Ed Sessions at the GAIN ’25 Conference
The GAIN Board is excited to open this year’s Ed Session proposal form! We are doing things a little differently this year, and want to take a moment to explain what’s changing, and what’s not.
GAIN 2025 Conference Logo
This year’s conference is designed to be a cohesive crash course in community building as an anti-oppressive and liberatory practice. We have three time blocks for educational breakout sessions scheduled—nothing new there! The primary difference this year is that we are defining specific high-level themes for each Ed Session block and hope to elicit breakout sessions designed to meet our goals for each theme. We hope to build Ed Sessions that are geared toward developing new skill sets for a wide range of proficiency levels. Sessions can take the form of a presentation, a workshop, or a structured conversation. Essentially, we are looking for a 101 level, a 201 level, and a 400 level session for each of the following themes:
Doing the Internal Work
For our first round of Ed Sessions, we will incorporate topics related to the work we must first do on ourselves to unlearn the oppressive beliefs and ways of being in the world that we have internalized.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Personal values assessments to ground your work
Emotional regulation as a necessary skill for social justice work
Boundary setting to avoid burnout
How to practice allyship
Authentic Interpersonal Relationships
Our second round of Ed Sessions will focus on the work we need to do with each other to build powerful relationships and repair harm, while establishing bumpers to reduce future harm, and focusing our energy into collective work against oppression.
Topics may include,but are not limited to:
Building inclusive team cultures
Trauma informed care
Calling in, out, and up
Non-violent communication
Applying Anti-Oppressive Community Building in Higher Education
Our final Ed Sessions will be about how to apply anti-oppressive principles within the structures of higher education for the purpose of changing those structures.
Topics could include, but are not limited to:
Race based anti-oppressive programs (e.g. peer to peer support, first-gen programming, etc.)
Applying restorative principles in front-line student service units
Actionable processes established to challenge oppressive structures (e.g. hiring practices, salary equity, position descriptions, inclusive language, etc.)
We would love to hear what session ideas are inspiring you, and invite you to present during one of our Ed Sessions. If you have a general idea, but don’t quite know the structure of your session yet, GAIN’s education team is excited to work with you one-on-one to help you develop your ideas into a great Ed Session! Our collective experiences and knowledge as a GAIN community will drive our conference theme to move toward collective liberation, through the power of community.
What’s NOT changing:
We are still looking for a wide range of presenters and skill-levels, so whether you have deep content knowledge and presenting experience or you are still building your presenting toolkit but have passion around a topic—all are welcome and invited to submit your interest to present an Ed Session.
