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Faculty: CIIA Seeking Featured Instructors for “Creating Welcoming Spaces” Innovative Teaching Showcase

Showcase Application & Nomination Form Due April 3

The Center for Instructional Innovation and Assessment (CIIA), with the help of its faculty advisory board, is accepting applications and nominations for instructors whose teaching reflects this year’s Innovative Teaching Showcase theme, Creating Welcoming Spaces. The Showcase has included some of Western's most dynamic instructors — featuring over 75 since 1999.

Showcase Theme

This year's Creating Welcoming Spaces Showcase seeks to honor faculty who intentionally design their courses to welcome all students, setting the stage for deep engagement and investment in learning.  These practices may also serve our students well by motivating participation, creating connections, and developing a sense of community and belonging—the very things so many still struggle with post-pandemic. 

How do instructors warmly welcome students, provide them the agency to contribute and demonstrate their knowledge, and invite them to connect with the class, their peers, professors, and the university? How do instructors  balance creating welcoming spaces for students while managing everyone’s safety and well-being? How do instructors create welcoming spaces for students while also communicating high expectations and establishing a rigorous learning environment?

Get Featured!

We are looking for faculty who are willing to share their strategies for welcoming students to help create success in a variety of ways, such as:

  • Designing warm welcomes
  • Employing first-day activities to create community
  • Developing relationship- and trust-building strategies
  • Building agency into student work
  • Offering empathy and flexibility
  • Promoting mental health awareness and support
  • Utilizing universal design for learning strategies (i.e., multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression)
  • Incorporating trauma-informed teaching practices (e.g., clarity, consistency, alternatives, well-being support, safety, self-care)
  • Exercising methods to support neurodivergent learners (e.g., activities that require moving around the space, supporting kinetic engagement, offering instructions in multiple ways, etc.)

Please complete the Showcase Application & Nomination Form by Thursday, April 3 to let us know who should be featured in this year's publication. For more information or to discuss participation, please contact Justina.Brown@wwu.edu.

“The primary responsibility of creating this environment lies with you. You have to convey to your students that you designed the course to foster their learning and care very much not only about their learning the material but also about their development as human beings. Therefore, you will listen to them, honor their voices, seek and respond to their questions and feedback, adapt to their individual and cultural differences, encourage their participation and best thinking, relate to them with honesty and empathy, and convey our enthusiasm about teaching them.” 

~Linda Nilson, 2019, Teaching at Its Best