ISLS 2026 Agenda

Thursday, June 18 · 19 sessions

8:00 AM

6 options scroll

Practice Paper · ALP 1100

Co-designing Teaching and Learning Experiences

Practice-oriented papers share co-designed teaching experiences across varied contexts, including wordless books for dual-language kindergarteners, community-building in online undergraduate courses, and board game design with Brownie Scouts. Other talks address climate justice instruction, metacognitive learning strategies, and research-practice partnerships in teacher education.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

Short Paper · ALP 1110

Co-design, creative methods art-based approaches

Six papers explore co-design and creative methods, from tangible classroom models and arts-based climate storytelling to liberatory computational making with Black boys and trust-building in design-based research teams. Threads include reconceptualizing imagination as social practice and using network analysis to improve co-designed online graduate courses.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

Short Paper · ALP 1120

Teacher professional development in practice

Papers report on teacher professional development in practice, examining tolerance for ambiguity in model-based science, dialogic teaching change through video-based PD, and teachers' evolving views of scientific uncertainty as a resource. Other talks cover computational thinking PD, video-based math identity research, and pre-service teachers' TPACK trajectories.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

Symposium · ALP 1300

Renewing Socio-cultural theory in a Networked, Decentralized Supercapitalist Society

Three papers and discussion ask what socio-cultural theory offers for understanding learning amid extremism, online fragmentation, and supercapitalist cultural structures. Cases draw on community partners including Homeboy Industries, academic esports federations, and Indigenous education partners to examine how macro cultural trends shape learning today.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency

Short Paper · ALP 2700

VR/AR/MR/XR and immersive learning

A short-paper session on immersive learning across VR, AR, and mixed reality, addressing how to assess learning processes with multimodal and log data rather than pre-post tests alone. Studies span AR multispecies inquiry with bees, instructional sequencing in VR, career exploration, and mobile AR for adult language learning.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

5 talks

Short Paper · ALP 3600

Humanities, Civics, and Learning

A short-paper session on humanities, civics, and learning, examining ethical sensemaking, informal learning, and political contestation across global contexts. Topics include mobile-phone learning among Jamaican farmers, children's more-than-human ethical reasoning, young activists comparing the Holocaust to current wars, and school change in India.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

4 talks

10:00 AM

3 options scroll

Short Paper · ALP 1120

Argumentation, dialogue, and dialogic engagement

Papers examine argumentation and dialogic engagement, from supporting competent outsiders' source evaluation with the AIR framework to a dual preparation model for dialogic teaching in East Asian classrooms. Other talks offer a typology of social bids in math groupwork and interaction analysis of knowledge construction in multilingual Indian science classrooms.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

4 talks

Short Paper · ALP 2700

AI Literacy, AI Tools, Teacher learning

Short papers address AI literacy, AI tools, and teacher learning, tracing teachers' evolving participation in AI education and critical AI literacy developed through design problem solving. Threads include posthuman creativity with GenAI in an Indian design workshop, redistributing cognition in AI-supported writing, and instructor scaffolding of student GenAI use.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

Short Paper · ALP 3610

Critical Perspectives in Learning Environments

Short papers bring critical perspectives to learning environments, covering AI-supported personality alignment among pre-service teachers, teachers designing AI-ethics scenarios with LLM tools, and whether critical pedagogy survives algorithmic social-media constraints. Other talks explore service-learning tutoring and equity, and game-based learning in literature classrooms.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

5 talks

2:30 PM

9 options scroll

Short Paper · ALP 1110

AI tools, interactions, and design

Six short papers on designing AI tools and understanding human-AI interaction in learning. Topics include AI's effect on the writing process, hybrid-intelligence and human-in-the-loop systems, four years of AI formative assessment and fairness, conversation-based assessment with AI agents, and new interfaces for AI-supported writing.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

Short Paper · ALP 1120

Embodied Learning

Five short papers on how bodies, movement, and representations mediate learning across science and mathematics. Topics include walking curricula reconnecting students with nature, transnational youth and climate justice, multimodal methods for analyzing embodied geometry, domain-inherent metaphors, and diagrams that bridge real and mathematical worlds.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

5 talks

Symposium · ALP 1300

Scaling Communities of Learners: How Size, Power, and Partnerships Shape Political Learning

A symposium using sociocultural and critical theories of power to examine how community scale shapes political learning for equity and justice. Across four cases ranging from organizational change in graduate education to a youth design-build group, teacher-leaders organizing for integration, and a single teacher-mentor dyad, it traces how transformation is mediated across community sizes.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency

Hybrid Symposium · ALP 1600

Fostering Educational Intimacy: ILSSA Intergenerational Partnerships for Purposeful Community Building

A reflective session from the ILSSA student association exploring what community means and how to support it equitably, using duoethnography and Uttamchandani's concept of educational intimacy. The discussion considers intergenerational partnerships, embracing the political in learning, and building relational continuity across ILSSA's leadership and the communities it represents.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency

Long Paper · ALP 1700

Teacher Transformation

Four papers on how teachers become agents of transformation through partnerships, mentoring, and boundary crossing. Cases include a composite counterstory of teacher change, science educators reconciling personal beliefs with official scripts, cohort-based research-practice partnerships, and high-coupling encounters bridging maritime and education communities.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

4 talks

Long Paper · ALP 2100

Art and Politics

Four papers exploring how the arts mediate identity, perspective, and political visibility for youth and learners. Threads include perspective-shifting through filmmaking, manga as counterspaces for queer youth, the director's role in ensemble learning, and how video analysis can racialize the visibility of Black learners.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

4 talks

Long Paper · ALP 2500

Motivation, Interest, Identity, and Achievement

Four quantitative papers linking motivation, identity, belonging, and achievement, several at large scale. Topics span equity-oriented pedagogy predicting college success, the attenuation of math identity across the high-school-to-STEM transition, motivation mediating belonging and STEM persistence, and affective-cognitive links in primary students' scientific literacy.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

4 talks

Long Paper · ALP 2600

Epistemic Authority and Agency

Four papers examining how authority and agency are distributed among students, teachers, and AI tools during learning. Threads include authority in elementary science modeling, how students remix AI chatbots into dialogic tools, epistemic agency in student-LLM math problem solving, and analytics-supported reflective assessment for pre-service teachers.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

4 talks

Short Paper · Barclay

Co-Design, Community-based education, sociocultural learning

Six short papers examine co-design and community-engaged education across undergraduate science, minority-owned small businesses, and intergenerational environmental-justice programs. Threads include enacting solidarity in community partnerships, collaborative data co-analysis, and culturally sustaining pedagogy through game redesign.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

6 talks

4:15 PM

1 option

Poster · Outdoors

ICLS Posters - Thursday Poster Session (In-Person)

An in-person poster session covering wide-ranging learning sciences research, including science and engineering teacher reasoning, AI in classrooms, and equity-oriented design in research-practice partnerships. Topics span heritage-language and algebra apps, urban gardens as educational technology, cognitive presence in MOOCs, and community-engaged research experiences.

Identity, Belonging & Learner Agency in a talk

91 talks