Reconnect, Recharge, Renew

Reimagining the Professoriate in a Rapidly Evolving World

Higher education and educational leadership are navigating a period of profound change. Shifting enrollments, evolving professional expectations, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, leadership attrition, and growing demands on faculty and students are reshaping how we understand our work and its purpose.

At the same time, these challenges invite us to reconsider what it means to teach, lead, conduct scholarship, mentor others, and sustain ourselves and our institutions.

The 2027 NCPEA | ICPEL Annual Conference invites educational leadership scholars, practitioners, faculty, and emerging leaders to explore how we can strengthen our professional communities while reimagining the professoriate for the future.

Reconnect

Strengthen the relationships, mentoring networks, and professional communities that sustain our work. Reconnecting means building meaningful connections across institutions, generations, and professional experiences while cultivating the next generation of educational leaders and scholars.

Recharge

Renew our intellectual and personal capacity through professional learning, reflection, and engagement with colleagues. Recharging emphasizes well-being, resilience, professional growth, and sustainable approaches to academic and leadership careers.

Renew

Reconsider the purposes and practices of teaching, scholarship, service, and leadership. Renewing challenges us to move beyond simply responding to change and toward intentionally shaping the future of our institutions, professions, and communities.

Together, these three priorities invite us to reconnect with the people and purposes that sustain our work, recharge our intellectual and personal capacity, and renew our commitment to preparing thoughtful, ethical, resilient, and human-centered educational leaders.

Conference Strands

The 2027 conference features five interconnected strands that reflect the challenges, opportunities, and evolving purposes of educational leadership and the professoriate.

1. Well-Being, Resilience, and Sustainable Careers

How can we sustain ourselves and one another amid the growing demands of academic and professional life?

This strand explores the personal, professional, and organizational dimensions of well-being and sustainability in higher education and educational leadership.

Topics may include faculty and student well-being, work-life balance, burnout, resilience, sustainable careers, digital wellness, self-care, organizational cultures that support well-being, and strategies for maintaining personal and professional vitality over time.

2. The Evolving Professoriate

What does it mean to be a professor of educational leadership in a rapidly changing higher education landscape?

This strand examines how the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of educational leadership faculty are changing and what those changes mean for the future of the profession.

Topics may include changing faculty roles; teaching, scholarship, and service; enrollment pressures; program transformation; evolving professional expectations; faculty career development; early-career faculty support; and navigating academic careers in a changing higher education environment.

3. Technology, AI, and Human-Centered Leadership

What does human-centered teaching and leadership look like in an increasingly technology-driven world?

This strand considers the opportunities and challenges presented by emerging technologies while emphasizing the continued importance of human relationships, professional judgment, and ethical leadership.

Topics may include artificial intelligence in teaching and scholarship, ethical AI use, AI-generated feedback, the human and organizational implications of emerging technologies, leadership in technology-rich environments, and maintaining relationships and humanity amid technological change.

4. Leadership Pipelines, Mentoring, and Professional Communities

How can we cultivate and sustain the next generation of educational leaders, scholars, and professors?

This strand focuses on the relationships, structures, and professional communities necessary to recruit, prepare, mentor, and retain educational leaders and scholars.

Topics may include equitable leadership pipelines; recruitment, preparation, mentoring, and retention of diverse leaders; succession and career pathways; faculty mentoring; professional networks; international perspectives; and support for emerging scholars and professors.

5. Purpose, Wisdom, and Leadership for the Public Good

What is educational leadership ultimately for, and how might reconnecting with that purpose shape what comes next?

This strand invites reflection on the fundamental purposes of education and educational leadership, particularly during periods of institutional and societal uncertainty.

Topics may include the purposes of education and educational leadership, cultivating wisdom, leading for the public good, bridging knowing and doing, reflection and recalibration, responding to institutional and political uncertainty, and reconsidering the purposes our programs and scholarship serve.

Engaging with the Conference Strands

The conference strands are intentionally broad and designed to accommodate multiple forms of scholarship, professional learning, and conversation.

Each strand welcomes empirical research, conceptual and theoretical scholarship, literature syntheses, works in progress, practitioner inquiry, and practice-focused contributions.

Participants are encouraged to identify the strand that most closely aligns with the central focus of their work. The guiding questions and suggested topics are intended to inspire possibilities rather than limit the range of appropriate contributions.

Graduate Students and Emerging Scholars

Graduate students and emerging scholars are an important part of the NCPEA | ICPEL professional community and are encouraged to participate across all five conference strands.

Graduate student research, dissertation-related scholarship, works in progress, practitioner inquiry, and collaborative scholarship are welcome within the strand most closely aligned with the work.

Integrating emerging scholars into the broader conference conversations strengthens opportunities for professional engagement, mentoring, and scholarly exchange.

Mentoring, Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

The scholarship and professional practices historically represented through Mentoring Mosaic and Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) remain central to the conference.

Rather than organizing these areas as separate strands, the 2027 conference intentionally integrates them across all five strands.

Mentoring, equity, inclusion, and diversity intersect with questions of faculty well-being, leadership preparation, emerging technologies, professional development, institutional transformation, and leadership for the public good.

This integrated approach recognizes their importance throughout educational leadership scholarship and practice.

Bringing the Theme to Life

Reconnect, Recharge, Renew is intended to be more than a theme for conference presentations. It also provides a framework for the conference experience itself.

Through scholarly presentations, professional learning, mentoring, networking, and community conversations, participants will have opportunities to connect with colleagues, exchange ideas, explore challenges, and consider new possibilities for educational leadership.

The conference invites us not simply to examine how the professoriate is changing, but to consider how we can collectively shape a more sustainable, human-centered, and purposeful future.

Reconnect with our community. Recharge our collective capacity. Renew our commitment to educational leadership.

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