ISLS 2026 Agenda

Wednesday, June 17 · 22 sessions

8:00 AM

7 options scroll

Arts Gallery & Performance

#1184: Looking Through the Lens: How Youth Practice Perspective-Shifting Through Filmmaking

A screening of four youth-produced short films from Spy Hop's Voices of the West media intensive in Utah, paired with research on how young filmmakers practice perspective-shifting. The selected works span a documentary, a YouTube-tutorial parody, an anxiety-themed narrative, and a nostalgic piece on community spaces.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency

Short Paper · ALP 1100

Maker educations

These maker-education papers examine identity, literacy, and collaboration across making contexts, including crafting and engineering identities, collaborative lore-building between marginalized girls, and computational literacies in an agricultural class. Additional talks probe what multimodal AI sees versus facilitator expertise, reflection quality and self-efficacy, and sustainable 3D clay printing.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

Short Paper · ALP 1110

Math education and teachers learning

Short papers address mathematics education and teacher learning, from participatory co-analysis of clinical interviews to the affective dynamics of whiteness in professional learning conversations. Other talks examine undergraduate conceptions of technology, mathematical values in algebra problem-solving, teacher sensemaking, and co-learning toward equity-oriented instruction.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

Long Paper · ALP 1700

Culturally Responsive Design

These papers show how culturally responsive and sustaining design supports learning and identity, from leveraging students' cultural resources in university physics to a robotic Punjabi Dhol for embodied music learning. Further talks examine Diné digital storytelling and relational, culturally sustaining computing with Tibetan diaspora girls.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

4 talks

Short Paper · ALP 2500

Socio-Emotional & Group Dynamics

Five short papers examine the emotional and social side of collaboration, from team functioning and leadership in pediatric medical simulations to regulating epistemic emotions in higher- versus lower-performing CSCL groups. Other talks cover teacher learning on WhatsApp, a fifth-grade SEL digital curriculum, and boundary-crossing STEM competencies in global informal programs.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

5 talks

Short Paper · ALP 2700

Teachers learning and agency

These papers explore teacher learning, agency, and positioning, including reinterpreting project-based learning in Kazakhstan and how inclusive 'we' discourse shapes belonging in science. Further talks treat customization dilemmas, teacher positioning during student game redesign, resistance as a professional resource, and autonomy in informal learning.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

Arts Gallery & Performance · Screening Room / Theatre (1070 McCormick Screening Room)

#1203: #SlowLS

A video performance examining time, movement, and rest through a scholar living at the intersection of academia and chronic illness, with footage replayed at varying speeds amid campus foot traffic. #SlowLS prompts viewers to question the rushed 'two-a-year' pace of academia and how disability might help resist its pressures.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency

10:00 AM

10 options scroll

Arts Gallery & Performance

#1184: Looking Through the Lens: How Youth Practice Perspective-Shifting Through Filmmaking

Four short films from Spy Hop's "Voices of the West" media-production intensive in Utah showcase how youth filmmakers make multimodal artistic decisions while shifting perspective. The selection spans a documentary on a local restaurant, a parody YouTube tutorial subverting the superhero genre, a film on anxiety from social media, and a nostalgic piece on a community movie theater.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency

Practice Paper · ALP 1100

Collaborative Design Structures in Researcher and Practitioner Partnerships

Six practice papers describe how researchers and practitioners co-design educational programs, including a university laboratory school for equitable computing and a community partnership developing urban-agriculture curriculum. Cases also span co-designed embodied games for computational thinking, technology-education pathways, and designing edTech with schools rather than for them.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

Short Paper · ALP 1110

Place and land-based learning and education across various modalities

Six short papers explore place- and land-based learning across modalities, including spatial typologies for active-learning classrooms and syncretic game designs interweaving virtual and natural worlds. Others address youth climate storytelling, multispecies discomfort in a STEAM program, identity play through creek science, and scientific practice in an archaeological apprenticeship.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

Hybrid Symposium · ALP 1600

Reimagining Learning through Arts & Making: Creative Identity Work in Partnership

This hybrid symposium gathers nine projects exploring intergenerational identity development through arts and making as a basis for deeper partnership. Spanning continents and communities navigating historic oppression, the papers position creative acts as pathways of resistance, joy, and reimagining culturally grounded notions of partnership.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency

Long Paper · ALP 1700

Speculative Education

Four long papers reimagine educational futures, including how middle school Black girls reframe surveillance through critical machine learning design and Black futures sensemaking in a future-educator course. Others derive design principles for speculative teacher imagination and examine learning at rogue conference poster sessions.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

4 talks

Short Paper · ALP 2500

Role of AI in CSCL

Five short papers interrogate AI's evolving roles in collaborative knowledge work, including students' experience of AI as a creative collaborator and a typological framework for AI's epistemic authority in Knowledge Building. Additional talks examine children's epistemic agency in AI science eBooks, activity theory for human-AI teaming, and a three-year cross-community design study.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

5 talks

Short Paper · ALP 2700

Design based research and instructional design to support learning

Six short papers report design-based research and instructional design work, including comic cons for scientific literacy and redesigning a graduate program toward learning design. Additional talks cover game-based planning for disability transition services, teacher agency in co-design, hybrid conference history, and boundary tools bridging home and classroom.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

Arts Gallery & Performance · ALP 3700

#1279: What’s In A Game? Framing Undergraduate Improvisers Contributions as Legitimate Participation in Improv’s Oral History

A demonstration of improv games created and modified by undergraduates in an 'Improv for Games' course, performed by a campus improv troupe. The work frames students' new forms as legitimate contributions to improv's oral history, motivated by a pedagogy of meaningful making.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency

Arts Gallery & Performance · ALP Patio

#1336: Intersect: A Mixed Media Collage Series

A mixed-media collage series that treats artmaking as collaboration with unruly materials, advancing a posthumanist, distributed view of agency among bodies, ideas, and matter. Created by a disabled, chronically-ill scholar-artist, the work reframes the 'flawed' or 'ruined' and explores how arts can support critical consciousness and radical hope in science and engineering.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency

Arts Gallery & Performance · Screening Room / Theatre (1070 McCormick Screening Room)

#1203: #SlowLS

A video performance about a scholar living at the intersection of academia and chronic illness, layering footage of the subject amid campus foot traffic at varying speeds with textual provocations. It invites attendees to question the rushed pace of academic work and whether disability can help resist its oppressive rhythms.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency

11:45 AM

1 option

Social / Networking · ALP 1600

Ignite Talks I

A fast-paced set of Ignite talks featuring auto-advancing slides on emerging ideas and works-in-progress across the learning sciences. Threads include AI in classrooms and teams, joy and wellbeing pedagogies, neurodivergent and inclusive learning, computational thinking, and arts-based methods such as dance and game design.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

12 talks

4:15 PM

4 options scroll

Poster · Online

ICLS Virtual Posters - Virtual Poster Session

A virtual poster session covering a wide range of learning-sciences topics, including making and aesthetics, computational thinking and creative coding, and culturally responsive STEAM across international contexts. Studies also examine generative-AI policies and student-LLM reasoning, field trips, and physics teacher professional development.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

70 talks

Poster · Online

CSCL Virtual Posters

A virtual poster session on computer-supported collaborative learning, featuring AI as a collaborative partner, adaptive support, and feedback literacy across peer, AI, and teacher sources. Methods span meta-analysis, scoping reviews, multimodal and physiological data on teamwork, teacher stress, and argumentative discourse.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

13 talks

Poster · Outdoors

CSCL Posters - Wednesday Poster Session (In-Person)

In-person CSCL poster session dominated by generative AI in collaborative learning, from teacher-in-the-loop essay scoring and AI lesson-planning to constrained GenAI for deeper learning and agency. Other posters cover multimodal and NLP methods for assessing collaboration, conversational agents in shared reading, and AI tools in arts learning.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

39 talks

Poster · Outdoors

ICLS Posters - Wednesday Poster Session (In-Person)

An in-person poster session spanning equity-oriented learning across STEM, computing, and the arts, with threads on multilingual and culturally responsive teaching, integrated STEM+C and AI literacy, and teacher learning in makerspaces and curricular customization. Settings range from family garden activities and afterschool math to climate-change pedagogy and preservice teacher preparation.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

93 talks