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One of the key characteristics of the Graduate Student Research Conference is its collegial nature that encourages participation from all OISE students. The research work being undertaken is important, for sure, but so are the relationships that form among colleagues and the conversations that take place in between sessions. Prachi Dhanky shares her experience of being a part of the conference team.

Facilitators: Chanel Tsang and Ghazal Malik
Saturday March 7, 11.30am to 1pm, 12-199 (Boardroom)

In Visualizing a Hopeful Future: A Reflective Collage-Making Workshop, Chanel Tsang and Ghazal Malik invite participants to reconsider hope as an active scholarly commitment. Rather than approaching hope as a fleeting emotion, they describe it as “a relational practice and not a passive feeling.” In moments shaped by uncertainty and unrest, they suggest that hope asks scholars to remain present with complexity while still imagining otherwise. It involves “staying with complexity and also imagining alternative futures through reflection and creativity,” transforming what is often hidden or unspoken into possibilities for insight and action. In this framing, hope becomes both method and stance, something enacted collectively through reflection and shared meaning-making.

Day 3 of the OISE Graduate Student Research Conference (GSRC) 2026 continues the momentum with presentations that explore learning as a deeply social, cultural, and relational process. From inter-generational identity formation to community-based learning and creative approaches to equity, these sessions highlight how education extends far beyond formal classrooms and into lived experiences and collective spaces.

Facilitator: Tawnee Dulce
Friday March 6, 3pm to 4.30pm, 12-115

In Journey Through the Body: Mindfulness in Journaling, Tawnee Dulce invites participants into a writing practice that is deeply embodied, spiritual, and restorative. The workshop emerges from lived experience. Following a near-death experience in 2021 and a concussion diagnosis, Dulce found herself unable to engage in her usual routines. In that stillness, she turned to writing. What began as limitation became discovery. She describes this period as learning that she “could write myself through writing,” using the page as a space to live her experience and reconnect with sensations and feelings that had long gone unattended. Journaling, for her, became a way to “connect to myself and my body, the unspoken sensations or feelings that we all have, that we don’t, or are unable to pay attention to daily.”

Day 2 of the OISE Graduate Student Research Conference (GSRC) 2026 brings together research that challenges how we think about education, equity, and representation across global and local contexts. Among the many engaging sessions, 3 presentations stand out for their timely questions and powerful perspectives.

Day 1 of the OISE Graduate Student Research Conference (GSRC) 2026 is packed with innovative scholarship, critical conversations, and bold reimaginings of education’s role in an increasingly complex world. With so many compelling presentations to choose from, narrowing it down is no easy task. Still, three sessions in particular caught my eye for the urgency of their questions, the depth of their analysis, and the hope they offer for the future of education.

As we continue to reflect on this year’s conference theme, Generative Hope: Possibilities in Education Research, we sat down with faculty and staff from the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto ahead of their upcoming panel discussion to hear their thoughts. In advance of their Sustainability Thinking Exhibition themed, Navigating the Planetary Crisis through the Arts: The University and the Polycrisis, they offered reflections on sustainability and on the role of the university in a time marked by interconnected global crises.

In a time marked distinctly by disorder and disorientation, conversations about climate and sustainability can easily slip into narratives of despair or distress. Yet, as teacher educator and researcher Dr. Hilary Inwood — a faculty member in Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at OISE, and Coordinator of its Sustainability & Climate Action Network suggests, hope is not something to be spoken or thought about abstractly – it is something to be practiced. Her work sits at the intersection of climate action, education, and the arts and demonstrates how creativity can cultivate that practice by linking awareness with action and by engaging learners cognitively, emotionally, and physically.

In a moment defined by global uncertainty, institutional strain, and social fragmentation, education research cannot afford to remain neutral or detached. This year’s GSRC theme, Generative Hope: Possibilities in Education Research, is a direct response to this reality.

We are living in an ever-changing world. Considering this, the 2026 OISE Graduate Student Research Conference (GSRC) theme, “Generative Hope: Possibilities in Education Research”, is situated within a context of global disorder and educational possibility.