examining learning across communities and contexts, from high schoolers cultivating future-oriented identities to digital accountability in new-teacher mentoring dialogue. Additional work probes youth authority in environmental engineering curriculum co-design and reconceptualizes psychometrics to treat context as intrinsic to learning.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

4 talks

Short Paper · ALP 2700

Arts, Expressions, Identity

Short papers exploring how the arts support identity work, wellness, and disciplinary learning, from artmaking with youth and non-judgmental art pedagogy to reconstructing disabled identities in undergraduate courses. Other talks link art-making to computational thinking, integrate arts with science teaching, and examine trans* body politics in sport.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

Long Paper · ALP 3600

Play and Games

Long papers on play, games, and young children's mathematics, including how kindergarteners negotiate teacher-designed playworlds and how teacher-child tensions during math play become sites of learning. Other talks present a three-prong framework for theory-based math games and the design of transformational games for socio-ethical reasoning about generative AI.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

4 talks

Long Paper · ALP 3610

Dialogue and Collaboration

Papers on dialogue and collaboration across varied settings, including relational attunement in making, medical students shifting from cooperation to true collaboration, and parents revoicing to guide children's computational thinking. Further talks examine how language shapes access to tools and how productive confusion unfolds during VR collaboration.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

5 talks

4:30 PM

5 options scroll

Short Paper · ALP 1120

Agency, Equity, and Social Justice in Learning Sciences

Short papers on agency, equity, and social justice in learning, including epistemic engagement in multilingual science, rule-breaking as a design affordance, and frameworks for hands-on open science in K-5. Other talks trace racialized assemblages in AP biology, recognition for minoritized STEM instructors, and infrastructuring for climate justice in making.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

Long Paper · ALP 2200

Activity System Structures and Shifts

Using activity theory and CHAT, these papers trace how learning systems shift and are structured across out-of-school STEM, district AI capacity-building, classroom makerspaces, and medical simulation. Threads include brokering family engagement, peer networks for K-12 AI, student-driven sociocultural change, and epistemic justice in standardized-patient training.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

4 talks

Symposium · ALP 2300

Understanding and Supporting Teachers during Times of Transition throughout their Career

A symposium on the boundary crossings and transitions teachers experience across their careers and how these shape learning and practice. Contrasting empirical contexts and theoretical lenses help identify core characteristics of teacher transitions and how to better support educators through them.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency

Long Paper · ALP 3600

Data Literacy and Computational Thinking

Long papers on data literacy and computational thinking, from comparing how students engage data practices in agricultural STEM to exploring spatiotemporal data through a space-time cube interface. Additional work operationalizes epistemic data agency at a data-storytelling camp and uses paper-based aids to support computational problem-solving with robotics.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

4 talks

Arts Gallery & Performance · ALP 3700

#1281: Let It Go & Lost and Found in Chi-Town: Short One-Person Productions

A practice-based arts performance and research presentation on how interdisciplinary arts facilitate trauma recovery and self-agency among incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth. Drawing on two decades of practitioner-researcher work, it uses solo dramatic interpretations, songs, and podcasts to amplify marginalized voices and spark dialogue on mass incarceration and racial equity.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency