We were delighted to receive a robust set of applications (representing 3 countries, 24 institutions/organizations, and an array of disciplines), and the strength of the applications made the selection process extremely difficult. Ultimately, we selected applications that raised research topics in line with the goals of the research seminar and that paired well with other applications to facilitate the formation of multi-institutional research cohorts. Our acceptance rate was 70%. 

Kelsey Bitting – Elon University – United States

Dr. Kelsey Bitting is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at Elon University. She is interested in multi-disciplinary, evidence-informed strategies for teaching with place-based pedagogies, especially community-based or service-learning, teaching outdoors or with digital globe technologies, and contemplative pedagogies that engage learners with the world around them. 

Beate Brunow – Penn State – United States

Beate Brunow serves as Associate Director and Associate Research Professor at Penn State’s Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, the university-wide teaching center. As an educational/faculty developer, she supports instructors across disciplines in developing and implementing effective teaching practices, including place-based learning. Her primary research interest for the seminar focuses on exploring the role institutional policies and structures play in supporting high-quality learning on location.   

Brennan Collins – Georgia State University – United States

Brennan Collins is the Associate Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Online Education at Georgia State University for High-Impact Practices, Digital Pedagogy, and Atlanta Studies. He is also Director of the Teagle Foundation funded Experiential, Project-Based, Interdisciplinary (EPIC) program.  The interdisciplinary nature and technology focus of these programs allow him to work with a diverse faculty in exploring inventive pedagogies. He is particularly interested in creating transdisciplinary and interinstitutional projects and platforms that explore the urban landscape to develop student critical thinking and create opportunities for community engagement.  This work explores the intersection of the Humanities with the emerging fields of mapping, digital heritage, data visualization and curation, and immersive learning. He teaches courses on Atlanta and in Multiethnic U.S. Literature and comics. 

Michelle Corvette – William Peace University – United States

Michelle Corvette is a renowned scholar and educator with over two decades of experience in higher education. She currently leads as Director of Faculty Development and Immersive Learning at William Peace University in Raleigh, NC. Holding dual Ph.D. degrees from Goldsmiths, University of London, in Interdisciplinary Art Practice/Research & Critical Studies, and another from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in Educational Psychology with a focus on creativity research, Dr. Corvette brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to her work. Her expertise encompasses professional development in all teaching methods, Generative AI cognizance, disability awareness, and community-based learning initiatives. With a focus on reflective mindfulness and student-centered instruction, Dr. Corvette’s current research synthesizes high-impact teaching practices, experiential and immersive learning, and assessment and accreditation policies and practices that enable learning on location. Her commitment to enhancing educational experiences reflects her dedication to fostering effective learning environments that support high-quality teaching and learning. 

Elisa Gargarella – University of Akron – United States

Elisa Gargarella is a tenured faculty member and coordinator of the Art Education degree program at The University of Akron (UA), overseeing undergraduate and graduate curriculum, program development, and visual arts teaching licensure. She founded and directs two community-based art programs: Arts LIFT, an urban youth arts apprenticeship for Akron Public Schools, and Art Bomb Brigade, a mural arts initiative producing site-specific public art with UA students. These programs have led to over 50 public artworks and place-based projects in her region. Her research focuses for Learning on Location: Place-Based Pedagogies in Higher Education will be “student perspectives on and experiences with learning on location” specifically related to how experiential learning, creative placemaking, and community-responsive pedagogy shape pre-service art teachers. Through this focus, she hopes to develop a comprehensive research framework that examines the impact of high-impact learning environments on fostering student engagement and facilitating meaningful, collaborative change within communities. 

Tyler L. Hough – Rice Business – United States

Tyler L. Hough serves as Director of Employer Engagement at Rice Business, where he builds strategic partnerships to advance student opportunities and institutional priorities. His research and practice focus on experiential education, place-based learning, and the role of partnerships in shaping equitable student experiences. Prior to Rice, Tyler spent over a decade in Chicago working with nonprofits and universities to design educational partnerships. Most recently, he led a center that developed urban experiential learning programs with an intentional focus on growing students’ cultural intelligence. As a boundary spanner, he worked at the intersection of faculty development, institutional engagement, and community partnership. Tyler’s work on place-based learning was featured in a special issue of the CUMU Journal, and he recently completed a research fellowship with the Society for Experiential Education. He is especially interested in how urban R1 institutions can make place-based learning a core part of academic life and advance more inclusive, lasting models through strategy and partnership. 

Kathy Kelly – Wellogy – United States

Kathleen Kelly is a distinguished architect with three decades of expertise, currently serving as a partner and Innovation Leader at Wellogy. Her professional journey has been defined by transformative work in teaching and research laboratories, academic healthcare, and campus design across multiple countries. The experiences, in collaboration with integrated teams, lends to Kathy’s body of work and expertise in innovation, wellness, and creating inclusive environments. As a SCUP Fellow, her research utilizes the intersection of the built environment, neurodiverse users, neuroarchitecture, and neuroscience in the search for environments enhancing the neurodiversity experience and inclusive goals on the modern academic campus. 

Liudmila Klimanova – University of Arizona – United States

Liudmila Klimanova is an associate professor in the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona and an affiliated faculty member in the graduate program in Human Rights Practice. She directs the Summer School in Russian and Eurasian Studies for U.S. students in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Liudmila’s research focuses on spatial approaches in language education and applied linguistics. Her recent projects include the Connecting Borderlands Initiative, which promoted place-based, interdisciplinary collaboration in global borderland classrooms, and Footprints, an open educational resource on geoliteracies and place-based storytelling for language and culture educators. She has led numerous teacher development workshops on place-based pedagogy with the emphasis on GIS mapping technologies. Liudmila’s current work explores how educators engage with place-based and culturally responsive teaching, highlighting links between institutional identity, diverse knowledge systems, and local context to support inclusive, community-centered learning. 

Charissa Lee – Southern Alberta Institute of Technology – Canada

Charissa Lee works at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) in Calgary, Alberta, where she is a faculty member in the School of Business. She is also a PhD candidate in the Cross-Departmental Doctoral Program in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Her primary research interests focus on experiential learning, professional identity development, and place-based pedagogies in applied education settings. Charissa is particularly interested in how learning on location fosters students’ connection to community, strengthens career readiness, and supports the development of transferable capabilities. She has led research projects exploring coaching pedagogy, ePortfolio integration, and competency-based education, with an emphasis on bridging academic and industry experiences. Through her participation in this seminar, Charissa hopes to contribute to collaborative, multi-institutional research that deepens our understanding of how place-based learning can support meaningful, inclusive, and career-relevant student experiences in polytechnic and college contexts. 

Susannah McGowan – Georgetown University – United States

Susannah McGowan is the director for curriculum transformation initiatives at The Red House at Georgetown University. After starting her career in educational development at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) from 2001-2007, she returned to Georgetown in Fall 2019 after an educational and experiential hiatus that included earning her Ph.D. at University of California, Santa Barbara in 2014 followed by five years of adventure in the UK where she worked at University College London and King’s College London. 
 
While at King’s, she co-established King’s Academy in 2017, a center for educational development supporting integral programs for faculty and graduate students around inclusive pedagogy, assessment, and blended learning. 
 
Since 2015, she has worked as an advisory fellow of the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving equity and student access through course design innovations for first year courses. She is a member of the Teaching, Learning and Inquiry editorial board, the journal of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSoTL). She is currently the Vice President of the US region for ISSOTL. 

Charles McMartin – Florida State University – United States

Charles McMartin is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University. He earned his PhD in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English from the University of Arizona. His research explores culturally sustaining pedagogies, community writing, student activism, and NextGen faculty leadership. His work has appeared in College English, Rhetoric Review, Composition Studies, Reflections, and Peitho. He is the lead coeditor of Next-Gen Perspectives on Leadership: Coalitional Strategies for Launching Careers, Building Networks, and Engaging with Systemic Inequities (forthcoming USU Press). As a participant in the Research Seminar on Learning on Location: Place-Based Pedagogies in Higher Education, he examines interdisciplinary and evidence-informed strategies for teaching with place-based pedagogies. He is interested in how place-based pedagogies empower student activists, strengthen their coalitional leadership, and offer actionable strategies for addressing systemic inequities in higher education. 

Megan Mobley – Oregon State University – United States

Megan Mobley is a Senior Instructor II in the Crop and Soil Sciences Department at Oregon State University (OSU) in Corvallis, Oregon. She teaches soil science; her courses range from general education courses to advanced undergrad/grad courses, and include on-campus, hybrid, and online modalities. She uses place-based approaches in her courses, especially her general education science courses, to encourage students to both build on their own prior knowledge and experiences and connect basic science concepts to broader contexts. In addition to teaching, she also serves as Faculty Fellow with OSU’s Center for Teaching and Learning, supporting faculty development related to teaching and learning in OSU’s brand-new general education curriculum.  The topic that excites her most about Learning on Location is learning about student perspectives on place-based pedagogies – their experiences and their perceptions of the challenges and benefits, particularly when engaging in place-based learning as part of an online course. 

Jeremy Ricketts – Utah State University – United States

Jeremy Ricketts is a lecturer at Utah State University, where he teaches writing and interdisciplinary humanities courses across the university’s Statewide Campus system. His classes are delivered in “Connect” and “Virtual” modalities, where students participate from diverse geographic locations throughout Utah. His research explores how place-based pedagogies can be adapted to serve students in distributed, hybrid, and online environments. He is especially interested in how instructors can cultivate community and deepen local engagement within virtual classrooms. With expertise in interdisciplinary teaching and the study of space and place through literature, cultural studies, and American Studies, he examines how physical and conceptual spaces shape learning. To support this work, he visits classroom sites across the state, building student connections to both course content and local environments. By participating in the Learning on Location research seminar, he hopes to contribute to scalable, research-informed models for place-based education across diverse institutional contexts. 

Shawn Xiong – Dalhousie University – Canada 

Shawn Xiong is primarily appointed as the instructor for the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology in the Faculty of Medicine to coordinate and supervise undergraduate teaching laboratories and introductory Biochemistry courses. Concurrently, Shawn also serves as the faculty associate for Dalhousie’ Center of Learning & Teaching. As a life-long learner, Shawn has been engaged with DBER and SoTL research to improve his teaching and his students’ learning experiences and outcomes. As a member of the SoTL Canada writing group focusing on place based pedagogies, Shawn is ready to share and continue to learn through the triennial research seminar’s multi-institutional research on Learning on Locations.